Holiday Goodies!

It is Monday and Tim and I are so happy that Christmas is this week. When Tim started working at R.C. Willey (back in September) we realized that we would not be able to visit either of our families for Christmas because R.C Willey doesn't believe in Christmas or visiting families. We came to terms with having our first Christmas with just each other and made plans with our good friends Kevin and Krystina (who were also planning on staying in Provo for Christmas) to celebrate Christmas together. This was the plan until K&K told us their parents surprised them with tickets to fly them out to California for Christmas. Tim and I felt bad for ourselves until we realized that Christmas was on a Friday!!! Tim doesn't work on Thursdays and gets off work at 6 on Wednesdays so we will leave Wednesday night, drive to Grandma Carol's house in St. George, then drive to Tim's parents house Thursday morning! It's so perfect, right? We have to leave late Christmas night to drive back to Grandma Carol's so that we can be back in time for Tim to work at 1 pm on Saturday.

When we thought we were going to celebrate Christmas with K&K, I decided I was going to make Christmas as wonderful as possible to distract myself from the lack of family. And to make things wonderful, I cook and eat! So I decided what could be more wonderful than precious Cornish hens?! I went out and bought Cornish hens and they are so cute and tiny! After the change of Christmas plans, we decided to have our special dinner last night (Sunday). I took Rachel Ray's advice and basted the little chickies with balsamic vinegar and orange juice. They were tasty and I wanted to take a picture of them but I forgot with all my other hostess duties! Dessert was Drama. I wanted to make an easy orange flavored angel food cake but by some horrible bad luck, Tim and I checked three grocery stores and couldn't find a single angel food cake mix. In the words of my dear friend Melissa, "Coincidence? I think so." I had already bought several oranges so I wanted to do some sort of orange dessert. I got on Foodnetwork.com and typed in orange chocolate cake and spotted the most glorious cake. I began reading the recipe and I for some awful reason the measurements were set for 150 servings! Holy Cow! I had to divide everything by 8. And it wasn't as simple as it sounds. The measurements were in pounds and ounces. I realized I am totally uneducated when it comes to converting cooking measurements. I spent the next hour on google typing in "cups in pounds", "ounces in cups", "teaspoons in tablespoons". Tim went to bed.

Tim helped me make the cake Sunday morning before church and it was quite a process. Here is a picture of the finished product. It doesn't look quite as glorious as the one on Food Network but I think they used fondant and they're chefs. The cake has two chocolate cake layers with an orange cake layer in the middle. In between the cake there are thin layers of chocolate ganache, and I iced it with an orange butter cream frosting yum. It was super rich!

Dinner was fun and Tim set up our new computer that I had been making him wait to open-it was suppose to be for Christmas! While he was working on that, I watched Iron Chef and dreamed of going to culinary school.