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Weekend Question Thread

I need to start holiday baking and gift-making this year. I’m behind. Usually I like to be done by the time the Thanksgiving craziness rolls around.

What’s your favorite holiday treat?

(Bonus if you include a recipe for everybody.)

A.

16 thoughts on “Weekend Question Thread”

  5. White chocolate cranberry oatmeal cookies! Recipe is on the bag of craisins! So easy and soooooooo good!

  7. I’m not really into sweets anymore, but used to occasionally buy semi-sweet chocolate chips and peanut butter and mix them together when I needed a chocolate/sugar fix.

  9. This cake:http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/chocolate-amaretti-cake-recipe/index.html
    I made it for a pre-xmas dinner with friends several years ago. During our long meal, the ice storm that started just before dinner intensified, and we lost power not long before dessert. We drank port, brandy, cordials, and bourbon, ate this cake, and fortified ourselves to walk back home. Now, even when it’s sixty, and still buggy and disgusting, we must have this cake.

  10. https://www.we-energies.com/recipes/cookiebook2012.pdf
    We are loving the simplicity and yumminess of the Snowball Surprise delights in the new WE Energies cookbook.
    http://www.lovefromtheoven.com/2012/01/13/hot-cocoa-cookies-with-kraft-jet-puffed-marshmallow-mallow-bits/
    These hot cocoa cookies were a huge hit on Thanksgiving!
    We also love:
    Apple Cinnamon Crunch Cookies
    1 cup vegetable shortening
    1 cup granulated sugar
    1 cup brown sugar, packed
    2 tablespoons milk
    1 teaspoon vanilla extract
    2 eggs
    2 cups all-purpose flour
    1/2 teaspoon baking powder
    1 teaspoon baking soda
    1/2 teaspoon salt
    1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
    1 cup uncooked oats (old-fashioned)
    3/4 cup crushed cornflakes
    1 cup chopped dried apples (not apple chips)
    Preheat oven to 325º F. In large bowl, combine shortening, granulated and brown sugars, milk and vanilla. Add eggs; beat until creamy. In separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. Gradually mix dry ingredients with sugar mixture. Stir in oats, corn flakes and apples. Drop rounded teaspoonfuls on greased cookie sheets. Bake at 325º for 11 to 13 minutes, or until lightly browned around edges but still soft in center. Cool on cookie sheet for about 3 minutes, then transfer to wire cooling racks. Makes about 5 dozen.

  12. Springerles, traditional German cookies. You make them one day, let them rise overnight, and then bake them the next day. They’re a very simple cookie, consisting mostly of flour, eggs, and powdered sugar. The secret ingredient is baker’s ammonia, which is a rising agent like baking powder. Except springerles made with baking powder taste differently. My grandmother’s recipe called for grinding up a piece of baker’s ammonia (also called hartshorn salt) “the size of a walnut.” What kind of walnut she didn’t say. And in any case when you can find the stuff, it comes powdered these days, not in chunks. And it isn’t easy to find. We used to be able to get it at a German bakery nearby, but no more. Nowadays, we order it on line.
    Springerles are rolled out thin, and then stamped with either a carved rolling pin or, like my family, with carved wooden molds. The individual cookies are then cut apart and carefully arranged on cookie sheets, each with three (count ’em) anise seeds under it. We always make a couple cookie sheets worth of anise-free springerles for my sister. Commercial springerles often have anise flavoring added; they taste terrible. The next day, springerles are baked carefully; they burn easily. And then they’re boxed and ready for giving away and eating.
    Here’s the Wikipedia entry for the labor-intensive little buggers:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springerle

  13. Have several homemade low carb, high taste variants on cranberry sauce. The cranberries themselves are high color, high taste, low carb. Just use Splenda (or your other favorite artificial sugar used for cooking).
    Start with a bag (? 1 pound?) bag of fresh cranberries (BTW – can be frozen and used for months later if used in the recipes that you simmer them down).
    1) Start with putting cranberries in pot (1 or 2 qts?). Rinse, drain off water, add a little water so there is just a little water in the bottom of the pot. Bring to a simmer and cook to desired texture – enough to soften them. Add sweetener to taste.
    Variants – I like adding diced jalapenos. Some like adding Oranges.
    2) I didn’t believe this one at first. Take raw cranberries and mince – best way to do it is use an old-time meat grinder. Again add sweetener. Oranges go well in this. More of a fruit-slaw.

  14. Chocolate leaves. They dress up a cheesecake, custard pie, or a strawberry pie, in a most delightful way. I started making them to give a nice finishing touch to custard with fruit sauce.
    Pick and wash camellia leaves. Camellias have nice firm leaves. If there are none in your garden a friend is sure to have some.
    Melt semi sweet chocolate.
    With a pastry brush or a spoon slather the backs of the leaves with chocolate letting it ooze to the edge but not over. Not too thin or it will crack.
    Lay on cookie sheet, plate, or tray, green side down and pop in the freezer for five or ten minutes.
    Peel the leaf off the chocolate. They will keep fine at room temp lightly covered until ready to use. Arrange on top of the dessert or tuck one or two into the whipped cream on individual servings.
    People think you fussed but it was really nothing much.

  16. Ok, there’s the all-purpose nom:
    http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/emeril-lagasse/gingerbread-with-spiced-creme-anglaise-recipe/index.html
    Gingerbread. Emeril’s recipe, not mine; I made a double batch before All Hallows’ Eve, baked up beautifully … but by the time I reached my destination those lovely tall soft-looking loaves had collapsed into the most amazing sticky-toffee-pudding-stuff ever. I didn’t make the creme anglaise … still don’t know what made the cakes fall. But boy were they good, even if you did have to eat them with a spoon.

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