Christmas Baskets

As many of you know, I am currently a Hausfrau, housewife, kept woman, call it what you like but it's not by choice.  Being gainfully employed would be a wonderful treat, paychecks, lunches out and the occasional ego boost would be most welcome changes to laundry, dishes, grocery shopping and cooking.  OK, I'll keep the cooking part.  When Christmas rolls around I have issues with gifts.  Since I am not bringing in an income I feel guilty about spending a lot of money on gifts so I do a big shop for ingredients at Costco and get to work in the kitchen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This month's #letslunch theme was edible holiday decorations, so I'm not sure these really count because technically they are edible gifts though they are decorating my entire dining room table staging area at the moment!  I have been baking up a storm over the past 2 weeks and am still behind!  8 types of cookies, rum caramel popcorn and spicy candied almonds combine to make my goodie gift baskets that I choose to do as gifts for friends and family at Christmas.  Most of the cookies had several components and even the ordinary chocolate chip cookies are a special recipe using corn syrup, cinnamon and cloves to make them huge, chewy and slightly different for the holiday!

What I am showing here are chocolate drizzled coconut macaroons, monster chocolate chips, chocolate dipped orange shortbread, peanut butter blossoms, cherry-chocolate rounds, dark gingerbread snowflakes, shortbread toffee bars with chocolate and almonds and poppyseed squares with homemade puff pastry.  If you are interested in any of the recipes, leave a comment and I will happily transcribe them for you.  I'll also add another picture when the baskets are complete.

Happy holidays all!!

Edited to add the final product!