Tis the Season for Cranberry, Fa La La La La La La La La!

Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Happy New Year everyone! AND Happy birthday Henry! That's a lot!!! I'm just doing a quick post before we go skiing to tell you all about some of our fun holiday cooking and baking.

We took a trip to NY for my brother's 13th birthday. We had to leave very early in the morning and my mom baked these Bakery Style Cranberry Lemon Scones to have on the way. My brother and big-little sister thought that these were the best scones that we had ever made. They were probably my second favorite, but they are very very good. We made the dough and cut the scones the night before and kept them in the fridge overnight and that worked well.

The cranberry makes these look festive for the holidays. They'd be a great addition to a holiday brunch.

A fun breakfast that we tried was Coffee Cake Mug Cake. These were one of my favorite breakfasts we've made in a while. You make a batter in a mug and then top it with a streusel topping, microwave it for about 90 seconds, and you have your own little coffee cake! I think we're going to make them again when we go skiing.

Isn't it cute to have your own little coffee cake like this?!

We've kept up trying more vegetarian dinners. A huge favorite was Singapore Noodles with Charred Scallions. We used pad Thai noodles instead of vermicelli because we thought we'd like thicker noodles more. My brother and I really loved this dish. It's definitely one that you should make.

I'd never had big pieces of scallion like this in a dish before and they were great! The scrambled egg is delicious too.

Our friend Molly recommended these Red Curry Lentils in the comments of my last post, and so of course we had to try them! These are very good. I really liked the curry and coconut flavors.

We served these over rice. I think they'd be good with a yogurt sauce too.

Our grandparents came for Thanksgiving and my mom planned a special dinner for Wednesday night that she thought my cousin Jonah would like. He ended up sick and couldn't come unfortunately, but we all loved this Lemony Shrimp and Risotto. We used spinach instead of arugula because we like it better, and everyone loved this.

People sometimes think that risotto is hard to make, but actually this recipe was very quick and easy. If you have any leftovers, you can use them to make pan fried risotto cakes. We didn't have time to do that because we were busy cooking Thanksgiving dinner the next day, but I'd definitely try that next time.

Another really good pescatarian meal that we had was Blackened Miso Salmon with Creamy Coconut Cucumber Salad. We made this with Arctic char because my dad likes that better and my brother said that this was the best fish dish that we have ever made!!! The marinated fish has great flavor and the creamy cucumbers are nice and cooling.

We served it over forbidden rice which looked very pretty.

You might remember from last year, we really like finding fun things to do with Thanksgiving leftovers. This year, we made Cozy Turkey Stew. I loved this. It's creamy and flavorful and the ultimate comfort food.

Doesn't this look like it would be good on a cold winter day?

A recipe that we made with Thanksgiving dinner, but would be great to make any time was Dilly Rolls. The best thing about this recipe was that we could make the dough in advance, which made it very convenient for Thanksgiving.

These rolls smelled great. We froze the leftovers and ate them toasted with butter recently and they were delicious that way too.

My dad likes having a ham after Thanksgiving. He calls it a "Snacking Ham." This year we made a recipe called Grandma's Corn Pudding to go along with it. This isn't the kind of cooking that we usually do. It's basically a bunch of canned food dumped into a casserole. We don't make casseroles a lot, but I think they're popular in other parts of the country. However, based on this, maybe we should make casseroles more! It's not very healthy and it doesn't include fresh ingredients but it's definitely delicious!!

You can see where we started scooping this because we almost forgot to take a picture, but we remembered at the last minute.

Another fantastic vegetarian dinner that we had was Spinach Artichoke Lasagna. This was a huge hit with everyone. Grazzy made it for her family and they loved it too. You use no-boil lasagna noodles which makes this quick and easy enough for a weeknight. My mom made the components in advance and then we put it all together after I got home from dance one night.

This recipe is made with cottage cheese instead of ricotta. This makes it healthier, but you would never know.

The cheese mixture is layered with pureed tomatoes and herbs.

This is what it looks like once it's cooked. This is another recipe that you should definitely make. It's a new family favorite for us!

My mom served my grandparents some appetizers while they watched us decorate our tree Thanksgiving weekend. This Pastry Wrapped Cranberry Baked Brie was awesome!! The first step is to make a quick cranberry sauce. You can do that a few days in advance though. The cranberry sauce is easy and great. We actually made just the sauce again another time and ended up not making the brie, so we used it as a topping for salmon and that turned out great too!

You cut the top rind off of a round of brie and spread the cranberry sauce evenly on top.

Then you add on toasted pecans.

You wrap the entire thing up in puff pastry. This is me brushing it with an egg wash.

And then this is what it looks like once it's baked. We served this with cranberry crackers, which I thought was the perfect accompaniment!

A very special holiday cheese is called Vacherin Mont D'or. It is a very strong cheese and is meant to be served warm. It can be baked different ways, but we used this recipe which includes white wine and garlic. It is soft and goopy and amazing.

My Grandma Linda gave us this holiday plate and I thought that the cheese looked really pretty on it.

For another fun holiday appetizer, we made a Christmas Tree Cheese Ball. This is really flavorful and was fun to shape and make.

Once you form your tree, you wrap it in plastic wrap and let it chill in the fridge. I accidentally dropped it on the way and so I needed to do some emergency re-shaping!

Of course we've had lots of delicious holiday desserts. For the past two years, we have forgotten to take a picture of our Butterscotch Pie on Thanksgiving, but this is the year that we FINALLY remembered. Do you remember how in last year's holiday post, I mentioned the Cranberry Curd Tart? Well we made them both again this year, and they're both amazing, but the butterscotch pie is still my favorite.

I decorated this with whipped cream rosettes and I liked the way it turned out.

We had planned on serving these Rice Krispie cake pops on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, but since my cousin Jonah was sick, we just mailed them to him. We didn't follow a recipe for these. We just made our favorite Rice Krispie Treat base and shaped them into cake pops and dipped them in chocolate. Grazzy is really good at doing projects like this and making things look pretty and so she helped us.

Our smoke alarm went off Thanksgiving night and the fire department came - whoops! My mom offered the firemen cake pops, and they left with all of them!!!!! We hadn't gotten a picture yet so Aunt Shay Shay sent me a picture of the ones that we mailed to Jonah. That's why the counter looks different here!

Every year for my brother's birthday, my mom bakes a Key Lime Pie and Rachel makes him Bon Appetit's Best Rice Pudding. This recipe really is the best. It is absolutely delicious and we look forward to it every year!

The recipe includes fruit with alcohol to put on top, but we skip that part and it's still great!

Of course we've also been baking lots of cookies. One cookie that was something new was Rolo Oatmeal Cookies. I think maybe I'd add more Rolos next time.

We didn't remember that we needed a picture until we'd already packed them in a gift box, but they looked nice all packaged!

One of our favorite favorite cookies (maybe my mom's very favorite) was actually another recipe to use up Thanksgiving leftovers. They were Mini Oatmeal-Cranberry Whoopie Pies and you actually mix leftover cranberry sauce into the cream cheese frosting.

These looked great, but tasted even better!

Another huge success was Pretzel Bottom Caramel Brownies. These were fantastic. The caramel on these was messy, but it tasted really good.

The caramel tended to slide off, so these weren't great for gifting. But we'll still definitely make them again.

We definitely did more with peppermint this year than we have before. We made Peppermint Bark that was really good. We used a slightly too small pan, so ours came out thicker and it was more like candy that we cut than bark. But I actually liked it that way and would probably do it the same way again.

This was another recipe that was tricky to cut and keep the layers together, but it still looked pretty.

My dad loves peanut butter blossom cookies and so even though he doesn't always love mint, we thought that he might like these Candy Cane Kiss Cookies. We probably over cooked these a teeny bit, because our oven was accidentally set on convection, but they were still delicious. Rachel made the same ones and hers came out thinner. My mom actually liked hers a bit more, but probably because we should have pulled ours out a minute or two sooner. I think that ours spread less because we chilled the dough for a few hours. So if you want them thicker, you should do that.

These are supposed to be made with nonpareils, but we didn't have enough, and I ended up liking having a mix with different sprinkles.

A fantastic peppermint recipe was Chocolate Dipped Peppermint Brownie Cookies. When we made the bark, crushing the candy canes was really hard and took FOREVER. But my mom found pre-crushed peppermints online. So we bought some before we made these cookies and it was so much easier! These cookies are sooooo good!! My Aunt Meggie sent me two chocolate peppermint cookie recipes for an opinion asking which she should make, but I think she should just make these instead!

My mom brought these cookies to work and everyone thought that she had bought them from a fancy bakery because they looked so pretty.

The cookie that we made with the funniest name was The Worst Christmas Cookie. But it's called that because it's so good that it ruins all other Christmas cookies! These cookies actually are really unbelievably good! My hip hop teacher Ice and my friend Gloria LOVED these!!!!

These have chocolate and toffee and m&ms in them and marshmallow fluff on top! They are amazing!

Another really good cookie that incorporated both chocolate and marshmallow was Hot Chocolate Cookies. I thought that the cookie base was better in the peppermint brownie cookies, but I really liked the ganache on top of these.

And I thought that these looked very pretty with the ganache on top. They'd look great on a holiday cookie tray.

A fun holiday treat that my mom made to surprise us in our Christmas lunch boxes was Reindeer Pretzels. These are very easy to make and looked super cute.

We used smaller pretzel dipping sticks, but you could also do this with bigger pretzel rods.

We also had red pepper candy canes, gingerbread man sandwiches and a Christmas tree sandwich. I love getting a holiday lunch box!

Every year, deciding what to give as gifts to all of our teachers is a big debate. This year we made chocolate peanut butter candy. We needed fifteen pans of it!!! I'm not linking the recipe though because there's a secret ingredient that I'm waiting for people to try to guess. So far I've gotten orange water, turmeric and sriracha as guesses. It isn't any of those! I'm still waiting for someone to get it, so you can add your guesses into the comments and I'll reveal the answer on my first post of 2023!!!!!

The color of these definitely gives a hint as to the secret ingredient...

Let me know if you try any of our holiday recipes or if you need any recommendations and have a great rest of the year everyone!!!!!!