Let the Baking Begin and Money!!

My sister and her family have come to my house for the Thanksgiving holiday. I am so very excited to gave a good old Yankee thanksgiving. We are cooking today. We have been invited to my MIL's Thanksgiving at her house on Thursday, but we wanted to cook a Thanksgiving dinner with just us, just like the good old days, minus four other siblings and our mom and dad. But it still will be good. And after today's festivities we will have a bread on Wednesday to recover before we will stuff ourselves again on Thursday. I have to admit that I did not do any of the baking yesterday. My sister was and is the cook. I stood there going, "Okay, uhm......yeah.....that looks right.....smells yummy." This morning she has already put the sweet potato's in the oven. I have this convection oven that I have no idea how to use. It has five different buttons on the oven that give you different ways to cook. One is convection bake (this one I use all the time), bake, broil, convection roast, convection convert (I have never pushed this). I really do not know how to use any of them. I am happy if the food in there is done by the time the timer goes off. I will have to get out the manual out for the baking fest today. Oh and I was lazy with my photos today so don't mind them being kinda dark and dull. I will do better next time I promise!!

We started out the morning with these. Well, she started out with these, again I just stood there going, "Wow, that is cool!" These are leaves made out of fondant for a cake that she is making for our Thursday Thanksgiving. Then my dearest sister made this filling for the cake. This is where I was saying, "Yummy!" This is a raspberry filling that she is going to be putting in her four layer almond cream cake. Move over pies, here comes a thanksgiving cake!!!!We won't totally forget about the pies. I sliced some of those apples. I tried using one of those apple slicers from pampered chief and I about cut off my finger after doing three apples so I turned the knife over to my sister. Oh the buttery goodness!! I just love apple pie. My mom makes the best apple pie. My sister made a dutch apple pie. Then there is pumpkin pie. Which may not taste very good. She accidentally put a whole can of condensed milk and she didn't notice until she had started to mix it. So we decided to dump some of it out and said, "That should be good enough." I am not a fan of pumpkin pie so this small folly doesn't really bother me. It looks like it turned out alright. My sister baked all day yesterday. Then after dinner she made the cake for Thursday.

Mr. Cowboy just called me and told me that he won 500 dollars off the radio. How awesome is that. We never win anything, let a lone $500!!! What a great time to win too with Christmas right around the corner!! He called me all excited!! He is just too cute.

Today my sister and I are going to be cooking and exercising. We are trying to work out so we don't gain any weight this holiday season. We are going to go on a diet together. We weigh the same and have the same bad eating habits, so we will do it together. How come it's so easy to gain weight and so hard to loose it? I guess having two Thanksgiving dinners probably doesn't help us in our weight loss does it? But I will have more yummy food pictures tonight. It will be a good preview for your Thursday meal!! I am so glad my sister came to visit! I will post more food pictures tonight, until then, y'all come back now ya hear!!