Deck the halls with boughs of HOLLY

I would like to say I haven’t been blogging because I have been soaking up the holiday atmosphere and relaxing … but that’s not quite true.  While I have been enjoying lots of little Christmas-y moments with my family, I’ve also still been busy making lots of gifts, and work has been crazy. We put up our tree last weekend, and I decided to hang this felt ornament I made for Parker right next to a ceramic ornament my mom painted for me when I was 4 years old. Traditions!

The new ornament is from a pattern in “Fa La La La Felt,” which has so many cute projects.

And though I’m happy to leave the food blogging to my husband, I wanted to share this yummy recipe from Cook’s Country magazine. Basically, you melt chocolate in heavy cream and refrigerate it to create a ganache. Then you roll the ganache into balls, wrap them individually in plastic and then freeze. When you want a cup of hot chocolate, just unwrap one of the balls and plop it into a cup of milk, and microwave for 2 minutes. The result is a very rich hot chocolate, in the same time it would take to make it from a powdered mix. I experimented with tossing the balls in powdered sugar before freezing. I found that the sugar tended to get a bit absorbed into the balls. There’s a similar version posted at My Kitchen Cafe, though I just heated the cream in a sauce pan, turned the heat off, dumped the chocolate in and let it sit for a few minutes to melt it.

(Yes, our tree is directly behind one of our kitchen counters. Our living room has five doorways and a closet door, so there really is no good space for a tree. So the tree is basically in our kitchen.)