A Sugar Cookie Wonderland!

     The gifts have been opened, the food has been eaten, and now that none of us can move any longer I thought now would be a good time to sit down and write a Christmas update!
     As all of you (hopefully) know we recently moved to Colorado Springs.  Conveniently enough, my sister lives only five hours from Colorado Springs so we decided to pack up the kiddos and head over to Garden City, Kansas to celebrate Christmas with my sister and her wonderful (and adorable) family.  This year, mommy (me) definitely stepped it up a notch and I've got to admit that I am pretty proud of myself.  In the years since Elli was born Christmas has always been interesting as far as food goes.  The first year, she was only two months old, so there wasn't a lot of eating going on, but we celebrated her second Christmas just one month before she was finally diagnosed with food allergies.  At the time she had just been diagnosed with a juvenile vomiting disease called Cyclic vomiting Syndrome, and was vomiting about three to five times daily.  It turned out to be an incorrect diagnosis but that's what we were going on at the time.  We decided to go to a Christmas party that we had been invited to anyway because we figured that life must go on and she couldn't stay in the house until she outgrew the illness.  The party started off well and Elliana was happily being held by her uncle Josh...who was feeding her cheese.  As you can imagine, the party got real interesting real quick.  Needless to say we went home.  The next three years all went pretty much the same.  Elli usually ate the same meat as everyone else, her grandma Sharon would make her some potatoes without dairy in them (because she is awesome like that) and then she would have Rice Krispy Treats for dessert.  We did very little holiday baking.
     Finally, on her 6th Christmas (yes, I said 6th!) I finally got with it.  We have enjoyed eating all sorts of goodies from banana bread to candy to sugar cookies and more!  It has been a wonderful holiday season!  In the weeks before Christmas my sister and I began to talk about how Christmas would look with Elli in the house.  My sister is absolutely wonderful and was right on board with having everything be as Elli-friendly as possible.  She wanted to do chocolate fondue so we decided that, instead of doing two different bowls of chocolate (one dairy, one dairy-free) we would do just one (dairy-free).  We thought that if we did it that way she was less likely to accidentally eat the wrong chocolate, and frankly it tastes the same so why bother having both anyway?  We bought pretzel rods and marshmallows and I spent a few days before Christmas baking banana bread.  We had a full array of items to dip in the chocolate fondue and Elli was free to eat all of them!   We did have a couple of loaves of bread that were not egg-free, but they were separated from the rest and Elli had no trouble knowing which was which since we cubed hers and sliced the others.  We also had a non-traditional holiday meal - TACOS!  I thought this was actually really fun and as a plus, Elliana was able to eat many of the things that were put out in the taco bar.   I also made some safe sugar cookies to bring and on Christmas Eve we covered the table in foil and let the kids go wild...and boy did they!  We all had so much fun and I am pretty certain that my sister will be finding frosting all over her house for the next few weeks!

Me and my sister, Erin, during the cookie decorating extravaganza!

The sugar cookies were a particularly special event for me this year as it was the first time that Elli has ever had one - and they happen to be my favorite.  We have always used our graham cracker cookie recipe for decorating and they are wonderful, but as you all know, there just isn't anything like a sugar cookie at Christmas time!  I am so excited to do this with Elli next year again and many times in-between.  It has never been such a blessing to see her, Asher and their cousins, Blaire and Presleigh, decorating cookies the SAME cookies all together, getting frosting all over each other and making an overall mess of everything!

 

Feliz Navidad!

Allergies Suck!

"Allergies Suck, Mom."
This is a term a hear often from my five year old daughter.  "Suck" is not a word I usually let my kids use, but for some reason when she says it in that particular sentence I can't bring myself to say anything about it.  What am I supposed to say?  I try really hard to never invalidate her feelings by telling her that her allergies aren't a big deal.  They are.  But, I have learned that often times, I can prevent this feeling by simply being prepared for situations, such as birthday parties, family dinners, and even Sunday School classes.  After four years of practice these things are fairly easy to prepare for and we rarely have times where we are caught without food or that Elliana feels left out because her food is not as good.  Christmas, however, is a whole other story!
     Christmas is the time of year where people have food everywhere you go and around every corner someone is giving out chocolates, candies and cookies to all the cute little kids.  I used to LOVE this part of Christmas!  Now, this part of Christmas is just sad to me.  It doesn't scare me as much as it used to.  I am very vigilant about keeping an eye on what is being offered to Elli and likewise she is also becoming her own advocate and is amazingly good at asking about the ingredients of what is being offered and unfortunately, in most cases, politely turning it down.  It really doesn't seem to bother her very much anymore, but from a mother's perspective this scene is absolutely heartbreaking!  Christmas without nuts, eggs, and dairy often feels like an oxymoron to me.  They seem to be two things that cannot possibly exist in any sort of harmony.  How could you have Christmas without, Pecan Pie, Peanut Brittle, and all the "oh, so good" cookies that all require eggs and milk?  This could become a very depressing train of thought if one were to dwell on it.  Thankfully this year I finally feel like we overcame most of our typical Christmas obstacles thanks to  a lot of time and effort and the Divvies Bakery Cookbook!
     Lori Sandler and Divvies bakery is what first inspired me to start baking for Elli.  Oh, I was baking before, but it was under a totally different mindset.  I used to bake having essentially already given up.  I already knew that the food would not be as good as it's non-allergy friendly counterpart.  As a result, I didn't try very hard.  I got by, but nobody was lined up to try my concoctions.  Elli seemed to enjoy them overall, but she didn't feel like she was eating the same thing and, I think due to my attitude, she knew it was a sad imitation of the original.  Then, one day, I saw Lori Sandler and her son, Benjamin, on Martha Stewart and to my surprise they were making nut, dairy and egg free chocolate cupcakes and they looked delicious!  I felt a small twinge of hope and excitement and so, thanks to the recipe which they so kindly gave out on the show, I made my first batch of Divvies Chocolate Cupcakes!  They were delicious!  So delicious that I had to admit that I really could not tell them apart from a normal cupcake and, if anything, they were actually one of the better chocolate cupcakes I had eaten.  This experience really inspired me.  If it was possible with cupcakes, surly it was possible with other things right?  And so I began to really try and figure out how to make something that were nut, dairy and egg-free AND actually taste good.  What's even better is that Divvies released a bakery cookbook this year and that only served to inspire me more!
    So, bringing this back around to the idea of having Christmas and good food without all the allergens I started to think about what I could do to give Elli those traditional Christmas experiences....safely.  So, what screams Christmas to me more than anything else?  GINGERBREAD HOUSES!  That was my first Christmas goal of the year.  I already knew I could make the pieces thanks to a graham cracker cookie recipe that I have been using for a couple of years now, but royal icing without eggs?  I was more than a little concerned.  Royal icing is a very think and sticky icing that dries firm which is why it is used for gingerbread houses.  It also contains eggs and when you are not baking them eggs are very hard to replace!  I did manage to do it though!  It was not easy, but once I figured out a good combination of ingredients I actually made a frosting concoction that was so sticky there was no doubt in my mind that it would work.  Now, to be fair to traditional royal icing, my egg-free, dairy-free version would never work well on a cake.  It did not dry quite as hard and it was not very easy to pipe.  For gingerbread houses though, it worked like a dream!  For those of you who are curious the recipe is as follows (more or less)

cream of tarter
lemon juice
glycerine
vanilla
powdered sugar
soy milk and/or water

This bowl of very sticky frosting was the final product:

Are you seeing a problem with this "recipe?  As you may have noticed there are no measurements.  That's because I didn't measure.  I just added them all together until it go really sticky.  It was an experiment, what else can I say?

Now, as I said before, the graham cracker cookie part was easy.  Here is a link to the graham cracker cookie recipe I use.

Take note, that I obviously burned a couple of these but as I was not planning on actually eating them we used them on our gingerbread anyway.
    
Now came the moment of truth, would my egg-free royal icing actually work?

Thankfully my icing did work, which is a good thing since the kids were getting more than a little impatient to decorate.  Here are a few pictures of the rest of our gingerbread house making and decorating experience:

We all had a wonderful time making our family gingerbread house and it was so wonderful to see Elli having a "typical" Christmas experience.  This will definitely become a Christmas tradition for us.  Since this project we have made candy, banana bread and today we will be trying Lori Sandler's sugar cookie cut-out recipe, which we are very excited about!

I have been so blessed this year to have had the opportunity and resources to finally be able to do some new things to help my daughter feel included, food wise, in the Christmas celebrations.   She is such a wonderful girl and almost always has a very good attitude about having different food, but it is such a blessing to see her face when she realizes that we all get to eat a piece of banana bread together.