Cookie Swap 2014

At the end of February, I hosted the Annual Cookie Swap.  This year marks the 11th year of me hosting or attending the Cookie Swap.  Wow!

This year's theme was a Valentine's Day one, where we had the baking challenge of incorporating a candy into our creations.  As always, all the cookies & bars were delish!

Here are some of the gals that were in attendance:

I like to refer to us as the "usual suspects", but in a good way!  There were Chris and her daughter Danielle, Myself in the purple, Sheri, Cathy & Crissta.  Other gals that were there were Vince's mom and his daughter Cris and Gen, a bowling buddy Kelly, Sheri's mom Shirley.  My friends brought their baby & toddler daughters to top it off: Ines, Keira & Vivien.

Let's show the cookies (I mean, isn't that what this was all about anyway?!):

Crissta baked Flourless Triple Chocolate Cookies with a Werther's Twist:

Werther's Originals

 



Cathy baked Heart My Heart Healthy Oatmeal Raisinets Cookies:

 

Raisinets



Chris baked Oatmeal Butterscotch Cookies:

Butterscotch Chips

Cris baked Turtle Cookies:

Caramel Cubes

Gen made Candy Sushi:

Fruit Roll-Up, Swedish Fish, Gummy Sour Worms & Nerds

I made two things, first was Chocolate Cloud Cookies:

Junior Mints

Second was GF Minty Brownies:

Junior Mints

Sheri baked Starbursts Cookies:

Starbursts

Shirley baked Rootbeer Barrel Cookies:

Rootbeer Barrels

Lastly, Kelly baked Conversation Heart Brownie Cookies:

Conversation Hearts

My favorite was Crissta's Triple Chocolate Cookies.  The most creative were Gen's Candy Sushi.  She spent hours working on them, making rolls out of Rice Krispie mix. 

The girls played so well together.  They were a bit hopped up on all the sugar, but, hopefully they fell asleep in the car.  I know I was ready for a nap after the party.

If anyone is interested in the recipe's to these cookies, let me know, I will email them to you.

Any ideas for next year's theme??

Cookie Swap 2013

This year marks the 10th Anniversary of the Cookie Swap.  We have dubbed it the Aluminum Cookie Swap.  Aluminum is the metal given as a gift on one's 10-year wedding anniversary.

Given this special year, we also changed up the rules.  Everyone who was attending was asked to offer up an interesting ingredient as they have in the Iron Chef TV show.  All the ingredients went into a hat and one was chosen for you.  This ingredient, you had to make into a dessert-like item.  The ingredient was to be a secret and we played a guessing game as we tried all the desserts.

My interesting ingredient was BBQ sauce.  Hmmmmmm.....

I chose to make shortbread cookies with a raspberry bbq sauce on them with icing, cut into strips.  First, the shortbread alone was yummy, so I had a good base.  I baked them and the first out of the oven were very cumbly.  So that was the one that I nibbled on to taste test.  Not too bad!

So, at the cookie swap, here is the list of ingredients that were used in the desserts:

Yes, these ingredients were in the food I was about to eat.  Ha, this was the funnest cookie swap yet!  Here are the cookies that we made:

Tomato Soup Cookies

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Wasabi - Black Pearl Cupcakes

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Black Bean Cake

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Tofu Chocolate Chip Cookies

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Guava - Cuban Thumbprint Cookie

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Frangelico Meringues

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Coffee - Khalua Fudge

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Goat Cheese Chocolate Truffles

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Fresh Ginger Cookies

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Avocado Peanut Butter Fudge

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BBQ Shortbreads

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I have to admit that these cookies/desserts were good.  Some a bit off, but very edible.  My favorites were the Black Bean Cake, Fresh Ginger Cookies and the BBQ Shortbreads (of course, my own).  The Fresh Ginger Cookies and the Guava Cuban Cookies were "normal" cookies, so they hardly count, because they did not seem like such a challenge.

The poor woman who got avocado, I felt bad for her.  Her fudge was my least favorite.  It was a spongy fudge that looked like it had a white coating on them.  Ehhh.....

The Khalua Fudge was strong!  They used instant coffee, which I thought was very clever.  I'm not a huge fan of booze in my desserts, I just taste alcohol, not really the flavor of the booze.  I had a bad high school experience with Khalua and truly have not drunk it since. (Nicole...remember the premade Khalua Mudslides at one of your parties??  Yeah, I have never forgotten it...I'm scarred for life!)

The most interesting, in my opinion, where the Wasabi Black Pearl Cupcakes.  They were a very moist chocolate cake with a zing at the end.  I don't eat wasabi when I have sushi, so I'm not super familiar with it, but it did not ruin the cupcake.  They were not hot, just a burst of something once you swallow the bite: Interesting!

This was a much enjoyed cookie swap and was glad everyone was a good sport about it and came up with some good, creative recipes.

Can't wait for what next year's will be!

Ben Ice Cream Cozy

Yup, that's right:  I knitted an ice cream cozy.  Wait until you see it!  

Let me start from the beginning.  Last year, I got a Knitting Desk Calendar (2011) and in there was a pattern for ice cream cozies.  They fit a pint of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, hugging the condensation, insulating, protecting your hands from the cold when you eat from the carton.  How awesome is that?!?!

Pic from the Knitting Desk Calendar

I knew I wanted to knit it.  At the time I was dieting and the thought of eating right out of a pint of Ben & Jerry's ice cream was undo-able, so I did not knit one right away (I was not going to use it while on the diet).  So, when I started thinking of who I was going to knit gifts for this Christmas, I thought, "Who can I knit the ice cream cozy for?  Someone must eat Ben & Jerry's ice cream!"  That's when I realized that I do, in fact, have a friend who eats this ice cream.  She even goes online to find what store is selling the exact flavor she is looking for.  This was a no-brainer.

Perfect!

Well, Christmas was sneaking up on me and I had not started it as of the beginning of December.  Nothing like waiting until the last minute.  I was on a roll and then was out with my knitting injury (see the Origami Sweater - Part 2 post).  I still have it and when I think about knitting, my elbow and arm will suddenly hurt.  Ridiculous!

I started it on December 13th, which was a Thursday and was done by Sunday.  So, not too bad.  Here are the details:

 

I used some stash yarn: Bernat Softee Baby (100% Acrylic), in Soft Peach (looks pink in real life) and Premier Yarn Everyday Soft Worsted (100% Acrylic) in Baby Yellow.  I have used the Bernat Softee Baby in a couple projects: I Heart Hats and Vivecita Beret.  The Premier Yarn, I used in my Cookie Swap 2012, Rapunzel braid.

The Softee Baby is a DK weight and the Premier Yarn is a worsted weight.  What does that mean?  That means that the DK is a thinner yarn than the worsted and I had to use 2 strands of the DK to 1 strand of the worsted.  That brought a challenge:  I had only one skein of yarn of each, so I had to ball up the DK yarn (the peach/pink) into 2 balls.

This gave me an excuse to use my ball winder.  I love that thing!

It was kind of a pain to wind it from a skein, but after a tangle or two, I had 2 balls of yarn to work with:

This way I can hold the 2 strands together without a huge mess on my hands by trying to use both ends of the skein (it would not have worked, I tried that way before I balled it up.  Trust me!)

So, this is knitted on double pointed needles (dpn).  The pattern calls for a size 10, but I knit loose, so I went down a needle size to a size 9.  I casted-on and was off.

It's always confusing to me when I cast-on to dpn's.  I always think that I am doing it wrong, but it works out somehow.  So, I have started it, as you see above.

This 2 color knitting is called stranding or simply colorwork.  This is where you carry the unused color behind in the work.  I'll show you in a pic, down below.  I worked in a ribbing pattern, so the cozy can be stretchy.  I worked from the top-down.

Here is a close-up of the rib pattern, where the color changes for the knit and the purl stitch.

This is what the stranding looks like.  This is a pic of the inside of the cozy.  This extra "layer" of yarn behind the stitches helps insulate it, so your hand will not get cold from holding it.

Unfortunately, I completed it and then realized that it was a bit too long and looked like a sock, not a cozy.  I had to rip out about 4 rounds of the colorwork.  Oh well, I fixed it in no time.

That was an awful lot of yarn for 4 rounds.  I put the dpn's back into the live stitches and finished it off again.

Vince and I took one for the team...the Anything-for-the-Christmas-Gifts Team.  We bought a pint of Phish Food (love that one, and it is Gluten Free) and tried the cozy on it.  It fit!!!!  So, we ate the ice cream while watching a DVR'd episode of Dancing with the Stars.  I washed out the carton and gave the gift, with the cozy on the empty Ben & Jerry's pint.  I put a gift card for the local supermarket in it, so she can buy a pint for her to try the cozy out on.  I'm not that cruel, that I would completely tease her with no ice cream!

There is also a Jerry ice cream cozy that I will knit at some point.  I gave her an IOU for that one.  I do not have any more stash yarn that fits the bill for this project, so I will buy some the next time I'm out at Joann's.

What do you think?  Is this a fab gift or what?!?

Cookie Swap 2012

Today was the Cookie Swap.  It was actually the 9th Annual Cookie Swap.  I have been involved with them for 9 years, can you believe it?  Anyway, we had a theme this year, which was "Favorite Fairy Tale." 

The fairy tale I chose was Rapunzel.  I chose to bake gluten-free lemon bars, which I called "Rapunzel's Lemon Tresses."  I got the recipe out of a book called The Cake Mix Doctor Bakes Gluten-Free.

This book is filled with tons of cakes, cookies and bars that are made with a gluten-free cake mix.  The bars came out really yummy.  Each year we try to be more creative with how we present our cookies for display and the packaging.  This year, I was thinking of making Rapunzel's Tower as my centerpiece. 

I recruited Vince to help me and he was great at coming up ways to make them easy.  We took mailing tubes and cut them about 4 inches high (these will be for the individual sets that people will take home) and one that was about 10 inches high for the centerpiece. 

Then he drilled a hole towards the top for the window and we covered the tubes with strips of scrapbook paper that was a brick wall and he made little pointed roofs out of construction paper.  His daughter and I then took yellow yarn and braided long lengths to hang out of each window hole, which helped suspend the bag of lemon bars in the tube.  They came out so cute!

Here are the individual sets:

We had such a good variety of cookies and bars.  I will show a few here:

Apple Toffee Crisps (Snow White Twists)

Apple Pie Cookies (Evil Witch/Snow White)

Hazelnut & Gretel Cookies

Cinderella's Pumpkin Streusel Bars

Princess & the Pea Bars (Graham Cracker)

Meringue Clouds (Kisses)

Everyone brought such yummy cookies.  There were also Chocolate Pillows, Honey Lemon Cookies and Pumpkin Cheesecake Coaches.  I could not eat all of them, but they all looked delish.

We also vote on superlatives, and I won for "The Most Magical" which was Best Presentation.  The other categories were: "The Fairest of Them All" (Best Cookie), "The Queen's Jewel's"  (Richest/Most Chocolatey), "The Court Jester" (Nuttiest), and "Over The Moon" (Best with Milk).

We had a good time and I did not come home in a sugar coma.  Hooray for that!  I tried to off set all the sugar with a healthy portion of veggies from the veggie tray and cheese cubes. 

We'll have to think of a fun theme for next year too.  Anyone game for coming to Florida for the 10th Annual Cookie Swap??