Sunrise on a Saturday

Who even knew there was such a thing!?!?

I have company this morning. My roommate from days of yore came down from Michigan to go see a play with me last night, and then she spent the night. So right now, in the butler's kitchen (I just love that), there is a breakfast casserole baking in the oven...and coffee brewing...and my poor kitchen probably has no idea what hit it. It never sees me at this hour on a Saturday.

This week has been absolutely exhausting and it's not done yet.

Wednesday was "develop the Christmas card picture" day. It turned into a bit of a fiasco when the photo lab did not make a note that I wanted my pictures on matte paper and they printed on glossy. But we got through that, and the pictures were stuffed into cards, which were subsequently mailed. Yesterday I received 10 of them back...forgot to put stamps on them. WOOPS. So if you're one of the people who gets some ugly red stamping UNDER the postage stamp - sorry!

Yesterday was baking day. I set out to make 10 recipes but had to cut one out in favor of assembling the soup for Angela's arrival last night - and cleaning the house. And I still didn't make it to bed until 2 in the morning that night!

Here was baking, round one. And yes, a couple of the recipes are forthcoming. This round included chocolate chip cookie cups stuffed with peanut butter cups. And of course, a couple of rounds of the peanut butter fudge.


Round two included pretzels with Hershey kisses and M&Ms stuffed in them, sourdough pretzel nuggets coated in a cinnamon sugar mixture, ranch oyster crackers (that recipe came from Kelly's Korner blog. She said we'd thank her if we tried it. THANK YOU, KELLY!!!), and a cocoa peanut butter fudge.

And the final round included two kinds of chocolate bark - one was white chocolate and one was milk chocolate. Both have M&Ms and pretzel bits in them. I also made peanut butter cookies with kisses inside, and better than caramel corn.

Baking is my gift to my office buddies - as well as to a few others - so here were the little bags all packed and ready to go. Everyone at work LOVED the bags. I got them (I know, tacky to tell, but love a deal, so here you go!) last year after Christmas on sale at WalGreens.

Here were the 4 designs. The snowman bag says "Season's Greetings," the reindeer bag says "Holly Jolly," the tree bag says, "Tis the Season," and the Santa bag says "Happy Holiday." CUTE!

Okay I really really have to go do my hair now if I want to eat breakfast on time!!