Homemade Holiday Goodies

This year, I wanted to gift some homemade goodies as Christmas gifts. Pretty much all year long I've been prepping, with things like homemade vanilla extract and vanilla sugar. I got some awesome bottles with droppers for the vanilla, and some pretty jars for the sugar.

I also wanted to bake a couple things to give along with the extract and sugar, so I decided on my Texas pecan pralines. I'd also been wanting to try my hand at black & white cookies ever since my friend Amanda told me they existed. I decided Christmas was the perfect time to do it, and I even made some holiday versions: regular black & white (with vanilla glaze and chocolate glaze), black & red (raspberry glaze and chocolate glaze), and black & green (peppermint glaze and chocolate glaze). Yay!

I know, these pictures aren't the greatest, and I forgot to photograph the cookies before I packaged them all up, so these shots will have to do.

Praline Experiments

This weekend I'm busy trying a few new things in between all of my standard baking. Since I needed to bake some pecan pralines anyway, I decided now would be a good time to experiment with a few ideas floating around in my head: butter pecan cookies and more shapely pecan pralines.

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Butter Pecan Cookies - Take 1

My idea for butter pecan cookies was to make a buttery shortbread cookie topped off with pecan praline. I used my robust sugar cookies as the base. These came out relatively well, but I only got a few cookies done before the praline got too cool and difficult to work with. They taste pretty good, but I'm not done perfecting this. I have another idea in store for the cookie part that will hopefully not only be delicious but less expensive in terms of ingredients.

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Shapely Pecan Pralines

Next up was making my pralines look a bit more appetizing. These things are SO decadent and delicious and melt-in-your-mouth-amazing, but the only photo I had of them made them look kind of... bleh. So I set out to make some pretty ones.

My vision was to make them in mini muffin tins, because I really like that shape. The first attempt was a failure... again, the stuff cooled too quickly for me to handle properly. My second attempt was better -- at least I got it all into the pan before it cooled off. But THEN I couldn't get them out of the tin without demolishing them. That's when I went out and bought a silicone baking mold. The result was MUCH better. Pretty shaped pralines!!



The only complaint I have is that the sides are dull, where they touched the mold. Not sure how to remedy that -- yet. Anyone have any ideas?