Growing up, the baking and decorating loads and loads of Christmas cookies was one of those things that was a very big part of celebrating the holidays in my family. These days, it's not much different, although I think in the last few years, I've mellowed a little bit and stopped making eleventy-zillion different varieties of cookies. Last year I think I made 9, and this year I've whittled it down even further to just 7: wagon wheels, peanut butter balls, snowballs, sugar cookie cut-outs, festive fudge cookies, salted caramel brownie cookies, and muddy buddies. I always like to give a little something homemade to teachers and neighbors and such, and while I feel like this holiday season has been a lot busier than the last few, I couldn't pass up doing some holiday baking over the weekend.


Before I started sewing, baking was my hobby of choice. My mother taught me to bake as a little girl, and it's something I've always enjoyed - in large part due to the yumminess that baking yields! I've baked less and less over the last few years, especially this past year as I've been working on eating healthier and losing weight. Christmas baking is different, though, and I don't see myself ever giving that up. On the bright side, I've noticed that I've eaten far fewer cookies thus far than in years past, so I guess I've learned something this year in my quest for healthier eating!

I wanted to share the easiest holiday cookie recipe that I make - something I call Festive Fudge Cookies. I've made them since the kiddo was a teeny tiny baby, and they're insanely easy to put together. I've made several different varieties, some with Andes mints in the center, some with plain Hershey kisses in the center (for chocolate lovers like me), some with Hugs in the center, and some with the candy cane Hugs. They all taste wonderful, but the Hugs make them look awfully cute, and when you're giving holiday cookies, I like to think you get bonus points for cuteness, so I like to use them.

Festive Fudge Cookies
makes about 60-80 cookies

1/3 cup butter
6 oz unsweetened chocolate squares
1 14 oz can of sweetened condensed milk
1 pouch/box sugar cookie mix, 17.5 oz
60-80 Hugs, kisses, or mix, unwrapped

1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Melt chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl in the microwave, for about one minute, and stir until smooth.
2. Stir in condensed milk. Stir in the cookie mix. This will take some effort, as the dough will get quite thick. Use a wooden spoon or firm spoonula for this step.
3. Shape and roll dough into 1/2" balls. Place on a cookie step about 1" apart. The cookies do not spread much while baking.
4. Bake for 6 minutes. When you take the cookies out of the oven, immediately press 1 candy into the center of each cookie. Let the cookies sit on the hot cookie sheet for about 3 minutes, then gently push the candy down, to spread the candy across the top of the cookie. Wait another 3 minutes, then squish the top of the candy to flatten the candy.
5. Let cookies cool thoroughly before storing. I like to place mine on an unused cookie sheet and pale it in the fridge for 30 minutes to an hour before storing, to solidify the candy.

Note: I usually make a lot of cookie dough in advance this time of year, freezing it until I'm ready to make the cookies. I don't recommend that with this recipe, it takes a crazy amount of time to thaw and is positively unusable while frozen.

Happy Wednesday to you all! Have a great day :)

Last Thursday morning, I got the call I'd been waiting two weeks for - my Juki was ready to come home from the repair shop! Yay!! I hustled over to the shop in loads of holiday shopping traffic, not even minding the traffic a bit for once, knowing that I was on a very important errand.

I brought her home, promptly set her back up in her table, and then set about to hunt through my photo collection to try to figure out where I went wrong with her. My Juki went to the shop right before Thanksgiving after I finished up a deadline project where I felt like I had to fight for every inch I finished of the project. I knew something was wrong, but I also knew I had a deadline I had to meet, so I tried to put on my best Tim Gunn to just make it work. I assumed I had a timing issue or maybe something had been knocked loose somewhere because it seemed awfully noisy. Don't get me wrong, this is a semi-industrial machine and it's pretty noisy on a good day, but something sounded different. And I was right - the needle plate was pretty badly damaged - dented and dinged as if the needle had been hitting it over and over.

The damage is at the needle hole itself - you can see that portion of the plate is dented and the hole has clearly been struck many times! Yikes! The repairman added the red nail polish (NOT blood!) to draw my attention to where the damage was.

As soon as they told me that, I started to wonder if this was something I did to my poor machine or if perhaps I didn't notice that kind of damage when I bought it secondhand. When I first bought it, I fully intended to bring it in for service, just to give a good once-over before I put it to use, but I couldn't help myself - I started using it, and then I couldn't stop!

Brand new needle plate all ready to sew with!

So, after hunting through my photos to see if perhaps I had a photo that showed me what the needle plate looked like when I first bought it, and finding photos where that needle hole is just out of focus, I've decided I needed to stop worrying about who caused the problem. What I do need to do is pay attention. If something sounds wrong, stop sewing. Take it in for service if I can't discern the problem on my own. Thankfully, I seem to have found a good repair shop, they were a pleasure to work with, but I'm hoping I won't have to see them again until it's time for a little yearly service.

Now that the Juki is back, I've got a laundry list of projects, from Christmas presents to class samples and other deadlines that I've got to get cracking on. And I'm just three squares away from finishing my Christmas cross-stitch project, so I'm hoping that there will be some finishes, or at least some fun progress, to share over the next few weeks! Happy Monday to you all!

My Juki has an official diagnosis from the repair shop - it has a badly damaged needle plate. I'm thinking this may have always been the issue since I bought it second-hand and it's always sounded a bit noisy, but it's hard to know for sure. Naturally, the needle plate isn't a part they typically stock, so it's going to be a little while yet before my machine comes home :( I've been sorting and folding fabric instead of sewing with it, and cross-stitching my little heart out, and I'm starting to see the light at end of the sampler tunnel!

My Kawaii Christmas cross-stitch sampler is coming together nicely while I'm without my machine, although if you compare my stitches with the chart, there's definitely some blips where I've made mistakes. For example, that red present with the cream box on number 13 was supposed to be a blue polka dotted present, but my inability to follow a pattern reared its ugly head there and it turned into a red present. But I'm not too worried about those little "design choices" - they give it character, right? Ha!

I've found a new method of stitching that's been working pretty well for me. When I have some quiet stitching time to myself, I follow the chart and stitch half of my X's, then when I'm stitching while watching TV or multi-tasking in some other way, I finish off those X's so I don't have to pay attention to the chart then. It's working out pretty nicely for me.

At this rate, I feel sure that I'm going to wrap up this sampler before Christmas. Yay! But then I'll have to start another hand stitching project, and I happened to pick up the perfect one during the Black Friday sales from Pink Chalk Fabrics...the new Studio Stitches pattern from Empty Bobbin. I am SO excited to embroider one of those adorable sewing machines!

Have a great day :)