This is my first blog post of 2018. The first of, what I hope, will be many. One of my resolutions was to post more frequently on here and to build a bigger following. Yesterday I bought myself a new mug for my blogging days (which are now scheduled on my calendar), and we all know the power of a new mug!
The holiday season is over now, and it’s back to regular life. I got all of the Christmas decorations put away and sent to storage earlier in the week, Rex is back to work, and today is Maddie’s last day of Christmas break before school starts again on Monday, so she has some friends coming over this afternoon to celebrate and I am trying to get back into a regular house keeping schedule again. Thankfully I was lucky enough to get a Roomba for Christmas so my vacuuming is all taken care of!
Our house is for sale so I’m also trying to get things sent to storage so the house is less cluttered. I am just itching to get moved and get started on the renos at the new house. We’re going to try to do as much as we can with as little money as we can and I will be documenting the whole process so that will be exciting and will make for easy writing, I’m sure, as it’s what I’m passionate about the most!
Life should be very different for us in the new house. We will have lots of acreage and I am hoping to get enough animals to make us self sufficient. That’s my 10 year goal. To use our land to be as self sufficient as possible. I have these grand dreams of being a homesteader so we’ll see what the reality turns out like!
Fingers crossed everything goes according to plan (I should know better than that by now!) the next Christmas will be spent at the River House. I am so excited about moving, so excited about renovating, but mostly, I am so excited about the first Christmas spent there. With any luck there will be multiple trees, many 1000 lights, and many many memories made.
My obvious love of Christmas means that I love anything holiday related. And to me, nothing says Holidays like gingerbread. I love the smell of gingerbread, I love the way the spices dance on your tongue, I love that they are so fun to decorate and personalize. But I’ve never been a big fan of the hard brittle gingerbread cookies.
You know the ones.
The ones they make gingerbread houses out of. The ones that are so hard that being left out in the open air for 30 days doesn’t affect their texture at all. The ones that I’m sure are responsible for many fractured teeth at this time of year. They still have that same spicy sweet taste, but I just can’t stand a crunchy cookie. I like my cookies soft and chewy.
So when I stumbled across this recipe for soft chewy gingerbread cookies that held their shape I was instantly in love.
I followed the recipe so I won’t bore you with those details. I will however let you in on a little tip…..when you pour the molasses into your mixer, make sure it’s not running and the paddle is lifted. Voice of experience over here! I just left it running when I poured the molasses in and it got wrapped around the paddle attachment and ended up being a GIANT mess to clean up!
Also I needed to add most of an extra egg as my batter was really crumbly and didn’t hold together. I didn’t realize how crumbly it was until after it was rested in the fridge but I added the egg right before I rolled it out and they worked out just fine!
This recipe makes LOTS of cookies but they freeze really well. If you’re going to freeze them, freeze them plain, with no icing as the icing tends to crack and fall off when frozen. I just took cookies out of the freezer as we needed them, let them thaw for a couple of hours then iced them and they were good to go!
Well, I need to get my butt to the gym, I haven’t missed a workout all year I’m not about to start now 😉
I hope you all had a fabulous holiday season with your families!
And I’ll talk to you again.
Real soon! XOXOX