Countdown2Xmas, Day 21 Recap!

Are you ready? Still have presents to wrap? Need gifts to make? Decorations? This post can help with all of that...keep reading!

Adventures of Goldilox brings us this adorable wooden bunting tutorial! 

Faith N' Coffee  brings us a great Christmas Cocoa recipe and tells us of her wonderful family tradition of writing letters to Santa.

Tucson Health Project has created this adorable Christmas Eve box! Go check it out, I may have to put a quick one together! :)

That is it for today! We have 3 more days until the big day...what are you doing to get ready?!

Melted Snowman Cookies!

Our kitchen isn't huge, but it is nice. I love it, it is all glass so it is easy to clean. We have a fantstic stove top and a cute little combi-oven. The oven is just big enough to bake some cookies or a small cake! So, we baked our second batch of cookies in it just last week! Our first batch were these adorable surfing cookies. But, that isn't important right now. What is are these cute Melted Snowman Cookies!

I saw this on pinterest a while back and knew these were too simple not to put in the rotation! I did it pretty much the same way they did over at Somewhat Simple only I used this sugar cookie recipe, from allrecipes.

The sugar cookie recipe from all recipes is delicious and freezes really, really well. I know from experience.

Anyway, here is how we did ours!

Roll the dough into about a golf ball size, 

squish it down in between your palms, and bake according to recipe directions. 

While they are baking mix together this "very scientific" recipe for frosting:

("very scientific" is code for I discovered this once when I was 20 and made cookies the first time, it isn't a science and I usually just dump powdered sugar and milk until it is at a good consistency. This does harden though so it is perfect if you need to stack cookies)

1 cup powdered sugar to 1 Tablespoon milk. Feel free to add to and take away ingredients as you see fit.

We then dipped each marshmallow in the frosting and decorated them with little candy coated chocolate sprinkles!

Watch them because the frosting takes a minute to harden so the face can "spread" so make sure you pay attention and don't let the eyes wander off ;)

Once the cookies were out of the oven and cooled we drizzled the frosting over the cookies until it looked like a puddle. We then put the marshmallow on top and added more candy sprinkles for buttons!

We honestly forgot about adding arms, but thought they were cute enough without them. Next time we will add the arms.

I think these are one of my favorite Christmas cookies: cute and simple! What is your favorite Christmas cookie?

Culture Shock: Week 4: Doritos, Backpacks, and Internet Banking, Oh My!

 Wow! It's been so long since I've done one of these! We've actually been in Europe 8 weeks now! It has been such an amazing adventure. From learning how to write an address to learning all our favorite products at the grocery store. These last couple weeks we have encountered some humorous and interesting things.....

The day the teenager and I discovered the "cool american" doritos was quite a day. We were just walking along and realized wow! they do carry chips here then as we were looking for a flavor we recognized the laughing that ensued got us a few dirty looks in the aisle, but it was all in good fun...incase you don't know the are the "cool ranch" flavor ;)

What do you mean Doritos don't need an "artsy" photo...of course they do! ;)

This was a fun one to discover. About two weeks ago we started seeing a ton of backpacks hanging from flagpoles. We couldn't figure out what it was. Well, the kiddo cheers with a bunch of older kids who were posting picture of them under their backpacks hanging from the flagpole and apparently it is a Dutch tradition to sling your bag over the flagpole to say "Yay! I'm all done, I don't need a school bag anymore". Pretty neat tradition huh?!

Finally...internet banking! This was a super interesting thing to learn. When we were first given the machine we didn't really understand what to do with it. But, basically you download the software to it, then when you go to log into your bank account on your banks website you plug this in, put your debit card in, enter your pin, press ok, and then you are in your account! You use this when transferring money between accounts, for bill payment, and when making an online purchase with a website that accepts debit as some European & Canadian sites do! Pretty neat huh? It makes the banking super secure. Although I will admit trying to get it to work at first was super frustrating because the day we did it apparently the English part of the site was experiencing technical difficulties and we couldn't understand anything! haha

So, that wraps us up for this week. My favorite is still the "Cool American" Doritos! I still giggle at that!