We had rehearsal this morning, for the cantata, so I woke up early enough beforehand to get a load of laundry through the wash, and make a Pumpkin Apple Gingerbread cake for breakfast. I woke Richard in time for him to make coffee (have I mentioned lately how much we love the new coffee maker?) and we ate breakfast with just enough time to do it leisurely before we had to head off to the church to sing. The cake, by the way, is tasty, but tastes nothing at all like gingerbread, and was time consuming enough that I am not sure if I will bother making it again, but it somehow seemed appropriate to the season, and with the apples and the pumpkin, one small slice is *extremely* filling.

After rehearsal we came back home and I spent some time on my knitting. Eventually Richard headed off to Borders to do a little bit of writing, so I zipped off to the grocery store to pick up flour and chocolate chips and sweetened condensed milk and butter, and then came home and did a little Christmas baking. I made a batch of Russian Teacakes (they have a lot of other different names, but basically they involve a little flour, a lot of butter, and some crushed walnuts, and when they are cooled they are rolled in powdered sugar and they are like a little explosion of sweet buttery joy in your mouth when you eat them). While the dough for those was chilling, I stirred up some Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge, which is basically chocolate chips and sweetened condensed milk and butter and just enough peanut butter to add a rich flavor, all melted together and poured in a pan to cool, and by the time Richard came back home, I was stirring up the dough for spritz cookies. We are all out of green food coloring, so instead of trying to mix up my own green, I decided to just make them all blue. Except I added a bit more blue color than I'd anticipated, and they turned out very, very blue - sort of the color blue you might expect if you made cookies out of a Smurf.

We watched an old Wallace and Grommit cartoon during dinner, and then I rolled out the teacakes and put them in the oven to bake, and my timing could not have been better, because all the cookies were just cool enough to store in tins by the time my parents came to pick us up.

My parents have been looking for a local production of Ahmal and the Night Visitors for some time now, so when they finally found one - in Sacramento - they invited us to go along. This particular production was quite well done, for being performed by amateurs, and was especially fun because the actual acting during the performance was 'done' by puppets.

Tis the season for Holidailies