Tis the season for.. toffee

As usual every Christmas time I make toffee. It's a family recipe and everyone seems to love it. The only downside to this, is that each year my list of people that would like toffee seems to get longer and longer. This year I planned out making 6 batches. Hopefully that will be enough. If not, guess I go back to the store and pick up some more stuff to make a couple more batches.

I have a running list in my head of people who have mentioned they wanted toffee, but since my memory isn't the greatest some days. Leave me a comment if you want to be added to the list.

Here are some shots of my process. I got 3 batches done last night, then I was out of cookie sheets.

(get all of your ingredients together)

(start cooking in the electric frying pan)

(Melt the chocolate chips)

(once it turns the perfect shade of brown and smells wonderful pour into a cookie sheet)

(let set for a minute or two and then cover with melted chocolate)

Christmas

We had an eventful holiday with all of starting on Christmas Eve. We visited with my Grandparents and then headed over to Jon's Grandpa's to celebrate with his family.

Christmas morning we were hoping to get an early start on the celebration but woke up to find that our power went out in the middle of the night and that it had been snowing like crazy. (I'll post my snow fall pictures in another post) We opened our presents and here is a collage of the excitement.

Once we were done at home we got ready and headed over to my parents for breakfast of Züpfe bread and to open presents.

We ended the day at Jon's Mom's house where we enjoyed their Christmas tradition of Christmas pie and opening presents.

It was a wonderful day and it was great to be able to spend time with each of our families.

Gift Tags

This year for Christmas I decided that I would make my own gift tags. Every year I feel like I go to the store and I can never find gift tags in a design that I really like. One year I even forfeited gift tags and just wrote people's names on the bottom of their gifts.

To start this project I found a paper punch in the shape of a tag and various printed papers as well as cardstock in solid colors.


Once I had a bunch of little tags punched out I decided which solids to match up with prints. I then glued a solid and print together. By doing this it provided the tag with a little weight, since the printed paper was kind of light. I then used a hole punch to punch holes at the top of the tags. I had decided that I wanted to use various ribbons and ric rac to hang the tags from. You could skip the holes at the top and just tape the tags on if you want.


Once all of this is done you can design and address the tags however you want.

Here is an example of a wrapped present with a completed tag. I used stamps for the lettering.

Santa

Even Larry is waiting for Santa to come.

Homemade Toffee

Every year I make several batches of homemade toffee to take into work, family events and holiday celebrations. However, after all of that is said and done there is always someone who says they wished they could have had a little extra to take home.

So, I am trying to take an inventory of anyone who might like their own personal batch of toffee this year. If you have never had my toffee, I think it's fabulous - but I might be biased. Also, I don't put nuts in or on the outside of the toffee.

If you want toffee just leave me a comment and I will make sure you are on my list.

Paper, ribbon & tape

For Christmas I gave several members of my family 12x12 tiles with a quote on them. When wrapping them I wanted each person to feel like they were getting something really special so I hand wrapped each tile differently. I loved how each of them turned out.