With Christmas fast approaching and the cooler temperatures of "winter" (25 C), it's time to bake Christmas cookies. My housemate and I invited our colleagues, friends and host families to join us for an afternoon of baking Christmas cookies. For most of our Lao friends, it was the first time they had baked cookies. Ovens are still very rare in households in the Capital.
We collected the recipes for family favourites and successfully found all the ingredients needed at the mini mart that caters to the purchasing interests and pocket books of foreigners.
The four recipes we selected included:
Christmas Sugar Cookies
No Bake Chocolate Cookies also known as "Frogs" or "Haystacks"
Peanut Butter Balls
Butter Riches
As we set to work measuring and mixing and occasionally spilling a few grains of sugar here and there, the ants too appeared. When it came time to roll out the dough, it became a challenge to avoid rolling ants into the dough. "Ah!!! But what are a few little ants??" They were just picked out and the process continued.
With the wonderful aroma of baking cookies, the sweet taste of cookies warm from the oven, a glass of milk and good conversation with friends around the kitchen table, it was a wonderful pre-Christmas Saturday afternoon in December.
So later in the evening when I discovered ants had invaded the sugar cookie container, that I thought was ant proof, I simply shook them off and chased them away. There was no way ants were going to win out and dampen my Christmas spirit!! Perhaps they would have last year, but not this year.
1 comment:
what are a little bit of ants in a cookie? ha ha. I remember when living in the Philippines, how it became automatic to just slap at my little "itchy spots" during eating, as I learned to assume they were ants, not just itchy spots! I am so glad your visit to the communitiy was re-energizing and invigorating :)
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