Cooking fun with OXO! Peppermint Cheesecake minis

This winter I was super lucky to get a chance to check out the cutest new measuring set from OXO. For those of you who read this blog and are close friends you may know that I used to be a chemistry teacher. This is why I totally freaked when I saw this new set from OXO that is little beakers. I was so happy to have them because when I was making these adorable little cheesecakes I had to use some funky measurements because I was making 3/4 of a recipes. I know that sounds crazy but sometimes when you have a party to go to and you forgot to buy enough cream cheese and your amazing finance runs to the store but buys the wrong type and you have to get it in the oven because you still need to shower and your ride will be there in less than an hour....its a  3/4 of a cheese cake kind of day!

Luckily it was so easy to adapt the recipe and by making smaller cupcake versions not only was less messy to eat (with no cutting or serving to worry about) but no one missed the other 1/4 cake. I have seen many version of this with crushed peppermint candies but I have to be honest I think that they either have to be crushed into dust then it isn't pretty or its too chunky and I choke on them. I also didn't add the topping since I was already in a bit of a rush but these little cakes were done so fast that I never got an after shot! Filling the cakes was no fuss because I poured all of the batter into a zip top bag then cut off the corner. Using a baggie as a disposable pastry bag just makes clean up a breeze.

Recipe at Epicurious  Peppermint Twisted Cheesecake

Christma-Channuk-Thanksgiving-mas!

Its seems that it is always hard to find time to get everyone together but during December this is especially true. One of the best parts of the holidays is visiting with friends and family that we might not see often enough during the rest of the year. This year it seemed like we had even more than usual going on and so we decided to combine our usually holiday parties into one big dinner....for 12! Officially our biggest sit down dinner to date.

Last year, we held a Latkes/Christmas Cookie party - everyone really enjoyed dinner and loved decorating cookies so we knew that was definitely part of the evening. Since my Thanksgiving was a little short of leftovers,  I was really itching to cook a turkey so there was another huge part of my menu. With so many holidays to celebrate we certainly didn't have a shortage of traditional foods to choose from! Everything came out really well except for my stuffing... which needed a little more time in the oven to get nice and brown.

I used a Martha Stewart recipe for the sugar cookies and they came out wonderful! Just make sure you watch them because a sheet of mine (or maybe two) ended up in the trash when I got distracted. For the latkes, I used about 7.5 lbs of potato and 2 onions to make about 60 latkes. I didn't have any matzah meal on hand so I went with panko breadcrumbs....it didn't seem to cause any issues.