Holiday season, baking season

Every holiday comes with some baking, but I think that Thanksgiving and Christmas come with the most. For Easter or the Fourth of July or any other holiday, you can eat whatever dessert you want — cake, ice cream, pie, tons of chocolate, anything. But for Thanksgiving, you have to have pumpkin pie. For Christmas, you have to have cookies. Those are just the rules.

There was a pumpkin dessert at my Thanksgiving this year — admittedly, a roll cake, not a pie, so I guess we bent that rule — as well as this amazing cranberry cake that my mom found and we made together. Cranberry sauce is my favorite Thanksgiving food, and I loved getting that flavor in our dessert, with some orange thrown in. Check out Leah Eskin’s recipe in the Chicago Tribune if you’re a cranberry fan, too.

For Christmas, we made many, many cookies. My mom likes to teasingly remind me that when I was growing up, I hated the cooking and baking parts of Christmas preparation — it just “wasn’t me,” I said, probably with some overly dramatic tears. These days, I get into it gleefully — this year, I was up working on cookies until at least 2 a.m. two nights in a row. I made:

• Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies. The classic, though I somehow managed to mess them up this time, ending up with two trays of flat cookies that were simultaneously burnt and underbaked before fixing the dough by adding flour. Blame 2 a.m. baking.
• Chocolate cookies with mint M&Ms, using these Inside Out Chocolate Chip Cookies from Sally’s Baking Addiction as a base. Delicious, though they didn’t come out as fluffy as I wanted them to be — I’ll try again soon! Even flat, they were still chewy.
• Peanut butter cookies, again using a Sally’s Baking Addiction recipe. I tried Sally’s PB cookie recipe this year because I was unhappy with the recipe I’ve used in past years, and after this first try, I am never going back to that old recipe. These came out perfect beyond my expectations — tasty, fluffy, a hit with every relative and coworker who tried them. Yum.

I didn’t get a picture, but I also made these Homemade Jingles from Shugary Sweets. Have you ever had Jingles, also known as Santa’s Favorites? I grew up eating them at Christmastime and assumed they were a standard thing, but when I talked about them at school in Missouri, no one knew what I was talking about, so maybe they’re a Chicagoland thing. They’re cookies flavored with anise, a spice that tastes kind of like black licorice, and they were always sold topped with red and green sugar sprinkles, cut into Christmas shapes like stockings or wreaths. I just learned that they have been discontinued by Keebler, which is sad news, but I guess that means I found this recipe just in time. I’ve tried a few sad copycat recipes in years past, but this one is the real thing. Fans of the classic cookies will be satisfied.

And I know this isn’t a dessert, which breaks my theme, but these brussels sprouts with cranberries are too pretty not to share. After I found the recipe, from Rachel Schultz’s Household Almanac, on Pinterest, I showed it to my mom, who is brussels sprouts’ No. 1 fan, and she put it on our Christmas menu. I can’t tell you about the taste personally — sorry, Mom, I’ve never liked brussels sprouts! — but everyone who ate them seemed to enjoy them.

I’m not quite done yet with holiday baking — my high school friends and I celebrated a few baking-heavy New Year’s Eves, and although everyone is spread out this year, I intend to carry that on. But it’s been a fun few weeks of tasty eats, and it’s put me back in baking mode after a few months off. I’m all stocked up on candy mix-ins thanks to after-Christmas sales, and more frequent baking (and blogging!) is on my New Year’s Resolutions list. Stay tuned. 🙂

If you baked something great this holiday season, please share! What are the traditional treats around your house? Did you try anything new this year that you loved?

Nom Flashback: Ideas for Easter

Tomorrow’s Easter! One of my favorite things about holidays is that they provide an opportunity to gather with your family or friends, when you can forget about your homework or errands for a little while because it’s perfectly valid and important to be spending time with people you love instead of being productive.

When you’re little, Christmas and Easter and Thanksgiving and all those holidays are about presents, jelly beans, pumpkin pie, all the “fun, festive” things. But these days, with most of my cousins, my sister and I away at school or jobs for most of the year, I think of every holiday as not just a celebration of a special occasion but also a celebration of family. I’m not going to make it back to Chicago for Easter this year, but I’m planning to set a chunk of the day aside to make calls back home.

Last year, I was home, and my mom was cool enough to let me help set the menu. The result? A very Pinterest Easter.

Noms: Irish Flag Blondies

As a half-Irish girl who loves to bake, I had big, adventurous plans for St. Patrick’s Day weekend. I was going to make soda bread. I was going to make Shamrock Shake Cupcakes. It was going to be great.

But the weekend got away from me, as weekends often do, and for a last-minute St. Pat’s gathering I instead found myself reaching for my trusty standby. Remember how I said Cake Batter Blondies are my favorite because they’re easy and can always be made festive? Here’s my case in point.

These guys are simple to make — short ingredient list, mix by hand, done in an hour — and although they’re not authentically Irish, they’ll be a hit at any St. Patrick’s party.

Noms: Cake Batter Blondies (Made festive for Valentine’s Day!)

Every person who bakes needs one solid go-to recipe, that one that never fails, always delights and can be made at the drop of a hat. For me, it’s these Cake Batter Blondies.