February 09, 2010
Tis The Season...
... for baking,
baking and more baking.
This past weekend, I marshalled up the forces (a skeleton force indeed due to attrition over the years) and spent 2 days making peanut almond cookies and pineapple tarts, with our own home-made pineapple jam.
5 people in 10+ hours over 2 days = 8 1/2 recipes of peanut almond cookies and 2 1/2 recipes of pineapple tarts. And it's not close to being enough! I'm facing the prospect of having to work the next few nights making more pineapple tarts. We normally make open-faced tarts so I thought I would try making the closed version with some store-bought jam, just to fill up the bottles and make it look more 'presentable'.
If there's time I'm also going to make love letters aka egg rolls. We did that once, a long time ago. We set up the barbecue, thinking that after we made bottles and bottles of love letters we could feed the army of helpers with some good ol' BBQ.
HA. HA. HA. Oh ye of over-abundant faith. Who knew that love letters would be so damn tedious. After one afternoon of grilling and rolling and much swearing (due to burnt fingers) we ended up with one bottle. Albeit one big bottle but still, just one bottle. The helpers were so wiped out, we just ordered takeout instead.
So, it's probably just a pipe dream of mine to make love letters on my own this year. But I have to say, the home-made ones taste so much better than the ones you get commercially. Yum.
I leave you now with some pictures of our spoils. A lucky few will get to see these in person! :)
Pineapple tarts and peanut almond cookies waiting to be packed
The loot