I must have been really good this year

I have to say my 4-day Christmas Vacation was pretty awesome.

Not only did I get one of these:

But I also got one of these:


The low-light of the weekend was almost sending myself to the ER and burning a hole through the arm of my bath robe. You see I was baking apple cranberry crumble pies and when I went to take them out of the oven I misjudged how close my arm was to the heating element on the top of the oven. Lucky for me the bath robe protected my arm. Unfortunately the bath robe now has a huge burn hole in the sleeve. Lucky for me my friends here in Alexandria gave me a new bath robe for Christmas.

The highlight of the weekend was using the stand mixer. I couldn't wait to get it out of the box which meant that M benefited from ultimate chocolate chip cookies and homemade white bread this weekend. As he says, it was an instant return-on-investment. I'm looking forward to making bagel dough in the mixer as it is a little tedious by hand and also trying out foccacia bread. Ever since college I have wanted to make that at home.