Busy, Busy Busy!

The fall started out beautiful with an Indian summer and then it appeared that winter would be approaching much sooner than planned with October getting extremely cold. This made Saturdays at the Hingham market a fun time. Nothing like a hot cup of tea or coffee from Redeye Roasters,  a bag of popcorn from Margie's Sweet Surrender, and fellowship with other vendors to pass a cold, windy Saturday. The market ended the weekend before Thanksgiving, which gave us time to catch a breather before baking tons of pumpkin and apple pies along with pumpkin breads and other delicious sweets for Thanksgiving feasts.

My favorite time of the year is Christmas. I love the music, the food, the smells, the lights, etc. We decided to take a portion of all orders placed between 11/25 and 1/1/12 and donate the proceeds to St. Jude Children's Hospital. When we first started the business, Bob had the idea of doing "Cookies for Kids".  Donations would be given to different charities and non-profit organizations that helped children. We were blessed this season with your generous support and were able to donate $300 to St. Jude's. We are hoping to give donations to worthy causes in the year to come.

 We developed several different types of Christmas cookies for platters this season. One cookie that became a sudden hit was the Peppermint Macarons. These are french style cookies that have a filling that can be buttercream or frosting or jelly surrounded by two light dyed-red meringue-like wafers. We decided to roll the macaron edges in crushed peppermints to give it that holiday feel. I was told that these cookies need to be offered every Christmas. We also made some Almond Scandinavian bars which were absolutely delicious.  We had a call for mini-cakes. Instead of one cake to serve guests, the mini-cakes allow for guests to have options. A few mini-cakes we did this season were the Chocolate Peppermint cake and the Eggnog Cake. Both cakes were a hit with our taste testers and added to our product line. Red Velvet, Peppermint, and Eggnog cupcakes were also added to our product line. The Holiday season kept us pretty busy up until New Years Eve.

The second half of 2011 sure did go by fast. January is usually a slow time for us because people are sticking to their new year's resolutions or are cutting out sweets. This time of the year allows for us to experiment with different kinds of recipes, change a few recipes that didn't work before, and just have fun baking in the kitchen. I'm going to try to post a few recipes a week during January; that's try to post. Between a full-time job and experimenting, it might only be a recipe a week.