Wishing you Crantastic Holidays

Hi everyone! Holiday baking is some of my favorite and in the past few months we've been really into cranberry, as you can probably tell from my title! We had a cranberry breakfast cake throw down last weekend and did one version on Saturday morning and one version on Sunday. First up was Cranberry Sour Cream Kuchen. Everybody really enjoyed this cake. This one was my big-little sister's favorite and cranberry is one of her favorite ingredients and probably one our whole family too, She liked that it wasn't too sweet. And my mom really liked the flavor and crunch from the almonds in the topping.

It seems as if pecans and walnuts are more commonly used in breakfast cakes, but my mom is right that the almonds are really good in this one. Cashews are actually my favorite nut though, and you never really see those in coffee cakes. I think maybe that's something that we should try.

This cake has a cranberry layer between two layers of plain batter, which is a different approach from our other cranberry cake contender.

Our next cranberry breakfast cake was a Cranberry Pecan Cake. My brother and I liked this one more. I thought that this one had deeper flavor and I liked the heavier topping and icing plus there was more tartness from the cranberry because they were scattered around.

We made both of these cakes in a springform pan, but the recipes suggest multiple other pan options if you don't have one.

You can see how the cranberries in this cake are spread throughout, which I also preferred.

Another cranberry breakfast that we enjoyed was Cranberry Pancakes. My brother LOVED these and requested that my mom make them for us skiing which I think would be perfect. They have a cranberry compote, but do still need at least a touch of maple syrup to add some sweetness.

The recipe says to only simmer the cranberry compote for a minute, but we cooked it for longer to have our berries more broken down.

Another breakfast that I liked a lot was Apple Fritter Skillet Cake. I liked how the glaze and apples went together. My big-little sister didn't love it though. She thought that the apples and cake were too separate and that the cake wasn't flavorful enough. She's fussy about apples though, so I'm not sure that her criticism is very fair.

I think that cakes baked in cast iron skillets look very homey and nice. And it's great to be able to serve them right out of the pan.

The topping really does look like an apple fritter.

We made another apple butter recipe which was Homemade Slow Cooker Maple Apple Butter. I thought that this was indistinguishable from the last slow cooker apple butter that we made and talked about in my last post, but it's still good. We used it to make Skillet Gingerbread Cake with Apple Butter. Remember how I told you that we'd bought Swedish pearl sugar for a recipe but then couldn't remember which one?! Well we figured it out and it was for this!!!!! My mom and I love gingerbread and we loved this!

The smell and flavor of gingerbread feels like a warm hug to me!

The pearl sugar adds awesome crunch and it was extra good with whipped cream. Not surprisingly!

We went to Bermuda in October and had BLT Steak's Popovers there. My mom and dad had already had these popovers at other BLT Steak restaurants and really liked them so we were excited to try them too. My mom thought they were probably the best thing she ate on our entire Bermuda trip, but the ones we made at home were truly even better!!!!! The outside was crisp but the inside was soft and perfectly eggy.

I thought that the crust of the popovers at the restaurant was too dark and hard, but ours was perfect!

You can see the popover pan that we bought to make them. But we also made a bunch in regular muffin pans with our leftover batter and those turned out well too. They don't rise quite as high but I wouldn't skip making this recipe just because you don't want to buy a popover pan.

A huge hit was Stuffed Apple Pie Scones. To make these, you create two rounds of dough and then spread apple butter on top of one of the rounds and then stack the rounds together. You're supposed to freeze them for 15 minutes and then cut them and bake them, but we froze them for a couple of days and then just pulled them out as the oven preheated and cut them immediately before baking. But they turned out so perfectly that we'd just do it that way again next time anyway. We all thought that these were some of the best scones that we have ever made. They are fantastic. And we have tons of apple butter still if anyone who lives nearby wants to grab some and use it to give these a try!

These scones also bake into beautiful layers that look as good as they taste.

Continuing with our apple butter theme, we made Cinnamon Sugar Swirled Apple Butter Bread. This bread has multiple components. You make a batter that includes apple butter and then layer it in a loaf pan with a cream cheese layer, an apple layer, and a cinnamon sugar layer before adding more batter and then more cinnamon sugar on top.

The end result just looks like a bread with a cinnamon sugar top.

But when you cut it, you can see that there is more to it. I would have liked even more of a cream cheese swirl in this though.

A brand new type of recipe that we tried was called Syrniki, which are Ukranian cheese pancakes. These are made with farmer's cheese, which we had never even heard of. It's a variant of cottage cheese, but it's made by pressing the whey from the curds, so it's firmer. These don't have a cheese taste at all though. The cheese just impacts the texture.

First you make a batter and then you dredge scoops of it in flour.

Then you cook them on the griddle just like typical pancakes.

But even though these look like traditional pancakes, they taste quite different. They're not at all sweet and they're denser and chewier. It's traditional to serve them with sour cream, but you can also serve them with fruit and powdered sugar, which is what we did. The cheese and eggs gives them a lot of protein, so they were a good breakfast for a school day.

My dad requested that we make a Creamy Mushroom Wild Rice Soup and this one was great. It was creamy and savory and makes a great winter meal. The only downside of it is that it wouldn't freeze well because of the cream.

Wild rice is definitely my favorite type of rice. I love the texture.

We made Butternut Squash, Chickpea & Lentil Moroccan-Spiced Stew and my mom and I absolutely loved this. It's fantastic. Surprisingly, my dad really liked it too. As soon as I came home from dance, he started talking about how good this dinner was! We added a dollop of Greek yogurt on top and my dad and I thought that the yogurt added a lot.

Stews often look sort of dark and murky, but every bite of this brings something new and delicious!

Another fantastic recipe that we tried was Tangy Braised Chickpeas. My mom said that she could eat this every single night. It has a lot of flavor. We've been reading about how people eat in Blue Zones, which are places where people tend to be healthier and live longer. Beans tend to be a big part of most Blue Zone diets and this recipe is a great hearty meatless main dish.

The flavors in this are really amazing. It's like an umami bomb!

One of our biggest recent hits was Black Pepper Tofu with Bok Choy. This was honestly extraordinary. My dad was traveling when we made this (smart Mommy!), but our friend Steph came for dinner that night and she loved it too. Even if you think you're not into tofu, just trust me and try this. I actually really want to make this for my dad. If he gives it a chance, he couldn't not like it!

I love bok choy, but if it's not your thing, this would be great with really any vegetable.

Another good dinner was Spicy Shrimp and Chickpea Salad. This one maybe wasn't life altering, but it's a very good, solid recipe.

The chickpeas in this are very lemony. This is actually a recipe that would work very well in the summer too. It has a light freshness to it.

Definitely my dad's favorite dinner of the fall, and maybe one of his favorite dinners ever, was Sweet Chili Shrimp Stir Fry This is absolutely addictive and you should just make it immediately. We all loved it. Couldn't get enough. But one of the things that made it so good is that we made our own Sweet Chili Sauce. It was very easy to do and so much easier than bottled. The only problem with this recipe is that it includes making coconut rice and that was disastrous for us. The rice was hard and the coconut milk scorched our pan and so my mom had to just quickly make a pot of regular rice at the end. So maybe I'd skip the coconut rice part. But otherwise this is an A+++++++.

We used broccolini instead of asparagus, since asparagus isn't really in season, and I think I'd always make it that way.

Another great shrimp dish was Garlic Shrimp Bake. This is an easy recipe and we made it late on a busy night and it worked well. You just top shrimp with a mixture of bread crumbs, butter, cheese, garlic and herbs and bake.

We used panko breadcrumbs which I recommend because they're crispier.

We served the shrimp over Lemon Orzo and I really loved the orzo. I actually ate it plain for dinner the following night and I thought it was delicious. It would be great with grilled summer vegetables too. I want to try it as a grain jar for next summer at the beach for sure!

My brother thought that the shrimp and orzo went really well together. It was definitely a good combination.

A new pasta dish that we tried was Vegetarian Baked Spaghetti. This recipe has garlic and mushrooms and green peppers baked with pasta. It calls for jarred tomato sauce, but we just made a quick sauce with San Marzano tomatoes and herbs instead. It's a little more work, but makes a big difference.

We all loved baked pasta generally, but everybody liked this a lot. There's nothing not to like!

We had a special Nashville themed dinner one night. I'll explain more on what inspired that later, but it was amazing! We wanted to do some version of Nashville hot chicken. But not everybody likes things super spicy so we made Truly Crispy Oven Baked Chicken Tenders and served them with 5 Minute Honey Mustard Sauce, hot honey and Chef John's Buttermilk Biscuits. Everything on this plate was outstanding. The chicken was so good that every single one of us plus my friend Gloria had seconds. And the buttermilk biscuits were awesome.

We cut the biscuits in flower shapes because we didn't have the right size circle cookie cutter, but I thought that they looked really cute this way!

We were traveling for Thanksgiving this year and so my mom didn't cook. She knew that we were going to miss having some of our Thanksgiving favorites, and so she surprised us by giving us mini Thanksgiving lunches at school before we left. She made these Dijon-Roasted Brussels Sprouts and they were awesome. We'll definitely make these again.

I love Brussels sprouts and I love mustard and I loved this combination!

We also had my Grandma Linda's Streusel Yam Casserole and the recipe for that isn't online but I can send it to anybody who wants it.

This recipe and my Grandma Linda's cranberry recipe are my two favorite parts of Thanksgiving!

My mom couldn't put turkey and gravy in our lunches, but she used a recipe for Caraway Rye Dinner Rolls and made the cutest little turkeys! These rolls were excellent. I highly recommend them and I'm sure they'd be just as delicious in a normal shape!!

Doesn't this look cute? I pretended to carve mine!

Then for dessert, we had Mini Apple Pies. She used our new Foolproof Pie Dough recipe again for this, but she actually messed it up the first time and overprocessed it and had to start over. So I guess it's not exactly foolproof, but it just happened because she got distracted by my little-little sister and let the processor run too long!

I thought these pies were awesome. I loved the little lattice crusts! But my brother thought that because these were miniature, the crust to apple ratio was too high. I understand his point, but I liked them anyway.

I am a huge Taylor Swift fan and I've always known that there's a recipe for her favorite cookies, but for some reason we hadn't made them until now. But it turns out that on top of everything else, Taylor Swift is an amazing baker and judge of cookies because Taylor Swift's Chai Sugar Cookies are exceptional! Don't let the chai in the title turn you off. They're just a fantastic spiced frosted sugar cookie.

The frosting in these is made with eggnog, which I've never tasted or cooked with before. But everything in these goes together perfectly.

Chewy Brown Sugar Maple Cookies are extremely highly rated online and they're good, but they have many steps and components and seem a bit overrated. I actually think that about a lot of recipes from Half Baked Harvest. They're definitely good, but maybe not as good as the reviews would suggest.

I will say that these look very pretty though and highlight classic fall flavors.

My friend Gloria loves Kinder candy and so we bought different kinds of it for her birthday party, but then we had lots of Kinder left over and needed something to do with it. So the first recipe that we made was Kinder Cookies. These are outstanding. They are soft and delicious.

We put pieces of Kinder bars in the tops at the end so that you could really see what they were and I really liked how that looked.

Then we also made Kinder Bueno Cookie Bars and I liked these even more than the cookies! This recipe has two different kinds of Kinder in them and I liked the combination.

You can see how these bars have lots of chocolate in them. I don't like it when recipes claim to feature a specific kind of candy and then there isn't enough of it to really showcase the flavor.

One of the best bars we've made in a long time was Loaded Fudgy Candy Bar Brownies. These are fudgy and fantastic and I want to try this as our new brownie base.

The only issue with these is that they didn't cut prettily, but we cut them at room temperature. They might cut more cleanly if we tried cutting them cold.

A less successful recipe was Gooey Gingerbread S'mores Bars. The gingerbread base was too cakey and it didn't go well with the s'mores topping. We'd like the s'mores topping over chocolate and the gingerbread cake with frosting. But together, this wasn't that great.

The topping looked great though. I'd actually really like to try it on a peanut butter bar base.

So after our gingerbread s'more disappointment, we tried again with Gingerbread Cookie Bars and these were better by a lot. I hate it when "bar" recipes just give you a rectangular cake instead of a denser, chewy bar. But this recipe delivers. The gingerbread base is definitely a bar and this has a cream cheese frosting, which works much better with gingerbread than the marshmallows did.

We added holiday sprinkles to up the festive factor!

Probably our biggest baking success of recent months was Cranberry Crumble Pie Bars. More people requested this recipe than maybe anything we've ever made. An interesting thing about this recipe is that we made it two ways. The recipe calls for orange zest and orange juice and so we made it that way the first time, and the bars were fantastic. But my mom doesn't love orange in baked goods and since the first round was such a hit, we thought we'd try it with lemon and maybe make a great recipe even greater! And sure enough, we all liked the lemon version even more, except for my brother. He liked orange best, but the truth is that either version is fantastic. This recipe is a total winner.

And these bars even cut nicely! They really are great on every dimension.

A more controversial recipe was Peanut Butter Blossom Bars. We made these because my dad loves peanut butter blossom cookies, and so we thought we'd put a different spin on those and surprise him with a bar version when he was coming home from a busy travel week. He liked these, but prefers cookies because he says that he likes chocolate in every bite and I agreed with him about that. But my big-little sister liked these much more than cookies and said that she'd make these with no chocolate at all if she could.

These bars were a teeny bit dry for me, but I think I'd just try baking them for a few minutes shorter next time. These actually might be a good bar to add the gingerbread s'mores topping to!

A great and not too sweet fall dessert was Spice Cake. This is a mild cake with cream cheese frosting. My brother thought that the frosting overwhelmed the cake, but the rest of us really loved this one.

I liked the look of a pile of frosting with soft peaks.

This is a simple cake and would be a great choice for brunch or tea.

My little-little sister definitely liked this one!!!!!!!

Then of course we made cute holiday themed treats for Thanksgiving and Hanukkah and Christmas. We made chocolate covered Oreo turkeys and I thought that these were adorable. It was one of those recipes that turned out to be trickier than it looks though because it's hard to keep the oreos from falling apart once you put the lollipop sticks in.

We made a gluten free version using gluten free Oreos for my cousin Johan and that worked really well for anyone with a wheat allergy.

Another fun one was turkey drumstick Rice Krispie Treats using our favorite recipe. We stuck mini marshmallows onto the ends of pretzel rods and dipped them in white chocolate to make the bones.

We gave these away and people loved them!

We took a recipe for Christmas Sugar Cookie Bars and decorated them for Hanukkah instead. I brought these in for my class at school and people really loved them. They were sweet, but not too sweet because they have a cream cheese frosting rather than buttercream.

I thought that the Hanukkah sprinkles looked great.

These cut beautifully.

It isn't a recipe, but a super special Hanukkah treat that we made was a s'menorah!!! We had to light each marshmallow individually because trying to light the marshmallows off of each other was way too hard. But this was really fun to do!

We realized that we didn't have graham crackers for these, but s'mores with biscoff cookies are amazing!

A recipe that people really liked was Marshmallow-Surprise Hot Cocoa Cookies. I thought that these were good, although maybe not remarkable, but Grazzy said that these were the best cookies she had ever eaten!!! One thing about this recipe though is that I thought that these cookies were definitely best on the day that they were baked. They were still fine the next day, but not the same.

They looked adorable and would be a great holiday gift.

My favorite Christmas treat that we made was brownie trees. We used Seriously Fudgy Homemade Brownies as our base recipe. These were super fun to decorate and I liked the artsy component of the process in picking out the order of M&M's. We trialed lots of different color patterns, but I thought that blue to red looked best! The brownies themselves were super chocolatey and I thought that they were some of the best brownies we had ever made. The hardest part was poking the candy canes in because there were chocolate chips in the brownies and I had to be careful not to break them or mess up the tree shape.

The finished product was totally worth the effort and looked very original.

Another cute Christmas treat was Salted Peanut Butter Christmas Trees. We had leftover frosting from the brownie trees so we used it again. I thought that these were good and had great flavor, but I would have liked a little more salt. The name makes you expect a sweet salty combination, but there really isn't the salty component. There's actually no salt in this recipe other than the salt on the pretzels and that's not enough to stand up to the sweetness of the chocolate and sugar. But people did love these. So it isn't that the recipe isn't good. It's that it's poorly named!

But salty or not, these looked awesome!

For our Christmas lunch boxes, my mom made these Santa Oreos and they were adorable! This isn't really a recipe, but making these is a fun project that kids can do.

She dipped the cookies in white chocolate and red candy melts and then added the mini marshmallows, mini chocolate chips and mini m&ms.

We always make teacher appreciation gifts and distribute them on last day of school before winter break. This year we made two fantastic peppermint recipes. The first one was Peppermint Brownies. I absolutely love the combination of chocolate and peppermint, so I thought that these were really good. The best part about these is that they have a frosting layer that tastes just like the inside of a peppermint patty. But if I were going to make these again, I'd swap out the brownie base for a fudgier recipe. I didn't think that the brownie base was as good as it could have been.

These looked great packaged in candy boxes.

Our second peppermint recipe was Peppermint Bark Fudge and this was amazing. We made more pans than I can count and this was definitely my preferred reicipe.

These were an amazing texture. They're very easy to make and you get a fantastic result with minimal effort.

Our other teacher gift recipe was something that we made up using a a Sponge Candy base. You might remember that we made sponge candy before for National sponge candy day a few months ago. Traditionally squares of sponge candy are dipped in chocolate, but we broke ours into chunks and made clusters with it. We wanted to try it this way because we needed to make so many and it goes much faster to mix it all together, than to dip individual pieces. We gave out more than 50 boxes of candy! But we ended up genuinely liking it this way more. The big blocks of sponge candy can be hard to bite into and this way gives you a better mixing with the chocolate.

These look like turtles and so people are surprised when it turns out to be something totally different!

So of course Thanksgiving and Hanukkah and Christmas and New Years are all big important holidays this time of year, but there's another very important December holiday which is Taylor Swift's birthday!!!! Obviously we had to celebrate, and so we had a birthTAY party! That's why we had our Nashville dinner. And then we also used our Confetti Sprinkle Cupcakes recipe to make Eras Tour cupcakes! We made these late after a day that my mom worked and then had to meed me at ballet to see my winter observation week. So when we got home after all of that, she wasn't sure about trying to make ten different colors of icing and then piping them, but I convinced her and at the end she agreed that she was really glad we did it!

If you're not familiar with The Eras Tour, each era is a segment of the show and corresponds with one of Taylor's albums. The first era was Taylor Swift and that is her big country album, so I decorated this one with a cowboy boot. My favorite part was adding the glitter to this cupcake which I did by misting it on with a spray bottle!

Green is the color that represents this album on the tour posters. This era was the inspiration for my big-little sister's concert outfit.

The next era is Fearless. She created her signature heart gesture during the original Fearless Tour, so we featured that gesture on our Fearless cupcakes.

And in case you can't tell, Fearless is yellow!

Speak Now is a dreamy crossover to her pop eras, so it's a pretty era with princess vibes.

I loved the purple and gold sprinkles that we used on these.

Our Red Era cupcakes featured some of her signature accessories and meaningful references from her Red Tour.

Rachel dressed from the Red era when we went to the concert. And my mom dressed from the Red era when we went to the movie.

Her 1989 Era features a song called Welcome to New York and so that and her outfits from that part of the show inspired our 1989 cupcakes.

It didn't photograph well, but the sanding sugar we used on these matched the frosting beautifully and made them sparkle.

My favorite cupcake was from Reputation because a snake is the symbol of that era and so we topped our cupcake with a gummy snake!

We didn't make a lot of Reputation cupcakes because we were worried about the black frosting, but once I saw how cool this one looked, I wished that we had made more.

My big-little sister's favorites were our Lover Era cupcakes. The combination of pink frosting and pastel sprinkles looked awesome.

We really got the shade of pink for this frosting exactly right!

The next era is Folklore, which includes a song called Mirrorball, so our Mirrorball cupcake was another one of my favorites.

I was hesitant about gray icing too, but I actually think that this color looks beautiful!

After Folklore comes Evermore and this is one of the very best eras in the show. The music is beautiful and the set for this part is very elaborate and artistic.

Evermore colors are orange and green earth tones. Our orange was a little bit too bright, but we were worried that if we tried to make it earthier we'd just create murky mush.

And then the final era is Midnights, which is why we used the clock set to midnight!

I loved how the dark blue frosting and silver star sprinkles looked like the night sky!

So I hope that all the Swifties reading this appreciate these cupcakes and that the rest of you have been okay humoring me! I hope that you all have amazing holidays and that 2024 is a wonderful era for all of us!!!!!!!!