Our very first holiday baking day! Sarah compiled all the recipes. She chose a bunch of vegan treats so that Caroline could share some with her family. We additionally had one more recipe on the list, Eggnog Florentines, but decided against making it because we ran out of time and it looked like a relatively complicated recipe compared to the other cookies we were attempting. We gravely underestimated the amount of time we'd need to spend making everything, especially baking the cookies and frosting them -- two large batches of cutout cookies is quite a lot of work for three people with only one oven!
Sarah and Caroline frantically finished the raspberry truffles and frosting all the cookies the next morning so Sarah could bring the treats to her late-morning tae kwon do class. It was a fun learning experience.
RECIPES
- Spicy Gingerbread Cookies (Smitten Kitchen) -- this recipe was really, really delicious, especially paired with cream cheese frosting. Sarah's family loves to make Santa face cookies out of this and she showed us how to make them. They are the most delightful thing.
- Lofthouse Style Soft Sugar Cookies (Two Peas and Their Pod) -- these turned out as advertised, fluffy and soft textured like the brand they imitate. I personally think they were a little too delicate to hold up to transportation. But I am not a huge fan of Lofthouse sugar cookies anyway. They are too sweet and something about the texture feels like I'm going to inhale the entire bite and suffocate and they always fall apart on me when I bite into them. This recipe is great if that's what you're going for, but it is not something I enjoy.
- Cream Cheese Frosting -- we used this for both the gingerbread and sugar cookies.
- Mexican Hot Chocolate Snickerdoodles (Isa Chandra, from her book Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar) -- A vegan treat. I'm not the biggest fan of chili pepper in my chocolate and I found the end product somewhat bitter so I thought these were just OK, but Caroline seemed to like them a lot.
- Gingerbread Biscotti (Smitten Kitchen) -- I was afraid I'd get tired of gingerbread after making so many cutout cookies, but I ended up really enjoying these and would make them again.
- Decadent Hot Chocolate Mix (Smitten Kitchen) -- quite easy to make if you have a food processor, and absolutely delicious. We made 4 times the recipe and split it 3 ways, and each generously filled a pint canning jar.
- Homemade Marshmallows (Alton Brown) -- for putting in the hot chocolate! We piped the mixture into long, winding ribbons onto so many cookie sheets and then tried to cut them with a pizza cutter until we discovered scissors works way better. Definitely use powdered sugar instead of mixing in cornstarch because the cornstarch makes it taste bitter (it also doesn't taste good in the hot chocolate) and the powdered sugar is not incredibly sweet anyway.
- Chocolate Raspberry Truffles (from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking, p.172) -- I made the raspberry ganache part but Sarah and Caroline finished making them the next day. These ended up a little too soft so they were hard to shape and looked messy, but they tasted good. I think this could be because they may have dispensed with the tempered chocolate coating on the outside.
- Dark Chocolate Coconut Truffles (Melanie Stephens, via Feed Your Awesome Machine) -- made with coconut milk instead of dairy cream so they are vegan friendly. They worked beautifully.
- Dark Chocolate Cherry-Walnut Bark (Grace Parisi via Food and Wine) -- no complaints here, this was really tasty. We made it vegan with dairy-free chocolate.
- Peppermint Bark (Allrecipes) -- my sister-in-law makes this so I was excited to try it. The only issue was that the peppermint candy crumbles had a hard time adhering to the surface of the chocolate.
- Popcorn Brittle (Mark Scarbrough via Cooking Light)-- a very old fashioned feeling recipe, but it holds up great. It has a really lovely salty-sweet taste and the molasses gives it an interesting type of sweetness. The popcorn makes for a light, easy-to-bite texture too, unlike most candy brittle.
