To be honest, cookie making is not my forte. I made some in the past, and were never satisfied.  Tried my hand at decorating cookies a few years back, but didn’t have the patience (nor read proper instructions/tips to make royal icing properly) and really haven’t tried it again since.

Queue 2016 Christmas.  As I’m on maternity leave, it has completely kicked start my drive for baking (in between baby napping and such).  After weeks of reading online recipes, tips and tricks from cookie experts and royal icing decorating ideas, I was pumped!

Made a basic sugar cookie recipe I found (googled “Easy Sugar Cookies”) and found this one. It tasted terrific! and super easy to make.  I didn’t follow the icing recipe on the site as I didn’t want to put fresh milk in a recipe..didn’t seem…good to keep not refrigerated after?  So back to google and found a recipe that uses Meringue Powder – don’t recall the source..but here is the recipe:

• 5 T. meringue powder
• 3/4 C. very warm water
• 1 t. cream of tartar
• 2 1/4 pounds powdered sugar (I weigh it—2 lb. 4 oz. or 36 oz.)
• 2 tsp. almond (or vanilla) extract (oil free/alcohol free)

I added a bit of lemon juice (for flavouring) and gel food colouring.

I chose a few shapes (mittens, snowflake, circles) and got to mixing the colours and decorating!

Ta da!  Packaged these up as gifts.

For the first time ever, I have decided to decorate my house other than just the put up the Christmas Tree 3 days prior.  A lot of fun DIY projects, and cheap finds. Fairly happy with the results.  Think Christmas decor 2016 will have a good foundation to build on!

DIY Snowman from socks and rice…inspired by Pinterest

Upcycled Mirror painted and distressed

DIY sparkly and glittery pinecones from outside

Inspired to do more than put up a Christmas tree this year to decorate our house, I rolled up my sleeves and got right into a mix of DIY and cheap finds. It’s been a rolling process through the month of November, and the house is nearly done.  There will be an overall reveal by next week of all the little touches throughout the main floor of the house.  For now, I want to show one of the cutest DIY Christmas project this year – the DIY Mistletoe Ball.  Extremely simple, but need patience and the vision that it’s gonna be good when it’s done.  (trust me, there was doubts when I first started!)

Materials required:

2 strands of mistletoe garlands from Dollarama ($3 each)
1 styrofoam ball (already had)
Hot glue gun (already had)
wired ribbon of any width and about 3′ (already had)

For me, this project literally cost me $6 + tax – funny how the more you craft, the cheaper things get as you start accumulating a lot of spare stuff!

Start by yanking the little leaves out of the garland – at first I thought I would have to cut them off, but then quickly realizes it snaps off quite easily with a little pull.

with the glue gun, put a dab of glue at the ends and bottom of the twig and stick it to the styrofoam ball.  I started gluing it more horizontally at first, but as I did more, start layering it to lift up the previous leaf to give it more structure.  It gets easier as it gets fuller.  This was also the part where I started doubting if it would work out as it was rather sparse and hard to glue at this point.

All I want for Christmas is…..a lemon tree!

and Nick delivered! ho ho ho!

About a week before Christmas, I came home and there it was!  It is beautiful – about 3 ft high.  2 ft wide. with 5 little pea sized green lemon stub, and 5 white flower bulbs ready to bloom.  It has a light fragrant smell that is not overwhelming.

My new house project is to keep this little guy alive.  It didn’t occur to me when i asked for a lemon tree for Christmas that I don’t exactly have a green thumb.  In fact – most of plants that I owned has died.  Including one cactus, numerous African violets, and several bamboos.

so this will certainly be interesting…wish me luck!