Holiday Baking

Well, the time has come to 'fess up! Callie and I together in the kitchen during the holidays?!??! Probably not a good idea! By way of introduction, let me remind you of some of our previous experiences. You may recall the the amazing . . .er . . . interesting Resurrection Rolls that we created for our Sunday School classes. I lost a cookie sheet during that experience and while the final batch tasted pretty good, they bore no resemblance at all to an empty tomb.
Or anything appetizing, for that matter.

I don't know why we thought those would be a success. It was only a few months earlier that we had a major "praline mishap".

And before that, there was the "Toffee Crack". Yep, that recipe is one that everyone swears by--easy and delicious. Unless of course, you have Callie and I making it. That night, we also managed to burn a bowl of chocolate we were melting.

And, while the final product was ultimately a success, there is not denying that some of the "snowman marshmallows" we created a couple of years ago were a little bit scary to look at.

Well, 2014 was sure to be different! Callie brought over a couple of recipes she'd chosen because they looked yummy and were supposed to be super easy. So we gathered our supplies and set to work.

We decided that we should try the toffee first. She had researched recipes and found the no-fail one. How could we go wrong? We roasted the sliced almonds according to the directions.

At this point, there should have been some alarms going off in our heads, but instead we considered it to be a minor bump in the road, scraped off the burned ones and continued on. Luke helped as we stirred and heated and spread.

The first batch looked so perfect---creamy and smooth. Except, what exactly is the "almond color" that the recipe called for? Is that a dark almond? A light almond? Knowing that our previous experiences resulted in overcooked toffee, we opted for the light color. And because it looked so good, we made the decision to go ahead and make 2 more batches, thus using all the cookie sheets that I own.

As we set those batches aside to harden, we began the Oreo Truffles.
Now these actually were very easy and tasted oh so good!

I must admit that some were not as pretty as others, but, overall, this was definitely a success!,

After a couple of hours, we began to worry about our toffee. It didn't seem to be hardening ---- at all. It was still very pretty, but it required a spoon to eat at this point. Even after putting it in the refrigerator for a while. Not wanting to waste all the ingredients, we decided to try to make something from our mess. I scraped one cookie sheet of "toffee" in a mixing bowl and added the ingredients that were missing from a cookie recipe (flour, brown sugar, backing soda, salt, vanilla, eggs).

We rolled them into balls, and at the last minute, I suggested we coat them in powdered sugar. I mean, what did we have to lose?!?! We baked one dozen and then had Ron taste-test them. The verdict??? They were good. Like REALLY good!!! They reminded me of the Chocolate Crinkle cookies my mother used to make.

We decided that they deserved a special name, so we dubbed them "Krisp Krinkles" and proceeded to bake as many as we could do that night before becoming completely exhausted. (remember that we had 3 full batches of "toffee" to convert). Both of us took them to work the next day and they were a hit with everyone that tried them. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), it would be virtually impossible to duplicate them.

I suppose the recipe might look something like this: