'Tis that time of year again... when I take a weekend out of my so busy life and dedicate a few days to creating edible gifts to express my love and appreciation for those close to me. This year made a set of four flavored salts:

- Pomogranete
- Vanilla
- Sriricha
- Lemon Lavendar

I also handmade cards to send with these small tokens of affection. Unfortunately, I was so busy drying salt that I forgot to take pictures of the process. I am out of practice on the food blogging front. I've been a busy bee outside of the kitschen! However, the whole thing is pretty simple. Take some salt, add the flavor you want into it and (if needed) dry it out in the oven. The times when you need to dry out the salt mixture is when you add a liquid (duh!!!). Making vanilla salt is similar to making vanilla sugar... take a bean, split, scrape and mix. No drying required. When drying the other salts I pre-heated the oven to 350, spread the mixture on a baking sheet and then turned off the oven once I placed the salt inside. It usually takes less than 10 minutes in the oven but, be sure to check because you don't want your salt mixture to burn!

On the home front I tried to keep things simple. I decided to make the no knead sticky buns I made a year or so ago. I am happy to report my continued attempts to use yeast has resulted in improvement in making bread! Also, this basic dough is a gift that keeps on giving! You can find the recipe here.

First up... sticky buns! I pre-made the dough and let it sit in the fridge for a day. Then the afternoon before Christmas day I rolled out the dough and prepped the buns into a pan. This way on Christmas morning I could pull them out of the fridge to rise while we opened presents.

To bring some balance to this decadent treat I pulled out my inherited cast iron skillet and made a frittata!






I had some left over dough so I took it and made some mini-loaves of cinnamon swirl bread.





Next up for me is using my new spherical cake pan to make a pinata cake stuffed with candy! My prior attempt failed b/c I over filled the pans. Also, on my wish list is this message cookie cutter set. Happy new year and happy cooking!