My Christmas Goals

• Finish my take-home exam next week.

• Spend a lot of time on the beach

• Be happy

• Read a good book

• Have long breakfasts on the balcony while enjoying the view of palm trees

• Take long walks with our two dogs

• Visit the island`s capital, Las Palmas and take a walk in the old town.

• Make some more Christmas sweets

• Practice my Spanish

• Play and cuddle with the dogs; they`re just the cutest ever!

• Spend quality time with my family

• Go shopping for some much needed new clothes

• Plan a strictly food-blog project

• Drink a lot of ice-cold Diet Coke

• Have long talks with my mom

• Go to church on Christmas Eve

• Write more exciting posts on travelling

• Take a lot of pictures

•  Eat a lot of Chinese food

• Donate christmas gifts to charity

• Make the Christmas-dinner

• Plan my 2013 budget

• Try new recipes and share them with you

• Help my brother with finding an apartment

• Eat the best ice-cream in the world

• Order curricula for the spring semester

• Celebrate new year`s Eve with my best friends

 What are your goals for this Christmas?

I just wrapped 128 caramels!

I`ll be posting the recipe later, so be sure to keep updated!

7. December

“Christmas can be celebrated in the school room with pine trees, tinsel and reindeers, but there must be no mention of the man whose birthday is being celebrated. One wonders how a teacher would answer if a student asked why it was called Christmas.”

– Reagan

Heavenly Homemade Bounty bars

These tasty Bounty bars are a lot healthier than the store-bought bounty; by the fact that its homemade, there is no unnecessary additives such as salt, glucose syrup, glycerol, emulsifiers, nor whey powder in it, as there are in store-bought bounty, and a lot less sugar. By using dark chocolate, it gets a very rich flavor and combined with pure ingredients; you won’t be able to eat more than a couple of bites. So you won’t eat as much, and it’s a much better alternative than store-bought. I made these yesterday, and I have to be honest with you. It was the best bounty bar I have ever tasted!

Ingredients

50 g /1.7 oz coconut oil

3 oz demerara sugar (raw sugar)

3.4 oz whipping cream

3.4 oz light coconut milk

200 g / 7 oz dried shredded unsweetened coconut

200-400 g / 7-14 oz dark chocolate (depends on the size of the bar)

Instructions

Heat the coconut oil on low heat. Add sugar and whipping cream. Let the sugar melt. Then add coconut milk and the dried coconut.  Mix well. Put it in the fridge or freezer to cool off until it got a firm texture.

This is when it gets messy. Use a tablespoon and take big portions in your palms and squish it tightly. Try to shape it into long bars. When you`re done, put it into the freezer over night.

Next day: use a sharp chopping knife and cut the big bars into smaller pieces. Put back into the freezer. Melt chocolate and get everything ready.

Take the coconut pieces out of the freezer and dip one by one into the melted chocolate. Since the coconut is frozen, the chocolate will cool off quickly. When you`re done, put them into the fridge for a couple of hours. Enjoy!

Note: depending on how big the sizes are, how much chocolate you need vary. I wanted small portion sizes so I used more chocolate. If you want bigger bars, then you won`t need as much to cover the bites.

Question: I`m used to the metric scale, so I use dl and grams mostly, but I try the best I can to convert the ingredients into other units of measurement. However, I`m not sure when to use oz and when to use cups, because sometimes it seems a bit unprecise to use cups when the ingredient measures requires more precision. When should I use the different measurement units?

6. December

“Christmas is the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart.”