Christmas Break Recap: Amazing Chocolate Cake and Snowman Sugar Cookies

For the past three weeks I have been visiting home. I grew up in a winter wonderland:

Welcome to the new year! If you are like me, you are probably thinking back on all the treats you ate during the holidays and thinking of ways to eat better this year. I usually eat pretty healthy in my own home, but when I visit my childhood home something happens and I become like a little kid again and start hoarding candies in my pockets and squirting whipped cream on everything. I put whipped cream on my cold cereal one too many times. Its actually pretty amazing. Especially on Cocoa Krispies. Oh, and its even better with a scoop of vanilla ice cream right in the cereal bowl.

My little Stella was fan of the Christmas food, too!

I have lots of ideas of really healthy and really yummy dishes for the new year, but I’m going to hang on to the holidays for one last post. Now, I don’t have new recipe for you today, but I just wanted to share with you some of the yummy things I made while I was on vacation.

Snow Day Snowman Cookies:

My sister and I spent a day making these sugar cookies and decorating them with royal icing. I’m not going to go into too much detail on how I made them, (To see a full tutorial on making sugar cookies and decorating with royal icing, CLICK HERE.) but I’ll give you a brief over view of how I made these.

1. On a circle sugar cookie, use thick royal icing to outline the hat with any color you like and white for the remaining portion of the cookie.

2. Use flooding icing to fill the hat and face with their corresponding outline colors. Pop the bubbles and let them dry all the way.

3. Use the thick hat icing to pipe details onto the hat.

4. Use food grade markers (I use THESE Americolor markers. They are awesome!) to draw on the face and carrot nose. Use a red or pink marker to color a clean Q-tip. Dab it on a paper towel a couple of times so it is less saturated. Lightly rub on the little rosy cheeks. You could also use luster dust. I just didn’t have any with me on my trip.

5. After everything is dry, squirt a blob of thick icing on the top of the hat. Turn upside own in a plate of sprinkles to make the pom pom. Now, I didn’t have hardly any sprinkles with me, so I ended up just using different piping tips to make different pom poms with just the icing for some of the hats.

The Best Chocolate Layer Cake (Ever):

While on my trip, my little sister decided she wanted to make a chocolate layer cake for one of her friends who mentioned that she was craving chocolate cake. She did most of the work while I read her the ingredients and directions, but I did help a little. The cake was easy and it is the best chocolate cake from scratch that I have ever made.

I’m not going to post the recipe here because we followed it exactly from Add a Pinch, one of my favorite cooking blogs. You should really check it out next time you are making a chocolate cake. It’s my new go-to chocolate cake recipe. CLICK HERE FOR THE CAKE RECIPE. It does call for a little bit of espresso powder. I left it out and it still tasted fabulous!

My sister’s friend Cami LOVED it!

I also made a huge batch of really yummy vegetarian white taco soup while (that will be a post of its own), but I spent most of the time sampling my sister in-law Chelsea’s gourmet food. She made the most delicious Chocolate Tres Leches. How about that for decadent!

Hope you had a great Christmas and here’s to a happy, healthy new year!

By Edible Experiments