Jovers

What a great month December has been! I have been so busy/lazy that I haven’t had a chance to blog yet this month.

I came back a couple weeks ago and helped my mom bake up a storm of cookies and caramel popcorn and other sweets. I squeezed in my last bit of shopping for my family and wrapped all my presents, soaking in my favorite time of the year and enjoying the break from classes, which are done for a month! Yay! I finished this semester strong with straight As! It was a pretty easy semester compared to some that I’ve had in the past, but I was still relieved to be done with all of my classes and to see that I still did well in all of them.

Christmas was wonderful. Christmas morning, at 8AM, I went to Andrew’s house to open presents with his family. I literally rolled out of bed and drove over in my sweat pants and baggy shirt to realize that they were all showered and well dressed. Eh, whoops.

His mom gave me two sets of books I’ve been wanting, the Fablehaven series and Ender’s Quartet. Andrew bought me a noise machine since my neighbors in KC are so loud. I plugged it in right away to see how it worked and I can’t wait to try it out. I bought Andrew Cards Against Humanity, a card game neither of us have played before but we’ve heard is very funny! (It’s tag line is: a card game for terrible people so I thought it suited us well. ) He loves to play games so hopefully it’s fun!

We spent the rest of the day with my family. We opened presents (I received more books, yay!! A few favorites: King Raven Trilogy, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and the Selection Series.) and then my grandpa and my cousins from Mississippi joined us. We played Catchphrase, which is a game where you have to describe the word/phrase that pops up on the machine and your teammates have to guess what it is. We had a blast, except when we got to the 70s and 80s because I didn’t know any of the movies or people that were popping up. Before my time, y’all.

My mom baked a ham and completed our Christmas day feast with scalloped potatoes, fruit cocktail, green beans, corn, rolls, and of course cookies.

The past few days have been rather lazy. I’ve hung out with Andrew and we’ve walked our dogs together. My dad dug up some old home videos that we had when we were little and we’ve enjoyed watching those. In some of them, I am only two and look like a little Asian kid. So cute

We also squeezed some wedding stuff in as well. We booked our honeymoon (!!!!!) which I am so excited about! We are going to Samana, Dominican Republic and staying at an all-inclusive resort. Andrew also picked out his wedding band and I purchased that, so I’ve got a few more things to check off our list. August is getting closer and closer!! :love:

Overall, it’s been a wonderful break. I’m looking forward to New Year’s Eve tomorrow and spending it with some great friends and family. :love:

I am home sweet home, and I know more than anything that that means good food. My mom always hosts Thanksgiving for our family and there are always at least 25 people in our little house every year. This year, my mom found this cute snack that she’d been dying to have me make with her, which she had apparently already made earlier in the month but my family gobbled them up.

These acorn treats are so simple to make, so cute, and so yummy that I had to share!

Only four ingredients are needed:

Hershey’s Kisses
Nutter Butters
White Icing
Chocolate Chips

First, we broke the Nutter Butters in half and layed the inside part face-up. You want the criss-cross side to be visible on the acorn.

When you split them in half, usually the peanut butter sticks to one side. On those, you simply stick the Kiss to it. On the sides without the peanut butter, we added a dot of icing to act as glue for the Kiss to stick to.

On the other side of the cracker, add a dot of icing and stick the chocolate chip to it.

Tips:

Don’t be tempted to press the kiss too hard into the peanut butter, otherwise the cookie will crack! It only needs to be gently pressed and it will stick. Remember, you can always add icing if you are afraid of them falling apart.
If you don’t like icing, you can always melt a couple of chocolate chips to act as glue and dip the bottom of the kiss/chocolate chip and stick them to the Nutter Butter. We love icing though, so we went the traditional route.
If you want to increase your Nutter Butter to chocolate ratio, don’t split the Nutter Butters in half! Use a one whole Nutter Butter for the top part of the acorn instead. We split them in half because we have a lot of people coming over and wanted to make as many as we could!
Only use a minimal amount of icing, so that it can’t be seen. My mom loved to douse the Nutter Butters in icing because she loved to eat the icing – but the presentation isn’t as nice. You can tell which ones she did and which ones I did.
I put three of the acorns in my hand at once to ice the other side. It made the process take a lot less time!

Voila! You have yummy, delicious acorns!

Have a happy Thanksgiving everyone! I’ll be wearing my fat pants.

Christmas Recap

Thanksgiving Acorns