Our Christmas treats and all the details!

Earlier on in the week I asked my sister Emily if she wanted to come over and help me make some Christmas treats. Sure enough she wanted to. She came over to my place on Tuesday after she got off work. So we put our heads together and thought up all of these different types of treats we could do. I wanted to make snowman and Santa out of nutterbutter cookies dipped in melted white chocolate and she was persistent about makeing suger cookies. So we looked at sugar cookie designs and found two cute ones we both liked. Emily just kept saying, "Oh these will be so easy." I was honestly very skeptical about it because I know how long it can take to do cookies, but sure enough I went with it. I did only agree to it if she would do all the cookie dough making and rolling it out, I'm just not a big fan of rolling pins, cutting out cookie, making the dough etc. But sure enough Em was like, "Oh ya, I'll do that!" So we both agreed on doing Snowman and Reindeer sugar cookies. Well shoot, now our issue was the reindeer, they are browns not the color of sand. So Emily called up my mom and asked her if we could just put some scoops of cocoa in it to make them brown. So our wonderful mother took it upon herself to look for a recipe that makes brown sugar cookies so she wouldn't be the blame of a disgusting cookie where we just estimated the scoops of cocoa to add to make it brown. Sure enough my mom found one and Emily and I just looked at all the ingredients and thought, "Oh ya, this will work!" Heaven forbid we didn't look at the instructions of how to make it and just thought the ingredients sounded great and easy enough (More info to come later down).

So while I was making a shopping list, Emily was already showing signs of sleeping, infact I looked over and was like, "Hey, we need to get going so we can get started on this." She than muttered, "After I sleep." After poking and priving her, I convinced her other wise, which come to find out she wanted to shower and make herself all beautiful before we left, which lucky for her Braxton was rubbing his eyes and showing signs of being tired so Em was able to shower while Braxton took his nap. So by the time he woke up, Emily has showered and we were off to the grocery store, around 5:00PM might I add.

As you can tell in the picture below compared to the ones above that it was rather dark by the time we started this extravaganza. (Picture below taken at 8:32PM)

And by a couple of hours later Jackson and Braxton have gone to bed, (smart men).

Now let me remind you, we are making two types of sugar cookie dough, one sandy color for our snowman and one brown color for our reindeer. Thank heavens Emily started on the reinder dough first because come to find out in the instructions, it nicely stated after making the dough, to wrap it up in surranwrap and "REFRIGERATE" for 1 hour!! Well shoot we don't have an hour to spare, thank heavens we still had sandy colored sugar cookie dough to keep ourselves busy. The sandy colored ones are what we were working on below.

Oh and for the picture on the right, you may see some cupcakes there in the bottom of the picture. Those are some gluten free cupcakes that I made for one of the families as a Christmas treat since they can't have gluten. It was so nice and easy to make, I loved it! I was done with making those a long time ago while Emily just started on the snowman cookies. (Picture below taken at 11:28PM)

Now while I stand there and frost these cupcakes, I suddenly remember, SHOOT, WE FORGOT SOMETHING!! We forgot the chocolate bells for our snowman hats! Our snowmen has to have hats! Lucky for us (not really but thinking positively) all of a sudden we smelt burning rubber come up from the beaters that Emily was using for her sugar cookies! Well a midnight Walmart run it is for sure now!

Back home from Walmart now and what do you know, it's been more than an hour later. We can make our reindeer cookies! Now let me tell ya, these were quite the cookies. It said to refrigerate for an hour, roll out the dough, make your cookie cutout, than refrigerate those cutouts for 15 minutes. Seriously?! So glad I wasn't the one making these cookies! But Emily was very faithful to her duties of making these cookies! (Picture taken at 01:42AM)

You know how when your body gets tired, you begin to think that everything is just funny and you laugh at the most stupid of things. Yep, we've hit it. We have officially lost our minds.

Might I add what Emily's facial expression is in the picture below on the left, that is her worried frantic look, because the cookies were stuck to the cookie sheet after baking! They stuck and weren't coming off. No worries only one of them lost an antler! :) Heaven forbid we lose one cookie out of the billion we made ;)

We than suddently noticed, Emily's flour stain on her shirt and had a good laugh at that too.

All of a sudden, Maximus just randomly gets up from napping with Roxy in the living room and comes into the kitchen. I take one look at him and bust a gut. How the heck did he get all that flour on his face?! We weren't that messy and Max was honestly sleeping the whole time by the Christmas tree! He didn't even come close to us so I guess we'll never know. Maybe we have some left over flour in the air from the billions of cookies we made, who knows ??? (Picture taken at 2:00AM)

Alright, a break from the Reindeer cookies, yeah! Lets at least finish the snowman cookies and have another finished project!

Now to make the melted snowman look, we had to look up on the internet for icing that was liquid but would harden really quickly. Rather called (Royal Icing). Which meant I needed Emily's help so it didin't harden too soon before I added the hat and nose. Which figuring out the consistincy for the liquid frosting was quite entertaining, just had to be there to see the fun of it. Took us about 30 minutes to figure that out.

So as pictured below, Emily poured and I put on the snowman hat and orage nose.
(Picture taken at 2:12AM)

Looking good! Just need to add the eyes with the black gel when it's hardened.

Here is the finished gluten free cupcakes. The vanilla wafer and pretzel weren't gluten free, so I failed that aspect of it, but at least the main part was! Maybe we should have just made cupcakes for everyone instead of the time consuming sugar cookies. Don't they look great! Almost better than the sugar cookies! ;) J/K sis :)

So while Emily was working on the sugar cookies, I pretended to be asleep in the chair which made her bust a gut and got me laughing. So now we were trying to take a picture of me pretending to sleep. You know how hard it is to not laugh and pretend to sleep when you know someone is taking your picture of it, it is very hard! My acting skills need some work. We had a good laugh though. :)
(Picture taken at  3:20AM)

My finished snowman cookies! I think they turned out great!!

Alright, the reindeer are baked, just need to decorate them all! (Picture taken at 4:13AM)

Oh man, now the decorating part was quite the task. The two tubes of prepared icing we bought to decorate these cookies were squirting out the frosting way too fast. It looked horrible. There was no way to slow it down! So after a couple of screwed up cookies. Emily thought to make her own frosting bag. She grabbed a snack bag (because I didn't have a sandwich baggy which just meant she kept refilling the snack bag, no big deal we have all the time in the world) and cut a hole in the corner of it. Worked great! So we agreed that she did the white part of decorating and I do the rest. I of course had the easier part of it. Those cookies had lots of white to do on it.

By this time, Jackson has woken up for work. Yes folks, it was 4:30 in the morning and still not done. Jackson looks the way we feel!

Yeah, someone available to take both our pictures together!

The dogs and were they slept all night! (5:07AM)

Our finished product, well at least some of them. Lots more to decorate.

At this point I went to bed because I had to be up in two hours to head to my work. So I figured I better take a little nap, plus I worked graveyard that upcoming night. Thanx Em for finishing up the last of it as you can see in the picture! I did do the noses and smiley face for her though! :)
(6:00AM)

I got home from the hospital around 9:30AM, Emily was just finishing up with our white chocolate chex mix treats that we wanted to do too! Holy Moly! I didn't think we were gonna make those too. I was thinking of bagging that and saving those for a rainy day. But nope, Emily was faithful to the very end! Twelve hours worth of treatmaking, never again! I'm doing my nutterbutters next year ;) Still love ya Em! Anyhow, I was getting ready to go back to bed and Emily went up stairs to hang out with Braxton. Emily said he did really good at just laying there watching his baby einstein while she doze on and off. Thank heavens Jackson would be off work at 11, which sadly enough ended up being 2:30 that day. Poor Em, so tired. So proud of Braxton though, such a good baby for aunt Lou! :)

Well here you have it, all the finished plates!

Thank you Em for all your help! You were amazing! And dinner was great by the way! Having a clean house and dinner in the crockpot, couldn't have been more happier!

I honestly couldn't have done these treats without ya! Can't wait for our next project together! :)

Luv ya Em!