oatmeal – AT-AT Everywhere

Martha Stewart Cookie Boxes

Sadly, I’m already caught-up on my backlog of holiday baked goods. I thought I’d wrap-up with a short ditty on how I packaged the treats. I typically opt for a cellophane bag, some festive Glad Tupperware, or a little Christmas bag or box. However, I am quite the sucker for all things Martha Stewart, as well as cute paper goods. Naturally when you combine the two, I’ll wreak all kinds of domesticated havoc.

But seriously, is this Martha Stewart Cookie Box not the cutest? It seemed like a great way to showcase my Grinchmas Cookies, S’mores Cookies, Walnut Butterscotch Oatmeal Cookies, and Martha Stewart’s Snickerdoodles. And it even has a freaking window on it for Pete’s sake.

I didn’t create a separate post for the Snickerdoodles because I made them at night-time and the photos were just awful. Plus, no one would be impressed by the process of making a Snickerdoodle… not that anyone is impressed by anything on this blog anyway.

Getting excited to bake this weekend! My hiatus is drawing to a close!

As an aside, I usually take a lot of pride in carefully selecting things to hyperlink to throughout my posts to shed a little light on certain situations. Well, I’m shamelessly swallowing that pride and am admitting to having absolutely no tie-in to the one I’m about to share. It just plum made my week. Hell, it’s made my year so far and I couldn’t find a clever way to include it. So here it is. #nerd

Walnut Butterscotch Oatmeal Cookies

These Walnut Butterscotch Oatmeal Cookies were another part of my 2011 Holiday Bake-A-Thon. Not much else to say other than they came out looking NOTHING like the photo in the recipe I got from SheWearsManyHats.com. The photos from the recipe were flatter and less textured than mine. I wouldn’t categorize this as a disaster though – they seemed perfectly fine and were still tasty!

If you’re not a walnut fan, you will not like these. They were very walnutty.

I’ve been slacking in the creative department. I have a ton of crafting/sewing things I started before the holidays that I never finished but want to. No baking adventures in the foreseeable future, save for a batch of Apple Pie Cookies I’m baking for a baby shower that my old roommate is attending. It’s my first “order”! However, I won’t be posting on that since I’ve already posted about those twice.

Raspberry Coconut Oatmeal Bars

I recently reformatted my computer all by myself (+10 geek squad points!) and ended up using these to pay off a friend who got me Microsoft Office and a couple of clutch photo editing programs (Photoshop and Lightroom, here I come!). Thanks, Jay!

I randomly came across the recipe while perusing the interwebs and thought it sounded good. I noticed that the recipe called for a food processor to mix the dry ingredients together, as well as a dough blender to blend the butter and dry ingredients together – neither of which I had. I never needed to make a crust this way before, and had only ever used Jay’s dough blender to make guacamole (it’s REALLY great for guacamole). Not having that or the food processor didn’t stop me – I figured I could do it all by hand by… furiously stirring a fork. I got the dry ingredients taken care of just fine, but the dough blending became challenging once the butter came into play.

After making the crust for these bars with a fork, acquiring a dough blender is now at the top of my to-buy list. The fork method was tedious to say the least.

I’ll be able to actually have some pretty pictures soon using something better than Microsoft Office Picture Manager! For now, you’ll have to deal with what I got in the gallery here: