What I did this winter break

Here is the vibrant green hooded kaftan (Debbie Bliss, Special Knits) minus the embroidery that I managed to start and finish while in Miami for the holidays. It was nice to be at my grandma's with no particular itinerary and most of the morning to knit in peace and quiet. Of course, not having a car down there determined the pace. Miami is,well, unforgiving to those without their own means of transportation. I was ok with staying home to start a new project for Stella but poor Jason was starting to show signs of an animal in captivity after a few days, i.e. pacing back and forth in one spot. I'm still not sure if I even want to add the embroidery seeing that my sewing skills are not up to par with my knitting ones. We'll see, I guess I'll give it a try. Next I might give a try at the picot dress but in a different color. For those of you who have Ravelry I will post details on the pattern, yarn and so on. Just give me some time since apparently my blogging/internet pace is on snail mode lately.

So, besides knitting and relaxing, need I mention the enormous amounts of delicious Cuban food we had. Especially, my grandma's cooking. Oh, I paid for it in the end by being 3 pounds over my target weight.
The funniest thing while there was that because of the heat, it was in the mid 80's + humidity the whole of our vacation, I started to show major signs of edema in my hands, ankles, and nose. Funnier yet, is that it all went away as soon as I returned to the cold here in Philly. Believe me, edema does not help when you're already so self conscious of your body image.

The little bun in my oven has recently made me aware of how precious sleep is. For some reason I've had a real hard time staying asleep at night. Besides reading I've been taking advantage of this time to do some baking. I know it sounds crazy to be stooped over the oven at four or five in the morning but I imagine this is what they mean by baker's hours. I managed to make bagels from scratch on two separate occasions. Pictured here is my first attempt and it shows. I didn't knead the dough enough causing the final product to be far from a complete ring. The second time around was much better. They came out really crispy on the outside and nice and doughy on the inside. Now I just have to get better at making them smaller like the ones we had in Montreal. That dough is a little deceiving. Just when you think you've made them nice and small they blow up while poaching.
Besides bagels I also made a batch of cinnamon rolls from Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess and a batch of Christmas tree cookies (Martha of course) pictured below.

These cookies look intimidating at first but are really not that hard to make. I think the hardest part was to crush the candy to pieces -- Jason had fun figuring that one out. The other hard part was finding a cookie cutter shaped like a tree in the middle of Christmas season -- Jason did not have fun figuring that one out. I never would have thought that mixing cookies with candy would have been a good idea. I'm still not sure if I agree with the whole thing. I mean, they were way too sweat for my taste but a lot of people liked them. It was funny that they were so amazed that you could get a cookie to taste like a jolly rancher when in fact that was what they were made of. I guess you get lost in the effect to associate the center with this candy. I would say that in the end they look pretty and would make great ornaments but would not recommend for ingesting unless you have an unimaginable sweet tooth.