In the absence of knitting (the trees proved to be too much apparently and now I need another little rest – how annoying is that?), I give you Christmas baking and an experiment…

My most favorite sugar cookie recipe to date I discovered back in the spring through Smitten Kitchen and her Confetti Cookies.

Oh. My. Gosh.  So tender and just wonderful.  And the sprinkles are fun.

So, I decided to use the same recipe with my new sheep/knitting cookie stamps from Juniper Moon:

And make little packages to give to the new owners of The Spinning Room!

Then, I used the same recipe, with an additional 1/2 cup flour, to make rolled cut-out cookies:

The sprinkled ones got taste-tested.  The others will become something else I’ll show you another time.

I highly recommend this recipe.  In fact, (heads up if you are local and like a free treat) I may or may not be making more sheep/knitting cookies to share at The Spinning Room.

In experimental news, I made a wonderful caramel sauce that my friend Chrissy told me about.  A can of sweetened condensed milk, immersed in water, heated in the crock pot for hours and hours.

My first try, for 8 hours, looked like this:

It didn’t look quite dark enough so I decided, after Googling for a little more information, to try again.  This time I put it in a canning jar so I could see how dark it was getting and left it in for 10 hours….

Ok, looks the same but the second one definitely tasted more caramel-y! Found that info here.  We are looking forward to trying it on something!

P.S. If you are reading this on a computer and not a mobile device, you might notice a wintry addition to the blog! (And if your are reading it on a mobile device, I bet that just made you want to go look at it on a computer…)