Santa’s White Christmas

Clara and I spent all yesterday baking and baking. We made pinwheels, gingerbread, checkerboards, shortbread decorated like little packages, and Santa’s from Nutter Butters dipped in white chocolate for hats and beards. She was a trooper but wore out before we got to the chocolate drops. I was pretty done in too, so we saved that recipe for another time. She took plates of cookies to share with Nancy next door and to the little girls across the street.  

She also helped me make our broccoli and bacon crescent roll appetizer wreath which was our dinner during Zoom happy hour with our marriage enrichment group. We drank what I call Noëls, appropriated from a Total Wine Halloween Bloody Good Times recipe: 1 oz cherry vodka, 1 oz vodka, 4 oz cranberry juice. Shake with ice. Serve in martini glasses or over ice; good maraschino cherries for garnish. I called them Cranberry Delights at Thanksgiving. Three celebrations just about uses up one bottle of cherry vodka.

As if I needed any more calories, I just learned about SWC, Santa’s White Christmas, a vanilla, coconut and caramel coffee created in 1994 by Barnie’s Coffee & Tea Company, originally a local coffee roaster. Plain coffee would be fine, but Orlando is awash in SWC ice cream, cookies, doughnuts, tiramisu, and more. Fortunately, I learned all this too late to participate in the SWC Crawl, but I did copy down some of the addresses where SWC goodies are available, thank goodness, only during December. I bought a half gallon of SWC ice cream at Publix, and I pre-ordered SWC cookies from Gideon’s Bakery, to pick up after we went to the Morse Museum today. 

The Morse is a repository of all things Tiffany, created when Laurelton Hall, Tiffany’s Long Island estate burned, and Winter Park art collectors rescued all the pieces they could. Beautiful objects displayed in a beautiful site. I will return when I can sit in the Daffodil Courtyard. Now everything is roped off. Soon.

We continued our non-nutritionally dense day with a beer at Ten10 Brewery, a stop on the Central Florida Ale Trail.*  I didn’t realize they also served in-house cooked food, so we moved on to a sandwich at the meh New York Deli. 


* If we get our trail map stamped by all 26 breweries, we get a special growler. I definitely need to get a map.

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