Holiday Recipes

I absolutely love baking during the holiday season. I’m always looking for excuses to bake, and during the holidays, I tend to find a ton of excuses. 🙂

One of our biggest traditions around the holidays is what I like to call the annual bake-palooza, which is the weekend before Christmas. Basically, we live in the kitchen for the majority of the weekend and bake, bake, bake for friends, coworkers, neighbors…you name it! It doesn’t sound fun to most, but to me, it’s a blast! Over the years, I’ve learned which recipes are great for gifting, and which recipes, while impressive, are just too much work to make for 15-20 gifts.

This year, I’m doing something different. While I’m still baking up a storm, I figured I could lighten the load a little by spreading out the majority of the work—the cookies.

Since we’re making a ton of goodies (husband likes to help), I had to do the math to see how many batches of each recipe I’d need to make for gifts. Most cookie recipes make 24 cookies (check your recipes first), so after doing the math, I decided 11 batches of cookies was a good number (2 of those being cookie dough gifts, which is a whole ‘nother gift idea). Of course, I doubt we’ll need all of those cookies, but I wanted to make sure I had extra dough, just in case…you can never have too much cookie dough, right?

One of the first things I always do for a big bake-palooza, is to stalk the grocery ads. I refuse to buy butter that’s over $2/pound box. I live in a fairly low to middle cost of living area, and from experience, I know $2 is rock bottom for the price of butter. It’s probably different in, say, New York or Los Angeles, but the idea is to buy butter when it’s the cheapest. Oh, and buy a LOT of it. I bought 12 boxes. Did you know that you can freeze butter? Just in case you don’t use it all..

Butter isn’t the only thing I shop for…I usually go through 3 bags of flour and sugar, multiple bags of chocolate chips, as well as 2-3 cartons of eggs. All of these go on sale this time of the year, and I know I sound like a cheap person for saying BUY EVERYTHING CHEAP, but seriously, when you’re baking multiple gifts, it all adds up! (and hey, saving money on ingredients means more money to buy pretty packaging, right?)

Once you have your ingredients, now of course you can make your dough. Since I’m usually doubling (or tripling) some recipes, I do that math in advance. Write those numbers on a post-it or something and stick it next to your recipe OR retype out your recipe with the correct amounts. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve doubled a recipe, only to realize I forgot to double one thing…like sugar. Yup. Not good. Just do the math in advance. 🙂

Side note: Just keep in mind your mixer size when you’re doubling or tripling recipes. My standard 5 qt. mixer can usually handle a double batch of cookie dough, but tripling really pushes the limits on the capacity of my bowl. I was able to triple recipes just fine in the 7 qt. mixer I have, though. 

Once your dough is mixed, use a medium sized cookie scoop (or large, if recipe calls for it), and scoop dough balls out. My freezer is a side by side, and a 9×13 cake pan fits just fine in there. So, I scooped them out into a cake pan, making sure to leave a tiny bit of space between dough balls, to make sure they don’t freeze together.

If you have more than one layer of cookie dough, just layer balls of dough between sheets of wax paper.

Once you have your cookie dough scooped out, place the pan into a freezer and allow the dough balls to freeze for 1-2 hours, until they are fairly set. Then, take them out of the pan and throw them into a freezer bag. Allow all of the excess air out of the bags, and seal until you’re ready to bake them.

To bake the cookies, all you need to do is place the balls on a cookie sheet, allowing a couple of inches in between for spreading, and bake at the temperature specified for the recipe for just 1-2 minutes longer than called for.

You can see that I burnt the cookie in the back, but that was because it was meant to be baked 25 degrees cooler than the others. Whoops! Glad I learned that lesson before the big baking weekend!

Stay tuned for the next posts in this mini-series: one about favorite recipes for gifting and another about packaging. 🙂

I can’t believe it’s Christmas Day! This is my favorite holiday of the whole year, so of course, I had to make cookies for the occasion.

I know this is random, but I just wanted to share a local Christmas carol that just doesn’t feel like Christmas to me unless I watch this during the season. If you’ve been to NOLA (or, of course, lived in NOLA), you might have heard of a few of these things/places.

Hope you and your families have a wonderful holiday! Merry Christmas!

It’s one of the hugest compliments when someone asks you to bring the same dish for a holiday, year after year. When it comes to my coworkers, they always just expect that I’m bringing a cheesecake again. Cheesecakes are easy, so I have no problem with making them for work potlucks.

However, with my family, I decided to take a leap last year and make eggnog macarons. Little did I know that these would be a hit. I was intimidated by these cookies, and there was a great reason. When you live in humid place like Louisiana, you can’t help but be intimidated by something that relies heavily on egg whites. So, fast forward to November. I asked my mom if my husband and I should bring something for Thanksgiving, and at first, she said that nothing was necessary. Then, three days before, she, along with my aunt, requested macarons. Guess they’re spoiled now!

I didn’t want to repeat eggnog macarons, since it’s Thanksgiving. So, I looked through a few sites until I decided on this idea: pecan pie macarons. Living in the South, pecan pies are a staple in the Thanksgiving feast, so this was going to be absolutely perfect!

So, the day I start to make the macarons, I go to look for my round piping tip. Uhhh…turns out it was another victim of the move since it’s gone. 🙁  So, I tried the star piping tip. I figured it would flatten out within the hour that the macarons had to sit out before baking, but they didn’t. I’m sort of happy they didn’t flatten out though…the star shaped macarons turned out pretty darn cute!

Instead of doing both the caramel sauce and pecan brittle for the filling, I ended up using the caramel sauce with chopped pecans in the filling. These were definitely a popular item on Thanksgiving Day, since by the time I was picking up leftovers, they were pretty much all gone. Yay!

I guess that means I should start thinking about what macarons to make for the next holiday get together with my family, eh? 🙂

Pecan Pie Macarons
Source: Tartelette

Ingredients:

Note: With macarons, it’s definitely important that your ingredients are weighed, so all measurements are in grams. 🙂

     For the macarons:

• 3 egg whites (about 90 grams)
• 40 grams granulated sugar
• 200 grams powdered sugar
• 55 grams almonds
• 55 grams pecans

     For the filling:

• chopped pecans
• one recipe of salted butter caramel sauce, well chilled in the fridge

Directions:

1. For the egg whites, 2-3 days before separate your eggs and store the whites in a covered container in the fridge.
2. In a stand mixer with the whisk attachment, beat the egg whites until they foam, gradually adding granulated sugar until you reach a glossy meringue. Be careful not to overbeat, since the meringue can easily dry out.
3. Place the almonds, pecans and powdered sugar in a food processor and pulse the mixture until the nuts are finely ground.
4. Add the mixture to the meringue, give it a quick couple of folds to break down some of the air and then, slow down and fold the mass gently until the batter flows like magma or thick ribbon. The whole folding process shouldn’t take more than 50 strokes.
5. Fill a pastry bag fitted with a round tip (or star one if you’re crazy like me) with the macaron batter and pipe small cookies (about 1.5 inches in diameter) onto a Silpat or parchment paper lined baking sheet.
6. Let the macarons sit out for 30 minutes – 1 hour to allow the shells to harden a bit. In the meantime, preheat your oven to 300 degrees. Once the shells have hardened, bake the macarons for 15-20 minutes.
7. Allow the macarons to cool a bit (until the pan is warm) before removing the macarons. If your macarons are stuck to the pan, pour a couple of drops of water under your Silpat or parchment. This should help the macarons lift off the pan more easily, due to the moisture. However, don’t let the macarons sit with the water for too long or you’ll risk the macarons becoming soggy.  
8. Once the macarons are fully cooled, spread some of the caramel sauce on the bottom of each of your macarons, add chopped pecans on top of the caramel on one of the macarons and sandwich the two macarons together. If you want to be super fun, brush some pearl dust on the top of the macarons.

Just a small side note….Did you win the Butterball giveaway? You have to email me to claim your prize and you have until tonight! Neither of the winners have emailed me. 🙁 You want free turkeys, don’t you?

 

 

Happy 4 days until Halloween!!

While Halloween isn’t my favorite holiday (I’m sure most of you can guess what my favorite holiday is. 😉 ), I feel like it’s fun to get in the spirit of it all. We decorated our house for Halloween, and I was thrilled to notice that in our new neighborhood, we aren’t the only ones who like to decorate. 🙂 I also noticed that our new neighborhood has LOTS of kids, so potential for Trick or Treaters? Wahoo! In the old neighborhood, we usually got a handful of kids, but some of them were way too old to Trick or Treat, in my opinion.

While we’re not dressing up for Halloween, I do have to admit that Millie has a costume haha! A yellow submarine. I was going to scour Goodwill for Ken dolls and paste them on the costume to have The Beatles and their Yellow Submarine, but alas, this whole moving thing has my energy devoted to unpacking and settling in the new house. 🙂 So, Millie will just be a submarine, and a very cute one at that.

Of course with Halloween being a few short days away, I had to take out my KA mixer for the first time since moving in the new house and whip up something festive. I found this idea on Kathie Cooks (via Pinterest) and it couldn’t be easier. It’s one of those ideas where you sit there and ask yourself, “Why didn’t I think of this?”

Since I used a recipe that I’ve already blogged (linked below), I’m just going to share how these are made.

1. Whip up your favorite sugar cookie dough recipe (I used this one for rolled cookies so they hold their candy corn shape without spreading.), divide the dough in 3 equal portions, dye one portion yellow, one portion orange and leave the last one undyed.
2. Take out a bread pan and line it with saran wrap. Roll out the undyed portion and place it in the bread pan, spreading the dough evenly throughout the whole pan. Then, roll out the orange portion, press it in the bread pan on top of the undyed dough, making sure to spread that evenly as well and then lastly, the yellow.
3. Cover and chill the dough in the fridge for a few hours or overnight. Then invert the pan on a cutting board (releasing the dough), and slice across the block in 1/4″ pieces. Cut the dough into triangles and bake according to your recipe’s instructions.