Christmas Comfort Food :)

Hey there! I have had a great Christmas break and been cooking a lot! I missed a blog another week this month so I am doing that now to make up for it. Every year we have a Christmas Eve dinner with all the family at our house; and I always help my mom cook every year. This year I helped her a lot and found out some great new recipes. I made a green bean casserole, this slow cook chocolate thunder thing, red velvet brownies, an oatmeal spice cake, strawberry cake, blondies, salad dressing, corn pudding, and 14 berry trifles. It was quite an eventful break. Everything turned out great except for the oatmeal spice cake. I had to use a bunt pan and when I turned it over it didn’t come out as a whole and it was really tiny. The cake part was good but it didn’t quite make it all the way. I do not know exactly what went wrong. I was once again reminded of the intense amount of time it takes to cook. On Christmas Eve I was cooking all day just for a twenty minute meal. It was kind a of depressing but still well worth it because I enjoyed the process. I also was reminded of the need to read recipes very carefully. I often find myself in a jam because I just didn’t read it closely or I was distracted or wasn’t paying full attention, but that did get me in trouble a few times. Luckily all the mistakes were minor and did ruin the food. I also got to use a little bit of my creative artistic side with the berry trifles because of the layers and different ways to arrange the berries and cream part in the glasses. One of my favorite things I cooked was the chocolate thunder recipe and the red velvet brownies. The chocolate thunder took four hours to cook but it was so delicious. It was warm, moist, and so chocolaty. It was great. Now the red velvet brownies were a little bit more tricky. It was annoying because the middle wouldn’t cook but the edges would so the edges got burnt or a little crispy but the middle part was perfect. So I cut off all the too hard and burnt parts and found all the moist cake part. So they ended up being really amazing but took more time than I was expecting. The free time was great and I am so happy that I got a chance to cook again. It was a great break and I am hoping that I will be able to cook more next semester since my schedule has slowed down a lot. Bon Appetite!