It's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year

Christmas baking this weekend was a success!  We started Friday night and made Parmesan Bread Knots and Butter Tarts.  I've always used my mom's filling recipe for butter tarts but I've used pre-made tart shells because in our first year of marriage I tried to make a pumpkin pie and a "never fail" pastry recipe failed dismally.  Last year when my parents came out for Christmas my mom brought her butter tarts with homemade pastry.  I bit into the slightly sugar-crystallized top and flaky pastry arms into a gooey centre -  it was almost a spiritual experience.

This year I baked with my friend Rebecca.  She is a newlywed and a self-proclaimed disaster in the kitchen.  (She lied, she's fantastic.)  We got together one night and sipped candy cane tea and sorted through recipes to come up with our final baking list and split the ingredients list. One of the recipes I was responsible for was butter tarts and I bought pre-made tart shells.  And then I got to thinking about last Christmas and my mom's butter tarts and I went out the night before our baking extravaganza began and bought Tenderflake.  When I was going through the till the cashier exclaimed, "Oh this is the absolute best for making pastry.  It's no fail.  Seriously you can't mess this up."  I didn't have the heart to tell her I was the one person in history who already had.

I made the pastry the day of and put it in the fridge to let the gluten (or whatever) settle.  And I put the tart shells into the fridge to defrost.  Just in case.  Later that night we rolled out the pastry and it seemed to be okay.  We popped our first test batch in the oven.  My mom's instructions are to bake until the insides are bubbling and the pastry is browned, 12-15 min.  The insides bubbled at about the 15 min mark but the pastry took forever to brown.  By the time the pastry was brown the insides where very dark.  Darker than I remember my mom's being.  But by the last of our four trays we had got the timing figured out and they were perfect.  We called it a night at 11:30pm.

We were back at it 9:30am Saturday morning.  Well I was.  Rebecca slept in (the joys of no kids) and came at 10:30 but she came bearing Starbucks and Spiced Rum so who's complaining? The coffee got our morning off to a great start and the rum, which we added to eggnog, helped us get through the end of the night when we felt "all done" but weren't. We broke for sandwiches at noon and I helpfully cut Rebecca's into fourths.  Having kids changes you.  I'm just saying.  At one point in the afternoon the combination of an endless amount of two double batches of shortbread and Sarah Mclachlan's Christmas CD were lulling us into a kind of dull autopilot.  Talking had ceased altogether and I felt like I was asleep on my feet. A few bars (and several sips of Pepsi) into Mariah Carey's All I Want For Christmas Is You and we were revived!  Caffeine + Mimi = Magic.

Hugh had to work Saturday and Rebecca's husband had other things on the go but our men arrived in time for dinner and hoping for some samples of our hard work.  It's always good to hope, isn't it?  After dinner Rebecca and I were back at it.  By 10:00pm we had finished:
4 pans of Cherry Slice,
3 pans of Toblerone Mousse Squares,
2 pans of Orange Chocolate Biscotti,
4 loaves of Eggnog Bread,
2 double batches of Shortbread Cookies,
2 trays of Peppermint Bark,
2 pans of Pecan Bars,
6 sheets of Almond Crescents,
2 batches of Porcini Mushroom Phyllo filling,
2 batches of Spinach Feta Phyllo filling.
We were exhausted.  Our feet were killing us but all we had left to do was assemble our two different kinds of phyllo.  We poured ourselves a rum and eggnog and invited our men to help but they had both fallen asleep on the couch already.  I would have said they were pretending if it weren't for the snoring.  By the time we finished and everything was packed up and washed up it was 12:30am. Which just happened to be when the guys woke up from their naps.  Aren't coincidences crazy?

Hugh had to be at church early on Sunday morning because he was doing sound so he took the big kids with him and Beesh crawled in bed bedside me and let me sleep in.  I dragged my tired self out of bed around 9:00am and drifted into the shower where my arms felt like they each weighed a tonne when I was lifting them to wash my hair.  I felt like I was moving in slow motion all morning and then finally I looked at the clock and realized I was going to be very late if I didn't get a move on.  Church starts at 10:30 and at 10:29 I was running out the door with a cup of tea I hadn't had time to drink and a butter tart since I didn't have time for breakfast.  My foot hit the first of our front steps and then I was launched into the air, tea and butter tart going in two different directions, and landed two steps below.  I sat in the snow for a while to assess the damage.  Tea?  A few sips left.  Me?  Okay I think.  Butter tart? I looked around and saw it lying in three pieces upside down in the snow.  I had grabbed that butter tart off the top of my tin so it was one of the really good ones from the last tray when we finally figured out the right baking time.  I was not letting it go to waste! And you know what?  Even covered in snow it was amazing.  I think I'm going to have a butter tart for breakfast every day.
 

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