Snowball Trees

Every Christmas my sister, Keren, and I make cookies.  We started this when I moved away from home for university, because it was a good way to spend some quality time with her while I was home for Christmas.  That and we both love baking.  Our specialty almost every Christmas is shortbread cookies, as we like to be able to cut out the shapes and more importantly, decorate them to the nines!  In the last few years, we have been trying new recipes out.  This year in my Christmas cookie hunt, I found a recipe for Snowball Tree Cookies from BHG, which are little balls rolled to be little Christmas trees.  You dye the majority of the cookie dough, keeping 1/3 of the dough out and roll the green dough into 1/2 balls, placing them in a triangle in rows of one, two, three, four and the white dough into 3/4 balls and placing them on the bottom.   Once they are backed, you make an icing to drizzle on the cookies and decorate them.  These looked like they would be a lot of fun to make and something Keren would enjoy, so the weekend before Christmas, we ventured to make them.

The dough was really quick to make up.  Because we had a busy weekend, we made the dough the day before we planned on making them, although in hindsight, I would have just make the dough right before we went to make the cookies, because it was easier to work with at room temperature, rather than straight from the fridge.

Dough fresh out of the fridge

Once we were ready to make the cookies, we recruited my mom to help, as I had read that making these cookies could be a little time consuming, and we didn't get started until late in the evening, after having Christmas at my Nanny's.

We took out the white dough and I proceeded to dye the rest of the dough green.  I found that this went a lot quicker than I expected.  I think it was because my last experience of dying something with food colouring, was when my sister-in-law dyed fondant red for my nephew's birthday cake and it took her like 2 hours to get the right colour...

Mixing the dough to make it green.
Mom's in the background making all the white balls.

The green balls!  Keren said they look like the French Peas from
Veggie Tales.

 Once I got the colour down, we went to town making the balls.  We had a hard time getting them to be the size they wanted, because they needed to be really tiny, which meant we didn't have enough to make as many cookies and the recipe had said it would make.  In the end we made 11 trees and I made a wreath with the extras.  Ta Da!

Since they were bigger, they ended up taking longer to cook then the recipe said.  We watched all of Merry Madagascar before they were done (so much for 8-10 minutes). Once they were out and cooling, Mom and I made the icing (Keren was done with the cookies at this point).  Instead of using the recipe that they said to make (as it makes A LOT), I made one my mom had used earlier that day on a cake.  It was only a cup of icing sugar, a couple tbsp of milk and 1 tbsp of vanilla.  Even at that there was icing left over.  Once that was made, Mom and I decorated them all pretty, just like real Christmas trees :)  Aren't they pretty?

They even taste good too!!

Snowball Tree Recipe
(originally from: http://www.bhg.com/recipe/cookies/snowball-trees/)

Ingredients

1 cup butter, softened

½ cup sugar

1 tablespoon milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour

Green paste food coloring

1 recipe Powdered Sugar Icing

Decorative candies

Directions

1. In a large bowl beat butter with an electric mixer on medium to high speed for 30 seconds. Add sugar. Beat until combined, scraping sides of bowl occasionally. Beat in milk and vanilla until combined. Beat in as much of the flour as you can with the mixer. Using a wooden spoon, stir in any remaining flour. Remove 1/2 cup of the dough. Tint the remaining dough with green food coloring.
2. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. For each cookie, use the green dough to shape ten 1/2-inch balls. On an ungreased cookie sheet, arrange balls in a row of four, topped by a row of three, then two, then one on top. As you arrange the balls, gently press them into each other. Use the plain dough to make a 3/4-inch ball and place it at the bottom of the tree for a trunk. Repeat with the remaining dough, leaving 2 inches between cookies on cookie sheet.
3. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until edges are light brown. Cool on cookie sheet for 2 minutes. Carefully transfer cookies to a wire rack; let cool.
4. Drizzle Powdered Sugar Icing back and forth over cookies to look like strings for lights. Add decorative candies to icing for lights. Let stand until icing sets.

Powdered Sugar Icing

Ingredients

4 cups powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

3 – 4 tablespoons milk

Directions

1. In a medium bowl stir together powdered sugar, vanilla, and enough milk (3 to 4 tablespoons) to make drizzling consistency.

Home Reno 2.0

We have been quiet on the home reno front since we finished the basement.  When it takes you a year and a half to re-finish your basement, you feel like you need to take a good break.  Well we decided that the break was over!  I struck a deal with +Jonathan Wilson back in October to repaint the living room over Christmas, as he was taking 2 and a half weeks of vacation then and I would be off from the 21st to the 2nd, so I could help him paint as he is not too keen on that.  Repainting the living involves taking everything out of the living room, patching holes in the wall, cleaning off the ceiling (as we had a popcorn ceiling that had two rather large smooth spots, so John wanted the whole thing to be smooth), painting and then taking up the carpet and either cleaning up the hardwood underneath or putting laminate down.  This would then lead to ripping up the carpet on the basement stairs, having someone come in and lay new carpet on the stairs and then finishing off the trim in the basement and up the stairs.  As you can see, this is a fairly large project to tackle, but I have been itching to do it because a) I hate the colour of the main floor, it looks blah, dirty and a little like student housing and b) I want to be able to have the basement completely finished.  So I struck a deal, and the plan was laid.

Here are the before pictures of everything:

Living Room

Hallway and Front Entrance

Living Room

Living Room 2

Stairs

Before Christmas we emptied the living room and front hall closet of all it's possession.  It's amazing how different it looks without any of the stuff in it!  Everything is now in the kitchen, basement and spare bedroom.  A little crammed, but it's only for a couple weeks.

Ceiling beforehand

After scrapping has begun!

The weekend of the 15th-16th, John began scrapping down the ceiling.  I was gone for the weekend, so when I came back, it was quite a different.  He had most of the living room done and didn't look too bad.  He wanted to be able to have it all done before we left for Christmas, but with a full week of work and things to fill our evenings, it didn't look likely.  We asked our friend +Paul Dagenais to come over and help.  He came the Wednesday before Christmas and cleaned the ceiling off and patched up all the holes and did some sanding.  He did a great job!  Although we couldn't do anything else before we left for Christmas, we were happy with what was done!

We came back from seeing family in the morning of the 28th and John decided that afternoon to work on the ceiling some more, to figure out if he needed to scrap it more, sand it or maybe just painting it would be fine. He started with the paint, it didn't really work out that well, so he went online, watched some videos and decided that he needed to scrap it down to the drywall.  As he was doing it though, he kept wondering whether taking the drywall down was the better option.  I didn't really know, nor cared, as this is really his expertise.  He went back and forth, but finally he went out and just started ripping it all down.  He got most of the living room completed by the end of the day. *(this was totally unplanned to the original deal struck with John, therefore I doubt I will actually help much with the painting aspect of things, luckily Paul's going to helping him out!)*

That is just part of the ceiling pile which I was cleaning up
while John tore down more!

On the 29th, we went at it again. John finished taking down all the drywall in the living room, hallway and front entrance.  I was on clean up and photo taking duties.  I cleaned up as much as possible, until we ran out of garbage bags, which was pretty well around the time John was done taking down the drywall in that section.  We had been taking throughout this process about what to do for lighting in the living room, as there was no overhead light before, there was only a switch which lead to one outlit, which we had a lamp plugged into.  We decided that we'd like to do potlights.  So once we were finished, we decided to head to Home Depot and pick up some more garbage bags and everything we needed for potlights.  We got very nice ones which will match the other lights we have for the front entrance and hall.

John's less than impressed that he has to tear down the ceiling.

Putting up the potlights

 Once we returned home, we put up the potlights, which went really quickly.  The hardest part was trying to get the cable to run down the wall to the light switch.  It kept getting stuck on the other wires, so we couldn't see it or reach it.  Finally, we found another cable we had, taped it to the cable for the lights and pulled it through.  Had we only thought of that an hour before...

After another half an hour, John got it all hooked up and it looked great!  There is going to be so much more light in the living room now, I'm really excited now to have a living room that doesn't seem so dark anymore!

Don't they look pretty?

Book Review: A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead

*I have not written a book review before (or a least a non-academic one), so please bear with me, as it many not be a typical book review*

I recently finished the book A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead (and by recently I mean like in November, but I've been busy).  The book is based on a true story of the women who were part of the French Resistance during World War II and their time in concentration camps.  I really enjoy learning and reading books from World War II, not that I enjoyed that it happened, but there is something about the stories on that time period which really draw me to them.  I have a fair amount of knowledge about what happened from school, books I've read and shows I've seen on T.V.  But this was a completely new take on the war for me, which showed me that I did not know as much as I had thought.  Before this book, I had no knowledge of the French Resistance and very little knowledge of those who had fought the Gestapo, my knowledge was more concentrated on the Jewish people and what the Gestapo did to them.  This book opened my eyes to a whole new side of the war.

This book opens with some background history of what was going on pre-war France and leading up to the Germany take over and the formation and action of the Resistance.  While I found the beginning of the book a tad bit boring and slow, I think this had more to do with my desire to the actions of the Resistance and what happened, than my desire to have the background information.  That being said, the information was helpful in putting together pieces of what happened.  My only complaint to this section of the book was that is was confusing to try and keep all the people straight and to understand some of the terminology, which I believe Moorehead thought was more common knowledge to people, but for someone as young as myself and living on this side of the world, I found myself constantly going to Wikipedia to understand what certain words meant.

As the book transitioned from the background history to the stories of the Resistance, I found that I really enjoyed it, albeit that it was confusing at times to remember whom was whom as she jumped around a lot with the timelines and people (something she did throughout the whole book).  Through this section though, I got a clear view of what the Resistance stood for and how they tried to retaliate against the Gestapo.  It saddened me each time a member was caught and thrown in to prison, a camp or killed.

The last portion, which was easily half of the book or more, was the experience of the women in prison and moved into concentration camps.  While their treatment in the prisons were hard, it seems like a summer camp in comparison to their experience of the concentration camps, especially Auschwitz.  Reading their experiences and the things they saw in the camps broke my heart.  While I knew some of what the Nazi's had done in their camps, I had not fully understood or comprehended the severity nor intensity of the actions they took.  I found this portion of the book brought me so much closer to God.  I went through two main emotions, sadness over the fact that these things to could and anger towards God for letting these things happen.  As I first began reading this section, I was brought to tears more than once and kept praying for the families effected by this and was sort of amazed that people could think that treating specific men, women and children was somehow justified in their mind. It saddened me to see how inhuman humans can be towards each other, when God is left out of the picture.  More than once I had to put the book down and leave it before I could come back to it as the things described sickened me so much.  Finally, as this section moved on, I began to move into anger towards God, for allowing such things to happen.  I know that God is sovereign in all things, yet at times it is so hard to understand how He an allow it.  I did not expect this book to move me towards God as much as it did.

The final part of the book spoke of the freedom brought to the fewer than 40 women who had survived their 2 years in the camps and their transition into the 'real' world.  Every single one of them found it extremely difficult to go on with their lives, although they did, and found that they could not talk about their experience with anyone but each other.  They had formed a solid friendship during their Resistance and concentration camps days, which could not be broken and was the only thing that really helped them make it through the ordeal.

All in all, I enjoyed this book.  I gained new knowledge of what happened in Auschwitz and the French Resistance.  I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is interested in World War II or wants to have their faith stretched and grow.