The First of Seven Baking Posts

 I have seven different treats that will be made for Christmas (time, not necessarily just that day). For those who like to make something or something different, or for those who just enjoy it when someone else does, this and the following six posts will feature recipes that are quite likely familiar to most of you.

Today’s treat is Hello Dollies. They may be called something different where you live. Let me know if they are!

Along the way, I’ll add the money saving tips I used this year because we are ALL watching our pennies ( even though Canada cancelled pennies ) . 

This recipe called for a half a cup of butter, but since you need a second mortgage for things like butter ( and romaine lettuce!), I scraped the last bit of butter off the wrapper from the butter I bought a little while ago on sale and the rest was the cheapest margarine I could find. 

Apologies for the vertical picture. Didn’t realize that you can’t change that on your phone ( or I don’t know how).

If you tilt your head, you can see that the butter/ margarine was melted in the baking dish while the oven preheated. Edited to add: make sure you grease up the sides of the baking dish a bit, too, so it isn't too hard to remove the squares when they are all done.

Next, add 1 1/4 cups of Graham cracker crumbs to the melted butter. I mixed it up a bit and pressed it down a bit with the back of a spoon ( careful - the baking dish is hot!)

Then put your cup of chopped walnuts or pecans on the Graham crumbs. SAVINGS: pecans were not on sale. Walnut pieces were! I chopped them myself.

After that, add 1 cup of chocolate chips. At this time of year you can often get the larger bags for a good price. Trust me when I say the rest of the bag will get used! These are semi- sweet.

Next comes coconut. I didn’t buy the sweetened coconut because lord knows this will be sweet enough!

You need 1 1/3 cups of coconut.

Buy the cheapest sweetened condensed milk you can find. Who will even be able to distinguish a difference?? And if they can, they likely won’t eat your Hello Dollies anyway!

As an aside, anyone remember the pull tab top puddings we had as kids? Now of course, they are plastic tops as the fear of lawsuits from life threatening pudding top cuts are too much for our society and the fact that children couldn’t possibly be expected to learn how to open them safely without direct supervision…( ok, I’ll stop).

Pour your sweetened condensed milk all over the top.

Oooops, I need direct supervision for taking photos!!

Bake at 350 for 30 minutes. This is what it looks like after baking. Let it cool, then cut into smallish squares as they are pretty rich!

And that, my friends is my first dive into the holiday baking on December 10th. I don’t know if I’ll bake something else today or not, but it will be a different day’s post. 

What have you made? Are you familiar with these? Do you have a coconut hater in the family? Can you discern the difference between cheap and luxury sweetened condensed milk?