Activity #1...SUCCESS!

In my last post, I posted about 25 Days of Blessing Your Husband. This consists of 25 envelopes, 17 of which are filled with thanks/gratitude/appreciation, 4 are filled with services and 4 are filled with activities for the hubby and I to do. We FINALLY got to do our first activity on Day 4, and what a blast it was!

Chris' envelope on Day 4 read: Prepare to become messy, but the end result will be tasty". Any ideas what we did for our activity?

A night of baking! We baked all sorts of Christmas goodies and even learned how to bake one that neither of us had baked before! I had Chris tell me last month what his favorite Christmas time goodies were. His answer, snicker doodles and peanut brittle. So, naturally, those two were on our "To Make" list. As well as we also added sugar cookies and peppermint bark!

The recipes I found from:
snicker doodles
Peanut Brittle
Sugar Cookies and Peppermint Bark I found from the free eBook offered on goodmorninggirls.org. The eBook is called: Advent Study: Keeping Our Hearts Focused on Jesus. *On a side note, anyone looking for an Advent study to do during these holiday times, I have really enjoyed this one so far!*

We first, went and saw our brand new baby Niece  Paige (CONGRATS Jessica and Jeremy!) and also visited with the now older sister (our other 3 year old niece), Emmy. After this fun early afternoon, we were lucky enough to see our only other niece Maddy (wow does God bless us!) and took her for a fun time at the grocery store! We had fun buying all of the ingredients for our Christmastime goodies! Then headed home to start cooking!

Maddy assisted Chris and I with our first goody... snicker doodles! We turned on the Christmas music in the kitchen and sipped on our peppermint hot chocolate from Dutch Bros. *On another side note, those who have not had the peppermint hot chocolate from Dutch Bros, it is a must during this holiday season.* We soon had a system of me rolling the dough balls, Maddy placing them in sugar, and Chris placing them on the pan. Only one ball of sugar managed to find its way to the floor but otherwise our cooking experience with children went well! Here's the end result:

Sadly, Maddy left after this, but that did not stop the cooking fun! Next up, peanut brittle! Now, Chris and I had never cooked peanut brittle before, not to mention we had no idea how long it takes. As a result, we now have learned a new skill of becoming peanut brittle masters, as well as we also now know if we cook it, it takes about two hours. Yet, it was two hours of tons of fun! We got to see our peanut brittle go from this:

To this:

(Chris was very happy with the outcome, if you cannot tell from his thumb)!

While waiting on our peanut brittle to cook, we made the peppermint bark as well. This is one of my all time favorite Christmas time treats as well as it is so simple! Nothing says easier to make than peppermint bark!

Unfortunately, the sugar cookie dough had to wait, since the dough had to refrigerate 2 hours. We have yet to get to it, but believe that it is on our list!!!

Of course, no baking experience would be complete without the cinnamon challenge. Chris and capitalized on the Buy 2 Get 1 Free on spices at Safeway. We ended up with two big jars of ground cinnamon so Chris put it to good use. 

Merry Christmas everyone! Hope everyone is having a great month and keeping Jesus in mind has His birthday approaches!