Savvy Baking - Recipe for Safety with Kidde

One of my favorite things do to over the holiday season is to bake with the kids.  There are so many different holiday treats to make including our Santa Claus cookies.  These cookies have been a tradition in my family since I was a little girl.  I remember making them with my Mom and my brother every Christmas.  These Santa Claus cookies are such a fun and easy baking project to make with the kiddos.

While all the baking and cooking that we do can be so much fun for the holidays, Kidde wants to also remind us how to make sure we stay safe for the holidays.  Kidde is the world’s largest manufacturer of fire safety products including fire extinguishers, smoke alarms, carbon dioxide alarms, escape ladders and other auxiliary products.  Cooking is the number one cause of home fires and injuries and the winter months are the deadliest season for home fires.   In a recent Kidde survey, nearly five times as many Americans know the shelf life of a Twinkie than know the recommended operating life of a smoke alarm. 

Just as an example, I was making these Santa cookies pictured above and when I baked the second batch, I completely forgot them in the oven.  It is so easy to get distracted by the kids or something else that you are doing and not here the timer go off when you are baking.  I was lucky enough that we remembered in time not to have any issues except some extremely overcooked Santa cookies that had to be tossed away.  But it definitely made me realize how quickly things could happen and how important it is for our family to be prepared to protect ourselves.  

Kidde has shared a recipe for safety with us to help us better protect ourselves and our families: 

Kidde has some great reminders for us to make sure that we are all prepared in case of an emergency and how to protect ourselves properly with some great suggestions below:

• Replace smoke alarms every 10 years. If you don’t know when your home’s alarms were installed, replace them. Consider installing smoke alarms that contain a sealed-in, tamper-proof battery that will power the unit for 10 years, like Kidde’s Worry-Free alarms.

• Place fire extinguishers within reach on every level of your home.

• Install UL-listed carbon monoxide alarms on each floor and near bedrooms. A combination smoke/CO alarm will provide warning from both hazards in one unit.

• Create an escape plan with your family.

For more safety tips from Kidde, you can follow them along on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

What will you be baking this holiday season?  Any family favorite recipes? 

Be safe and Happy Holidays!

Cheers,

*This post is brought to you in partnership with Kidde.  All opinions and thoughts are my own.  Thank you for supporting sponsored posts on Savvy in San Francisco.

Tasty Treats - Salted Caramel Ding Dong Chocolate Cake

When the fabulous and newly married pinner, Maia, repinned this recipe from Portugese Girl Cooks, I immediately repinned it to my Savvy Desserts board.  Salted caramel and ding dong in the same sentence is almost too much to handle.  My friend, the talented Michele of Cakewalk Baking and Pastry Chef at the Berkeley restaurant Zut!,  repinned it from my board and then made it within a couple of days. She said that everyone went crazy for it! I'm having a hard time getting it out of my head, so I think that it might need to be made ASAP.

What is your favorite cake recipe? 

image via Portugese Girl Cooks

Santa Claus Sugar Cookies {Repost}

This is one of my favorite cookies to make a Christmas time with the bambinos that I thought I would share this post with all of you again! Have fun! 

Use any sugar cookie mix (Trader Joes makes an amazing one that is all natural) or recipe or buy a pre-made rolled dough. 

 Make sure you have a great assistant to help with the taste testing!

If you make your own recipe, roll the sugar cookie dough into a long roll, so that you can slice the cookies. Then place it in the refrigerator or freezer to make it firmer for easy slicing.

Two slices for each Santa cookie. 

Leave one circle whole and cut a triangle out of the second one for the hat and the extra two half circles become Santa's mustache. 

I normally buy Nestle Toll House chocolate chips, but decided to buy Ghiradelli chocolate chips not realizing how BIG they were. So, this Santa is a little bug eyed! You need candy red hots for the nose. 

You can either use red sprinkles for the hat or you can ice it in red icing after you have baked them.

I used the natural sugar frosting that came with the Trader Joe's sugar cookie kit for the mustache and hat trim. I grew up using the Cake Mate frosting tubes, which tastes OH SO GOOD, but when I read the ingredients this year and realized that partially hydrogenated oil was part of the ingredients, I decided to pass on the trans fats. I have to admit the Cake Mate frosting tubes with the fun tips create much cuter Santa mustaches and hat trim, but this will do!

Happy Baking!