Christmas '17 Whereabouts

Before anything else let me just greet everyone a happy hohoho! I had a great Christmas because I got to spend it with the whole fambam. We  had dinner at around 8:00PM but stayed up until midnight to open presents then slept afterwards because of food coma lol. Prepping for Christmas dinner (Noche Buena) was a lot of work, from the table setting down to cooking but it was all worth it, 'tis the season to be merry e? 

Festive diy Noche Buena table
setting.

We had a little exchange gift thingy to cap off Christmas eve and we were all happy with what we got. As for myself, I received a kawaii notebook along with a pack of plastic containers for my baking supplies plus a cute cat mug I've been yearning to have from my sissies. But, what made me really ecstatic was how festive our dinner table and little buffet corner turned out. I made those little red Christmas tree food picks of each and every item on the menu just to give our buffet corner that Christmassy feel. I also printed out a menu card I placed on a photo clip holder to detail every food item just for kicks and it turned out pretty cool as well like a real buffet corner. I just love organizing and making things not just functional but aesthetically pleasing and quirky at the same time. My niece loved the whole ensemble and of course the food. We did not have that over the top quantity of food for Noche Buena because aside from that’s gluttony, we’re not big eaters anyways and it’s just the six of us so it was really a dinner set up for a small family. Staying up until midnight was quite a challenge though but for the spirit of Christmas, we endured sleepiness through hours of movie marathon! Trust me, I think we got all Christmas movies covered. Check out the video below for our DIY Christmas dinner table setting.👇🏼

What's bakin'?

A day before Christmas...

These sleepers are oh so

cute and comfy! Waiting for

midnight to open our prezzies.

My biggest present though was from my Dad because he bought a brand new electric oven a day before Christmas yay! Not that I asked for it, I never wanted one actually since I'm all set making my skillet cookies. Speaking of which, making skillet cookies was fun although extremely exhausting because you cannot leave them on the pan for too long or you’ll burn them as opposed to ovens, it’s timed so the risk of burning baked food is very minimal and is mostly human error because this rarely happens if you follow the recipe religiously. It was quite a challenge for me though as far as baking time and cookie recipes are concerned because the recipes I rummaged online are meant for skillet cooking and not oven baking so I had to recast the cooking time, temperature and everything else because I was looking at a very big picture skillet cookie recipes won’t work with electric ovens just to find myself wrong. After wasting tons of baking supplies, I realized one very important thing,  reducing the oven temperature by many degrees depending on the cookie recipe worked wonders and solved my baking dilemma, another eureka moment for me.

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas 🎶

My best sellers: Matcha & Red Velvet 
holiday cookies.

I hated ovens because the La Germania gas range & oven my family had when I was in high school (ages ago) almost burnt majority of my eyebrows after I lit it with a candle for a stupid reason (that’s how old ovens work before), I turned the propane tank cylinder too high not wary about the might’ve been, yeah I was kid who just wanted to bake an orange chiffon cake lol. My eyebrows grew back of course although I came into a realizaton baking isn’t for me aside from the cost of baking supplies could already get you a decent box of cake. Anyways, about two years ago I rekindled my interest with baking out of boredom and thought what other creative ways to cook a batter of pancake. I started experimenting with crushed Oreo cookies, flour and whatevs in my attempt to come up with cookies n’ cream anything and it turned out into something pretty good, I made a cookies n’ cream rice cake from scratch! However, the move to our new house dissipated my interest in making no bake stuff again because I got sidetracked with DIY home decor projects in my resolve to beautify our new house. I focused on interior decorating for another year until boredom hits me again and to make this long story short, I decided to make cookies without the need to use an oven because I find the whole pre-baking process too tedious and ingredient measurement too technical aside from we no longer have an oven since the one we had before turned too old and rusty and collected dusts ’til it was no longer useful. Anyways, I’m now friends with the new electric oven because it has made my life a whole lot easier since It has cut down my working hours plus it helps a ton as far as my cookie biz is concerned. 

Curiosity can kill a cat...and

stubbornness. He was so 

famished and exhausted when

 he got home. Bad kitty.

Holiday season feels... 

I love my cat mug. And oh excuse

 Dielle the photo bomber doggie. 😆

Christmas Morning.
On the other hand, my sisters and I were worried sick a day before  Christmas because our cat sneaked outside (our Dad let him out actually) and failed to come home until Christmas morning. It was a first since he's technically an indoor cat and we seldom let him out unless he sneaks out so I spent almost the whole 24 hours worrying where he went and what happened to him until one of my sibs went out in the neighbourhood to walk one of our dogs and there she heard a cat crying somewhere and couldn't decipher where it's coming from but most likely it's our cat. I wandered into the backyard and heard a cat's wail about few meters yonder and that's when I decided to tag one of our dogs along to head me to right direction and there I found our cat trapped inside a neighbour's backyard surrounded by tall walls (and I mean 20-30 feet) and it's an abandoned house so no one is there to let the cat out unless he leaps 20 feet high. To sum it up, the rescue was a success when one of my Dad's friends scared off the cat, he jumped off and let himself out on his own unharmed, geez. And that's the reason why I never let the cat out because he's been into a lot of trouble. It's quite a challenge keeping him indoors because he used to be a stray cat we fortunately found but that's an entirely different story.

Moving on, I spearheaded we have another exchange gift come New Year’s Eve just for kicks again and also to keep us awake in welcoming the new year. But, this time around we must stick with the Php50-200 gift budget per head since it’s a last minute thing lol. And again, we’ll do the buffet scheme this coming NYE because Noche Buena turned out pretty well so why not do it again for Media Noche? As an end not, less is always more and I mean less food is more because this season is note just all about food and gifts, it’s all about togetherness. What best way to spend the holiday season than with the fambam yeah?