I got going with the holiday treat-making today. I started with the work-gifts for James to hand out. Halfway through I remembered that his whole department is part of a company-wide body fat losing contest until March. Well, their wives and kids can eat the cookies. Maybe I'll send a bag of baby carrots along with the treats...
I got some homemade hot chocolate mix last year and thought I'd be adventurous and give it a try this year. I found a recipe off allrecipes.com, but altered it enough that it will just be easier to write the version I used here:
Dana's Re-Vamped Amaretto Hot Chocolate Mix O' Steamy Goodness
*6 1/2 cups powdered milk (or maybe Morning Moo's Low Fat Dry Milk Alternative if that is what you bought on sale at Macey's food storage sale this year... it claims to have delicious milk flavor...)
*1 (5 oz.) package non-instant chocolate pudding mix
*1 1/2 cups -or a bit more- Great Value brand chocolate milk mix (I'm sorry but that is the only brand that will work. If you try anything else your hot chocolate will all be ruined. Ruined I tell you! Okay, maybe not, I've never tried...)
*1/2 cup powdered amaretto creamer (what? You want another flavor? Fine. Be that way.)
*1 or maybe 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
*3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder.
Mix it all up in a big bowl with a whisk. Maybe break up the cocoa powder lumps with a fork before you add it. To make the hot chocolate add 1/3 c. mix to 1 cup really hot water. If the water isn't boiling or close, it may taste powdery. I warned you, so now you have no-one but yourself to blame if that happens. If everything goes right, you'll have a nice cup of creamy, thick, amaretto-y hot chocolate. Mmmmmm. It almost makes me not hate the snow. Almost.
I filled 5 big wide-mouth mason jars (are those quart-sized jars maybe?) just over halfway with the hot chocolate mix.
Then I made these cookies. The only change I made was to add about 1 1/2 T. of the amaretto creamer to the dough right after I added the vanilla. I was getting a little carried away with the amaretto goodness. These cookies are my favorite, but they make over 100 cookies, so I don't bust the recipe out too often. Somehow it never occurs to me to half the recipe...
After the cookies cooled I added a layer of plastic wrap over the hot chocolate mix in the jars, and then jammed the rest of the jar full of cookies.
Then we ate a ton of the leftover cookies so we could close the lid on our cookie jar:
In-between baking one million batches of cookies, I made labels and glued them to the jar-lids:
Here are the tagged and ready final products:
I started out with the intention of writing "From: James and those needy people who call him all day", but changed my mind after I had already written "From: James and those..." so I ended with "...other Haymore folks" instead. As I get older, something odd is happening. I am getting inhibitions and possibly small helpings of tact. I know, it frightens me, too. I changed my mind because I thought it might not be a good plan to bring the attention of James' boss to the fact that I call him once... or twice... or so a day while he is at work. See? Thinking ahead. What the heck? What is happening to me? Before you know it I'll be too hesitant to write "flamingo stylist" under "occupation" on forms or to sing to the Spice Girls with my car windows rolled down. Getting older sucks a little!
On another subject, I've noticed that the more past midnight it is, the more commas, (parentheses), -dashes, and... dot dot dots I use while posting. It gets annoying, I know, but that's just how it is!
1 comment:
Hey, we are kitchen twinners! I've been making cocoa mix for Taylor's preschool teachers & B's work colleagues too! Hee hee... maybe we need to join forces and spread chocolate bliss through out the neighborhood! :)
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