Amy Scott's Thoughts

It’s a been a drippy couple of days here in western Washington. Days like these are perfect for baking projects and with Thanksgiving coming up, I figured I would start some new baking adventures. I attend an annual event called Taste of the Holidays at my church. It’s a fun tasting of holiday goodies. They send me home with the recipes every year and I’ve never made a single thing out of the books. After this year’s TOTH, I decided I was finally going to make something out from these recipe books that I’ve stored for so long.

Of course, this is me, so I had to pick desserts! That is my favorite part of any meal! I went back through the books and picked three recipes that I remember liking a lot. I set to baking yesterday when I got home from work and finished up this afternoon. My first project was called Hello Dollies. They have graham cracker crust with chocolate (I used both milk chocolate and white chocolate), coconut, condensed milk and pecans. The second project I started was pumpkin bars with cream cheese frosting. I will admit that I just used store bought frosting. I figured with all the baking I had planned, it would be nice to have one step completed for me. The third project was raspberry ribbons. I think these were the hardest of all. It’s a cookie was raspberry jam down the middle and a glaze drizzled on top. There were more steps to this recipe and I don’t think I got the exact balance of jam to cookie down.

Because I plan I sharing these goodies with family tomorrow I couldn’t dig right in and chow down. However, I’ve never made these recipes before so I did do a little taste testing… I needed to know what I was serving! Overall,  I think these treats were tasty and I look forward to sharing them with others. Every year when I attend TOTH, I get a little overwhelmed by how awesome all the food is. I guess I always figured that I would never be able to do as good as a job as the chefs so why try… I’ve decided that is a dumb attitude to have! So what if I’m not the best – these turned out great and I am very happy with them! That is all that matters! It’s not a contest!