Fowler Family Christmas!

We Wish you a Merry Christmas!

From our Growing Family to Yours!

Christmas Party Mix

Looking for a gift for those people on your list that you know you should get something for, but you don't want to spend too much on? Like your postman, neighbor, or maybe just a friend that you don't see very often?

Well look no further than my Christmas Party Mix!

Its a thoughtful homemade gift that you can eat! And who doesn't like stuff to eat around the holidays? It's a pretty simple little recipe that doesn't take too long to prepare. And you can switch it up and add your favorite snacks and try different combinations too.

For mine, I had:

• No-name Cheerios (Oatie-O's)
• Shreddies
• Goldfish
• Pretzels
• Hickory Sticks
• Peanuts

I wasn't sure about the last 2 ingredients as some people are allergic to nuts and I just thought the hickory sticks might have been too much, so I left them out of the first batch but after some reconsideration, I added them to my second batch. 

For the sauce, it was:

• 2/3 to 1 cup Butter (melted)
• 4 tbs Soy Sauce
• 1/4 cup Brown Sugar
• 2 tbs Garlic Salt
• 1 tbs Salt

I'm not very good at measuring so I just winged it for the sauce. So the measurements above are just approximate. You can make it sweeter by adding more sugar, or more savory by adding more salt. But I would caution that most of the snacks are already pretty salty, so be careful not to add too much salt.

      

Step 1: Mix the dry ingredients together.

Pretty easy. Open the bags and dump them into a bowl. I didn't have a big enough bowl, so I did 2 trays.

Mix well.

         

Step 2: Mix Sauce

Melt the butter and add all the other ingredients to it. Stir until the sugar is dissolved.

At this point you should probably turn on your oven to about 200* F to preheat it.

Step 3: Pour Sauce over Mix

Pour the Sauce over the dry mix and stir well. There should be an even coating of the butter sauce over everything.
If your mix isn't already in a roaster, transfer it into one now.

Step 4: Bake
Put the roaster in the oven without the cover on.
Bake for about 1 hour 15 minutes or until toasty.
Check on the mix every 15 minutes and give it a good stir each time to make sure the mix is evenly baked.

It will still be a bit sticky even after they are done baking, but will harden up to a nice crunchy snack in a few minutes after being out of the oven

Step 5: Place in Containers

As I mentioned above, the mix will still be a bit sticky after you pull it out of the oven. It won't take long before they start to set and get hard and crunchy. I found it easier to scoop it into the tins while they were still in their warm sticky stage, so I would pop it back into the oven between filling each tin. If not, the mix becomes brittle and hard to scoop without breaking the snacks.

I found these Christmas tins down to the dollar store for $1.50 each so I got 9 of them. 

I also lined the tins with some wax paper.

Tada!! A little munchy crunchy tasty gift!

I was able to get 6 full tins out of my 2 batches...plus a little left over for our table. 

Thanks for reading!

Pekrul Family Pintrest Pinwheels

You know what I love? Collaborating with friends!

Our good friends Kim and Trevor contacted me last night to ask if I would share their Pintrest Pinwheel experience on my blog. My response...of course! It can be hard to come up with fresh new content all the time so I welcome the input and the interest in my blog.

So without further ado, here is the Pekrul Family Pintrest Pinwheels:
(as written by Kim Pekrul)

So, Trevor and I had an awesome day of baking these pinwheel cookies today.  We have never made these before, so it was a learning experience for both of us. We both love baking and cooking in the kitchen together. So we work well together.  The cookies are for our families second annual Christmas cookie exchange. I needed to make 13 dozen cookies.

I found the cute recipe for the cookies on Pinterest.  

It turned out we had ALL of the ingredients in our house to make them.  We just needed to buy blocks of margarine.

I did the creaming of the butter and sugar. Trevor measured the dry ingredients. If you read the process it takes to make these pinwheels it was pretty tedious…but there was just a slight learning curve, and after making 2 batches of cookies we felt like we were experts.

Instead of adding chocolate we added food coloring to half the batch. (and peppermint/vanilla  to the butter/sugar/egg mixture) They turned out to be very pretty. We rolled the two colors together, then rolled the logs in different colors of sprinkles. Pink/yellow/purple/blue.

Taylor had 2 of his friends over today. So they helped a bit. (Sapphire and Arianna) So fun baking with my son and his two (girl) friends!

The recipe says to roll the two layers together, put them in cling wrap and put them in the fridge for 3 hours or over night. We cut that in half by placing our logs outside for an hour (hey we live in the north LOL)

Then we sliced the logs into perfect little cookie shapes and baked them for 8-10 min. So fun.

The end.

Thanks Kim,Trevor, and family! Wish I could have a taste of your treats, they look awesome!

And if anyone is interested in being a guest blogger, just let me know, I would love to collaborate with you too!  b

                                                                                                                    

On the first day of Christmas...

...My mommy made with me, a batch of chocolate chip cookies!

Well it's finally December and time to bring on the family Christmas Traditions!

As you may recall, I have already made a Sock Advent Calender for Hunter to start the count-down to Christmas, but I thought it would also be nice to try and do an activity related to Christmas as well.

Now, I'm no super Mom and while I am aiming for 24 activities and some can be done together, there is no guarantee that all will get done. I figured it best to make a list of all the thing that I want to accomplish and try and knock them off my list as the days go by and we get closer to Christmas.

Here's my list so far:

Christmas Activities:

1. Bake some cookies and treats
2. Go to local craft fairs
3. Bake perogies
4. Attend Santa Clause Parade and Tree Lighting
5. Watch "How the Grinch Stole Christmas"
6. Send Christmas Cards
7. Watch or read "A Christmas Carol"
8. Make a gift
9. Make paper snow flakes
10. Take a family Christmas Photo
11. Go Christmas Shopping
12. Wrap Gifts
13. Invite friends over for a Christmas Cheer
14. Make Party Mix as a gift
15. Get a tree
16. Decorate the tree
17. Sing Carols
18. Donate toys
19. Have a family game night
20. Decorate a Ginger Bread House
21. Make a Christmas Craft (for the tree or for the house)
22. Visit friends and family
23. Read "The Night Before Christmas"
24. Go to Church on Christmas Eve

So this weekend I started with the first thing on my list...Baking cookies!

This was pretty easy as my Mother-in-law had slipped a tub of pre-made cookie dough into Hunter's bag one day last week. The dough can be frozen, but once it is thawed out, it will only last for about 5 days in the fridge. Since by the time I took it out of his bag it was already thawed, and was already in my fridge for 4 days, they needed to be baked this weekend!

So after all my hard work of prepping the dough (i.e. taking it out of the fridge), we were ready to start cutting the shapes and baking the cookies!

I had my little "helper" Hunter help me roll out the dough and cut out the cookies. He was pretty into it too! Correction, he was into playing with the dough and throwing it all over the kitchen. Oh well, we had some fun doing it. 

Next it was into the oven for about 10 minutes a batch then on the rack to cool. In about an hour, we had a mountain of cookies to eat...and eat them we did! I thought "wow, how are we ever going to eat that many cookies?" But this morning when I woke up, there were only about 8 left (must have some mice in the house lol) 

Thanks for reading and stay tuned as we work our way through our list.

Do you have any Christmas Traditions that our family does every year? Share them with me!