Secret Santa

This is Secret Santa Week at work.  Last week, we all filled out surveys to help our Santa out - filled with ideas of our favorite treats, office supplies, magazines, fast food, scents, etc.  We could be as silly or as serious as we wanted when filling these out (one coworker wanted to answer everything with "wine"), and then we drew from the surveys to figure out who we were the Secret Santa for.

I was SO excited about the person I drew!!  She and I have similar personalities, so when I decided to be snarky and sarcastic about her gifts, I knew she would appreciate it.  For example, one of the survey questions was to name something we need more of, and she answered "time," so for Day One, I gave her a kitchen timer.  Under the category of things she can't live without, she wrote "pasta," so on Day Four, she'll be getting four boxes of different shaped pasta.

Did I also mention that each present also has a thoughtfully written haiku attached to it?

Despite her writing such helpful things on her survey, there were also things that I had to be creative with to accommodate.  One of her favorite smells is Warm Vanilla Brown Sugar, which is a Bath & Body Works scent.  Now, I hate shopping under normal circumstances (I mean, really hate it), and I especially hate shopping during the holidays (thank God for Amazon!), so I had NO desire whatsoever to trek anywhere near a Bath & Body Works to get something with this smell.  Another of her favorite things is homemade sugar cookies with icing.  I love cookie cutters to look at, but I really don't like actually using them.  I prefer cookies that I can just scoop up and drop onto the baking sheet.  Again, I had NO desire to spend an evening cutting shapes out of cookies for a gift.

Because clearly being someone's Secret Santa is all about me (*insert massive eye roll here*), I decided to combine these her favorite smell and her favorite treat into one gift.  I did a little Pinterest searching, and the Brown Sugar Cookies came to be.

Being that it was the first time I'd made these cookies, I stuck to the recipe exactly.  Josh, my faithful guinea pig and taste-tester, really liked them.  The recipe's description of these being a combination of a sugar cookie and a snickerdoodle is spot-on.  They're super chewy and the sugars that they're rolled in just before baking got nice and crusty on the outside.  I really like the difference in texture between the cookie and the sugar.

The only thing I'm not a big fan of with these cookies is their name.  I feel like for such a fun cookie, they need a much better name than just Brown Sugar Cookies.  I'm now taking suggestions to rename them something more creative than that.

Three dozen of these puppies are now cooking on wire racks.  Soon, they'll be packed into a bag or a box to be delivered to my secret person tomorrow morning (by the way, Coworkers Who Might Be Reading This, I am not your Secret Santa, so this post isn't ruining the surprise...and I think you all know who my person is anyway).  In case you're curious, here's tomorrow's haiku, just for good measure:

Homemade cookies, yum!
Brown Sugar Snickerdoodles
You don't have to share.

Thanksgiving Dessert Edition

Ohhhhh-kay, so it's been nearly a week since Thanksgiving, but it's never too late to post about a holiday meal that involved cheesecake, right?

I love cheesecake.

So.  Much.

Inside tip: I love cheesecake so much that, when playing the game Apples-to-Apples, if the red cheesecake card is played, I will always pick that one over all others.

I also love coming up with new variations of cheesecake.  Well, maybe not so much "coming up with" as much as "thinking of something yummy and then finding a recipe online."  Someday, I'll come up with something that hasn't been thought of already, but for now, there's always something online.

Thanksgiving seems like as good a time as any to make new cheesecake.  I've experimented with new recipes two years in a row now, and my toughest critic (my dad) has had good comments both times (which is astonishingly high praise).

This year, the recipe experiment was White Chocolate-Cranberry Cheesecake.

Oh yes, you read that right.

Not only was this delicious, but it was SO pretty (it helps that it was sitting on a pretty plate supplied by my mom)!

First of all, let's talk about that chocolate crust.  I used Nabisco chocolate wafer cookies (after a debate with myself in the grocery store about how horrible it would be to toss the chocolate animal-shaped graham crackers into my food processor before I actually found the plain chocolate wafers...seriously, I have issues), and it was fabulous.  With the bits of shaved chocolate blended in with the cookies - yum.  I've saved this recipe for future use if for no other reason than to remember the crust.

The cheesecake itself was really good, too.  I omitted the dried cranberries and amaretto liquor, but added in a generous spoonful of vanilla extract (homemade, by the way...insert pat on the back here).  I was hesitant about the semi-sweet chocolate mixed in, thinking that it should've been more white chocolate but you know what?  I was wrong.  Those little chocolate bits were great!  Baking it at the time specified in the recipe yielded a cheesecake that wasn't set quite as much as I'd have liked, so next time, I'll keep it in the oven for at least five more minutes.

Last was the topping.  I did exactly as the recipe said, except the raspberry jam wasn't seedless (it was, however, also homemade!), but it was all terrific.  It seeped into the cheesecake itself, and looked so great dripping down along the sides of the entire cake.

All in all, this cheesecake was a hit!  Honestly, I'm not usually a super huge fan of fresh cranberries, however the combination of cranberries with raspberry jam was spot-on.  This recipe is definitely a keeper.

Thanksgiving marks the start of the holiday cooking and baking season, which is always exciting.  Stay tuned for upcoming holiday treat posts!  

And I hope your Thanksgiving was as delicious as mine!