O Christmas Treats

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The other day, Tom asked me what Christmas goodie I'm making this week. I thought it was kind of a weird question at first, but then it occurred to me that I've made at least one seasonal-flavored treat every week since the start of the Christmas season. So, in the spirit of the season, I've decided to list them and tell the story behind each one.

The week after Thanksgiving, neither Tom nor I had very much going on in the way of work. Tom had finals to work on, but I was bored out of my mind. So about halfway through the week, I pulled up Allrecipes.com and tried to find something to bake with ingredients we already had at home, and I came across a recipe for cinnamon cupcakes. These were awesome, and so simple. Actually, I did end up sending Tom out for one ingredient: frosting. :) The recipe made a huge batch, so we froze them and thawed them out a few days later to take to small group.

Every year, the ladies in our church do a gift exchange. Each person brings eight inexpensive gifts, and by the time the exchange is over, everyone should leave with eight different gifts. A lot of the gifts are homemade, so I decided to try making some ginger-scented pecans. I'd had the recipe for months but hadn't been able to justify making them until then. (The recipe makes a pretty big batch, and with nuts being so, well...caloric, I hesitated to keep them in the apartment for only the two of us to share.) The only time-consuming step was toasting the pecans, and that was only because I did it in cycles due to having to use cake pans instead of a baking sheet. Other than that, it was surprisingly easy! And delicious! They didn't get snatched up as quickly as some of the other items, but once they were, it seemed like they were a pretty big hit.

I'd been itching to try making peppermint bark, and I found a really simple recipe in a book my sister Beulah gave me a few years ago. This is by far the easiest seasonal recipe I've ever made: white chocolate chips, dark chocolate chips, and crushed candy canes. That's it. Melt the chips, stir in the candy, spread it out on some wax paper, stick it in the freezer, and break it up after it hardens. So easy. Sooooo good.

The Sunday before Christmas, our small group decided to do something a little more special than what we do for our usual Sunday night meetings. Since a lot of people in our group are coffee-drinkers, I thought biscotti would be a nice little treat to go with it. Tom has a book called How to Cook Everything, so I figured I'd better be able to find a recipe in there. Not only did it have a basic biscotti recipe, but it also had suggestions for how to jazz it up. One of the alternatives was to use almond extract instead of vanilla, and to add a cup of sliced almonds to the dough. I love anything almond-flavored, so I went with that idea. It was a little more involved than just baking cookies, but I guess that was to be expected. Also, the recipe didn't make quite as much as I expected, so I tried a batch of cinnamon which ended up being somewhat of a disaster, and I ended up not taking them to group anyway. But almond, yes, good.

Can anyone out there think of any Christmastime flavors I've overlooked? It's never too early to get ideas for next year...! Merry Christmas!

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