Christmas By The Dozen

Merry Christmas everyone!  How was your Christmas?  Magical?  Delightful?  A veritable winter wonderland?  Good.  I'm happy for you.  Really, I am.

My Christmas wasn't horribly bad, but it just felt like a very "off" year.  Not my favorite.  To start the holiday season off right, on November 20th Ivy and I were hit by a semi truck.  We both came out of it pretty good considering, but the recovery and aftermath did put a damper on my Black Friday shopping.  For the first time in eight years I stayed home on Black Friday.  That left me with a whole lotta shopping to get done in December.  And with the accident came a bunch of doctor's appointments and new car shopping and new carseat shopping and insurance shenanigans to be done in December.  The shopping and everything did get done in time (barely) but I didn't get much decorating done.  I got no baking done.  Things just weren't feeling as Christmasy as they should.

The weekend before Christmas I marked out on the calendar to be a CHRISTMAS PREP EXTRAVAGANZA!  We were hosting Christmas for the inlaws this year so at the very least I needed to clean house and I was also hoping to finish up that decorating too.  Saturday morning Violet and I got to cleaning until I bent over to turn on the tub faucet (to fill a mop bucket) and my back went out.  Just went down south for the holidays to visit family I guess.  I crawled to bed and stayed there all weekend unable to walk.  Needless to say, things yet again didn't get done as I had planned.

Christmas went fine, gifts were opened and meals were eaten and there was cheer and whatnot.  But I'm still sitting here feeling kind of unsatisfied.

Lucky for me though, I remembered - THERE ARE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS!  I still have time to salvage the season and have some fun.  So my goal is to do twelve days of gluten-free and dairy-free treats.  I don't know if that will make everything better, but at least we can all drown our sorrows in marshmallow and chocolate.

Grandma Beccie provided the treats for Christmas, which were delightful, and I'll hunt down her recipes for you all.  My contribution for Christmas was a quick batch of gluten, dairy, peanut free Muddy Buddies (using this recipe).  I was so-so about these because I am a huge peanut fan and the almond butter just seemed subpar to me, but no one else had my reservations and the whole bowl was promptly devoured.

So yesterday when I decided to do this, I was trying to think of an easy treat to make that I had the ingredients for on hand.  In scanning my cupboards, my eyes rested on a Tupperware container of Cascadian Farms Honey Nut O's.  This cereal did NOT go over well with my brood.  I thought it looked good, but they won't eat it.  I tried it, it's not terrible, but I agree with them, it's not great.  It was an expensive box of cereal though so I didn't want it to go to waste.  So I rounded up a recipe for Almond Honey Cereal Bars from the Cascadian Farms blog and figured I give it a go.  Maybe the cereal would be more enticing slathered in honey and sugar? 


Turns out, it is.


They are all gone already except for the four I put in a bag marked "DO NOT EAT (FOR SATURDAY)".  We are doing a family gift exchange on Saturday so I thought I should keep a variety of treats from this week's projects to share with everyone.

And for today, another easy project with all the ingredients already on hand.  Grandma Marcia had bought the makings for chocolate dipped pretzels (ingredients: chocolate, pretzels) so I whipped those up today.  Glutino pretzels dipped in melted Enjoy Life dairy free chocolate chips.  Easy peasy.  Also extremely delicious.  This is a great one because it is basically indistinguishable from its dairy and gluten full version.  Yum.

Tune in tomorrow for the fourth day of treats.  It should be exciting because at this point I again have no idea what I'll be making ;-)