Baking all day.

Everyone has their own holiday tradition... even those who don't celebrate things this time of year tend to have that one they they do every year cause why not.

For me thats getting together with family and friends and watching The Ref on christmas eve.
For those who haven't heard of this film, it's easily one of the best Christmas eve movies... because it's not saccharine. now... don't get me wrong i love a cheesy happy holiday film as the next person but i also like when the holidays aren't so perfect because... well... it's funnier.
Also for the record, Die hard is another great christmas movie... i mean if Sound of music can be qualified as a christmas film simple because she talks about packages and snow.... Die hard which takes place at a christmas party is 100% a christmas film.

Anyways this year the christmas eve get together is at my house and I am known to be a bit of a baker (i don't know how... 95% of the time i just find the simplist recipes and call it a day cause i don't really have a lot of time to put aside for baking.)
So i have sort of been appointed as the head baker and i figured... maybe cookies would be too boring.

So i've been trying to learn a few more tricky (but still not terribly time consuming) recipes.

This past week i have been trying to bake Profiteroles with varying degrees of success (read as they were edible but not what i was expecting) and finally on the third try (and buying a new cooking sheet since apparently air insulated ones do not work for the dough) they turned out pretty damn good (you know... for someone who is leaning)

look at them all puffy and hollow.
However at this stage it's really just a shell... so we made a pastry cream (which sounded hard but was actually pretty easy and really tasty) yesterday and after piping them... Voila!

... hm.... ok... that probably doesn't get the point across.

There we go.
Next time i'll probably mkae them smaller cause the amount they puffed surprised me but for now... yum~

Yesterday i also made some rose shaped Meringues.

well even though the recipe said they would be ready in 1:30 hours.... it lied.
this needed to stay in the oven frying out overnight before i could get them off the silpat.
but still i think they look pretty (and lemon flavores as well)

The final thing is something that was more of an experiment.
Macha shortbread.
we also had these imprinting mats so yeah.. .gave that a shot.

alright this looks great, cake wait to see how it looks when they bake!

oh..... oooohhhh...
well we tried that's what matters... you can kinda see the imprint but yeah... maybe one of the other mats will work better.

and thats the end of my baking photodump.
i figured it was better to post it here then to twitter.

But seriously go see the ref, it's dark comedy but it's just done so very very very well.

Now to figure out what other recipes i can try... i saw one for sugar cookie penguins.....
but i would just end up making Sugar cookie Prinnies.... and have everyone looking at me like i'm nuts.