holiday spirit | heart & sole

Last weekend my Mom made a trip down to visit for a girl’s weekend. We kicked things off with a Christmas cookie baking day. Thanks to my Dad for FedEx-ing a package full of all the ingredients we’d need we were good to go! We put on the Christmas music station on Pandora and made dozens of peanut butter blossoms, chocolate peanut butter balls and attempted some snickers peanut butter bars.

National Christmas Tree

The cookies were mostly a success. The snickers peanut butter bars came from a recipe I found on a blog I follow, and it seemed like there might have been a liquid ingredient missing from the recipe. There was nothing really holding them together, so they didn’t make the cut and ended up in the trash. The others were delicious however, so I stuck most of them in my freezer to keep me from eating them all at once! We also took advantage of the leftover chocolate to make a bunch of chocolate covered pretzels. Check out the recipes below.

On Saturday night, we enjoyed the unseasonably warm weather and went into D.C. to check out the National Christmas tree. Somehow in my six years here I’ve never done this. It was of course, very crowded, but also very fun. We took a quick spin through to check out a couple of the state trees and then got up close to see the main tree and all the train sets around it. They really do a great job with it, and it’s a fun holiday thing to do. We capped off the night at one of my favorite D.C. restaurants right around the corner from the White House – Old Ebbitt Grill. It was a great weekend and a fun way to get into the Holiday spirit. Only 8 days till Christmas!

Peanut Butter Blossoms:
½ cup veg oil
½ cup peanut butter
½ cup sugar
½ cup brown sugar
1 egg
2 tbs milk
1 tsp vanilla
1 ¾ cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt

Shape into balls and roll in sugar. Bake on cookie sheet at 350 for 8 minutes. Put in hershey kiss and bake another 2-5 minutes (unless you use peanut butter cups – they melt much faster!!).