Recipe: Cookies for the Holidays

Now that Christmas is past, people are planning their New Years celebrations. Our contribution is a wonderful new cookie we discovered this week. The original recipe is called Hazelnut-Butter Cookies with Chocolate Chips, from Bon Apetit. We didn't have hazelnut butter handy, so substituted Nutella, and it was fantastic!

Try these for New Years Eve, or any time!

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 cup creamy unsalted hazelnut butter (we used Nutella here)
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup (packed) golden brown sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 12-ounce package semisweet mini chocolate chips (2 cups)

Preparation

1. Sift first four ingredients into medium bowl.
2. Using electric mixer, beat butter, hazelnut butter, and both sugars in large bowl until light and fluffy.
3. Beat in egg and vanilla.
4. Beat in flour mixture.
5. Stir in chocolate chips.
6. Cover and refrigerate at least 2 hours (can be prepared a day ahead, if kept refrigerated. Soften dough slightly at room temperature before shaping).
7. Preheat oven to 350F.
8. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Using 1 level tablespoon for each cookie, roll dough between palms of hands into 1-inch balls. Arrange 1 inch apart on prepared sheets.
9. Bake one sheet at a time until cookies are golden brown, about 12 minutes.
10. Let cool on sheets on racks 5 minutes, then transfer cookies to racks and cool.

Option: You can also add 1/2 cup skinless, chopped hazelnuts when you add the chocolate chips, for a nuttier cookie.

Makes about 4 dozen cookies.

Crunchy on the outside, soft and delicious on the inside.

Mmmmmmm! Enjoy!

New: Gift Certificates Now Available from our Facebook Page

We've offered Brewster House Gift Certificates through our web site for several years, and each year (especially near the Christmas holidays) several people take advantage of them as gifts for their friends and family who love Brewster House, or to introduce them to Brewster House and Freeport, Maine.

We recently became aware of an application that we could add to our Facebook page that will allow Facebook friends to purchase our Gift Certificates directly from Facebook.

To use the Gift Certificate application, select the quantity you want (the base value is US $100.00, selecting multiples simply increases the value of your gift certificate, so if you enter "3" you will be purchasing a gift certificate with a value of $300), then proceed to check out. Your payment will be processed through PayPal's secure checkout service, and we are notified of the purchase so we can send you your gift certificate.

Be sure to include your mailing address so we can send the certificate, and also please provide a valid email address, so we can reach you if there are any problems. These will be sent free to addresses in the US and Canada. Other areas will be by arrangement.

We wish this had been available earlier in the Christmas season, but better late than never!

I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas...

Now that the roof is completed and Christmas is nearly here, we have been working on the house, and eagerly awaiting our first real snowfall.

It arrived last night, in the form of an inch (or a bit more in places), with flurries off and on today and a bit of melting, already, too.

We have guests arriving for Christmas Eve (though there are still rooms available), and more around New Years Eve, so we're hoping we'll still have a nice, white Christmas for all of their enjoyment!

The Pounding Has Ended (and the result is beautiful!)

The crew finished up their work as night was falling on the fourth day, and the result is absolutely wonderful. We are delighted with the new roof!

New roof over the porch and you can see it nicely over the bay windows and on the peaks

Guest entry, and roof over the porch, and up the peaks of the house

Guest entry and barn

The back of the barn and the cupola.

Is this the last day?

The guest entry porch gets its new roof.

This morning the crew is working on the roof areas over the porches, and the back side of the barn (by the way, the barn is where we, the innkeepers, live - it is a really nice barn).

The front of the house gets a new porch roof.

According to the roofer, the job may well be finished today (we hope so, as we have guests arriving this afternoon!).

The crew working around the skylights on the barn

Since the back of the barn is also where our office is, the pounding is really loud(!) overhead today, and we can watch out the window as piles of old shingles fall down the tarpaulin slides, and bales of new shingles are hauled up to replace them.

On the third day of Christmas

The front section is all finished except the cap.

Day three of the project to replace the roof dawns bright and cold! It was only about 8 degrees F last night, and this morning it was 12F when the crew arrived to begin working.

When they completed the front section of the house, they noticed that the supplier had sent the wrong color for the cap shingles (the ones that run along the peak), so those have to be replaced.

The barn and area above the guest entrance are the target for today.

Most of the middle section of the house is completed, and about 1/3 of the barn (it was really weird to shower this morning with hammers pounding directly overhead - it sounded like they were coming in through the roof!). The crew hopes to finish tomorrow, but weather will play a role in the completion time.

Up on the housetop...

But is isn't reindeer we're hearing on the second day of this project. It is "a whole lotta shakin' goin' on!"

Tarps drape the guest entry to protect it from falling shingles.

This morning the crew is over the middle part of the house, and the entire place is reverberating with the pounding and scraping noises that accompany the removal of the old shingles. We can hardly wait until they get to the back of the house, where our living area and office are located!

The front section of the house is nearly completed, as you can see in the photos. The shingles are coming off the center section over the guest entry, which we hope will be nearly completed today.

The front section is nearly complete.

The last section is the barn, which is very large (not as barns go, but as houses go), so may take more than one day. In addition, our property slopes down at the rear of the house, so the height from the back of the barn roof to the ground is not just three stories, but four(!).

On the first day of Christmas

'tis the season - for a new roof!

The old roof comes off - near the guest entry.

One thing we've always known we would need to do, but have been hoping would wait a bit, is to put a new roof on at Brewster House. In theory it shouldn't be needed, but the hints have been coming for years.

Every year in the wind storms and Nor'easters that are common in Maine we lose a few shingles. Most times we just have an annual repair and things are fine for another year. This year we lost quite a few more shingles than has been the norm, so we talked to the roofer about a replacement, and decided to go ahead with the project.

He told us that one of the reasons we were losing so many shingles is that the old roof used a shingle that was too light to stay in place in the heavy winds. Sigh. Thankfully, the new roof will be heavier, and should stay in place much better.

Down come the shingles over the dining room

The men arrived early this morning and began stripping off the old shingles. They'll be here for several days, repairing any wood that is needed, and sealing up the roof and putting on new shingles.

We're looking forward to a new, - heavier - and more attractive roof!

Decorated for Christmas: Nubble Light

We decided to take our own advice from our previous blog post and visit Cape Neddick Lighthouse in York Beach. Also known as Nubble light, for the small island ("the Nubble") it sits on, this lighthouse is immediately off shore, and easily viewed from a parking lot at the end of the mainland.

One of the wonderful features of the lighthouse is that it is lighted for Christmas (and again in July, for those unwilling to brave the December chill to see it). It was the Christmas lights we were after on this visit. It was a nice, clear evening, so everything was visible. It wasn't terribly cold, about 30 degrees F, but the wind was blowing, so it was hard to use a bare hand to work the camera controls!

We arrived at the lighthouse shortly before sunset, and as the sun began to set, the sky behind the lighthouse developed a rose-colored glow.

In the photo above, the sun isn't quite down and the lights have just come on. You can barely make out the white lights outlining the buildings and the tower.

As darkness begins to fall, the lights are more pronounced, giving the best of the daylight and dark views!

Now that it is dark, the lights making the outlines of the buildings can be clearly seen.

Now that is why we like visiting lighthouses in the winter!

Christmas season is underway in Freeport!

Portland Head Lighthouse

As always, the Christmas season kicked off this year with Sparkle weekend - the first weekend in December. L.L. Bean had lighted their huge Christmas tree a week or so beforehand, with the beginning of their annual Northern Lights Celebration.

Sparkle starts with a parade, with Santa Claus arriving on a Lobster Boat, all the shops and B&B's are decorated with lights, and there are sales and activities for all ages.

Yesterday we had our first snow that lasted more than a few hours, so the Christmas spirit is in the air!

One of our favorite things to do is to visit some of the Maine lighthouses, to see them with their wintry snow coats! It is a completely different view to see them in winter, when we're so accustomed to seeing them in warmer weather.

Give it a try! You'll enjoy your visit, and the photos you can get are like nothing you'll see in the summer months!