Happy New Year!

I hope that everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving, Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year (that's a lot of holidays!)!!

We had a nice family Thanksgiving, even though covid meant that we didn't get to see my grandparents and aunt and uncle and cousins like I hoped, and since then, we have been crazy about cranberries!! We had never really baked with cranberries before, but then we ended up with extra that we didn't need for our cranberry sauce, and so we wanted to use them up. It turns out, WE LOVE THEM!!!!!

We made three kinds of cranberry muffins. The first Fresh Cranberry Muffins were the simplest. My sister loved these muffins. They are very easy to make and light and delicious.

You can't really see it in the picture, but you sprinkle sanding sugar on top of these which adds nice crunch and looks pretty. But if you wanted to, it would be very easy to add a streusel topping or a glaze.

We also made Cranberry Crumb Muffins. These were a big hit, but they were a lot of work for muffins, just because they required lots of bowls to mix different groups of ingredients together. I think they'd be worth making again, and I might try skipping a few of the steps and just mixing things together and seeing what happened!

My mom doesn't love muffins with crumb toppings because we make a mess when we eat them, but I think it's worth it!

Unfortunately we forgot to take a picture of our third cranberry muffin (you might notice that missing pictures is a theme of this blog post!) Our third kind was Chocolate Cranberry Muffins, which are made with white chocolate. These muffins are awesome and were easy to make in advance. My mom made the batter the night before and then baked them before work the next morning and they came out great. If you can only make one cranberry muffin this winter, I'd pick this one!

It turns out that white chocolate and cranberries are generally a really good combination. Do you remember the Baked Oatmeal I blogged about here? Well we made it again (of course we don't have a picture of that either) and this time we topped it with dried cranberries, white chocolate chips and toasted almonds. Everybody LOVED it. My brother said it was one of the best breakfasts that we had ever made. Another thing that we did differently this time is that we baked it in a Le Creuset casserole dish. The edges turned out crispy, sort of like oatmeal paella, and that was everyone's favorite part.

We also made a Cranberry Breakfast Cake. This comes from the same website as the first cranberry muffins and they're similar. This is just a cake form. I liked them both but if I had to choose, I think that I liked the cake more!

I liked how the top got crisp and crackly.

Of course, we made some not cranberry breakfasts too! We made a Pumpkin Coffee Cake with Oat Pecan Streusel. This recipe is definitely on the healthier side. It has a crumbly texture. My sister and I liked it a lot, but my brother and mom didn't really. The best healthy baking should really be as good as less-healthy baking and since everyone didn't like it, this cake probably isn't.

This cake is gluten free, which is useful if anyone you know has celiac disease (this might be good for Rachel's brother!).

One of my favorite breakfasts that we have made lately was Baked Egg Boats. I loved this breakfast because it is eggs and toast combined and you don't have to make the different components separately. You hollow out a baguette and then fill it with a mixture of eggs, cheese, pancetta and green onions.

The egg mixture firms as it bakes in the oven, and then you serve slices. This was a great filling breakfast to have before skiing!

An excellent cold weather dinner that we had one night was Homestyle Chicken Noodle Soup. This recipe is amazing. My mom cooked the noodles separately and then added them just before we ate. This was a good move because it kept the noodles from getting too soft and mushy.

I thought that this soup looked perfect. And the lemon and dill in it add fantastic flavor.

We thought that we were going to have a big Thanksgiving, but it ended up just being the six of us (and my littlest sister doesn't even count!), so we had LOTS of leftovers!!! We decided it would be a fun project to see what new recipes we could make with them. One of my favorites was Thanksgiving Leftover Pizza. My mom had seen this recipe, which gave us the idea, but we didn't really follow it.

We used traditional pizza crust and spread mashed potatoes over it and drizzled it with gravy. Then we added chopped up turkey, chopped up brussels sprouts, green beans and cheddar cheese. We baked it and then we added dollops of cranberry sauce at the end. My dad didn't think he'd like this, but he actually did. He preferred it without the cranberry, but I liked it with.

It's hard to tell what everything is in this picture, but it actually looked pretty. And even though it sounds weird, it turns out that Thanksgiving leftover pizza is actually delicious.

We also made Cheesy Leftover Mashed Potato Waffles. For this recipe, you make a waffle mixture with mashed potatoes, eggs and buttermilk. You're supposed to use scallions, but we didn't have any, so we just added herbs instead. These were a hit with everyone. They were somehow both light and fluffy, but also very rich, just like mashed potatoes!

I loved that these had crispy edges, but soft centers.

A fun Christmas recipe that we made was a Pull-Apart Christmas Tree. You make this by rolling balls of pizza dough around pieces of mozzarella. Then you shape them like a Christmas tree, bake them and brush them with parmesan herb butter. We put this out with cheese and charcuterie for a holiday lunch.

We served this with sauce for dipping that my Grammy Marcia and Papa Bill make with fresh tomatoes from their garden!

Hoppin John is a Southern dish made with black eyed peas that is supposed to bring good luck for the New Year. There are different theories as to why it is called Hoppin John. Some people think it is named after an old man called Hoppin John who used to sell peas and rice in Charleston. Other people say that it is named that because children would hop around the table in excitement when it was being served. It also isn't clear why it is associated with good luck. One theory is that enslaved people in the South used to eat it between Christmas and New Years, when they didn't have to work because crops weren't growing, and that they ate it with collard greens which looked like paper money and cornbread which was golden and the peas looked like coins. We had never had it before, but decided to try it this year, and everybody loved it so much that we ate it for three nights in a row! My brother said it was one of his favorite dinners that we had ever made.

Black eyed peas are really more like beans than peas.

Of course we made lots of good holiday desserts. For Thanksgiving, we made a butterscotch pie. My mom hates making it, but it is amazing and for the second year in a row, we forgot to take a picture. So I promise that next year we will DEFINITELY remember to take a picture of our butterscotch pie.

Another dessert that we made Thanksgiving weekend was caramel apple pie sundaes. Remember all of the stuff we baked using our salted caramel sauce? Well this is another recipe that we used it for! We cooked apples in butter with cinnamon and sugar and then we put them over vanilla ice cream with candied walnuts and salted caramel sauce. These sundaes were fantastic! And they would be good to serve to guests because you can make the caramel sauce, the apples and the nuts all in advance.

These sundaes looked and smelled incredible.

We made a Cranberry Curd Tart and this is actually where our cranberry craze began! This crust uses rice flour, so it just happens to be gluten free. The recipe calls for hazelnuts, but we used macadamia nuts because we like them more and this ended up being my mom's favorite crust ever! We would definitely use it with other recipes. This cranberry tart is a little bit of a pain to make, but it was totally worth it and would be a fantastic Thanksgiving dessert. It is a tart tart (ha ha) and would be great after a meal of rich food. Rachel even used this recipe for a family pie contest!

We pureed our curd with an immersion blender which helps give it such pretty color. We probably should have piped whipped ream rosettes, but we were too tired to bother, so we just piled it on!

We had extra egg whites left over from making our cranberry curd tart, and so we used them to make meringues. We wanted to make something new though, so we made Peppermint Bark Meringues. These were fun to make and are a great project for kids. First we made a typical meringue base, except that we added peppermint extract. Then we put stripes of red food coloring in a piping bag (we should have taken pictures of this step), before filling it with our meringue batter and piping out the cookies. Then after we baked them, we dipped the bottoms in chocolate and crushed peppermints.

The stripes of food coloring give these a cool red and white swirl.

This is what the bottoms looked like.

Then we put them in jars to give as gifts. My teacher, Mrs. Elmer, loved hers but she was nice and shared them with her family! I thought that these jars looked very festive!

One of my mom's favorite holiday recipes was Soft Gingerbread Cookies with Maple Glaze. These started a bit of a gingerbread phase, so expect some more gingerbread recipes coming soon! These were soft and the maple glaze added great flavor. We gave lots of these away. My friend Gloria loved them!

I thought these looked super cute decorated.

My mom wanted to surprise us with something special after school one day and so she made these Chocolate Christmas Tree Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting. She doubled the frosting and there still wasn't very much. The recipe just gives enough for a very thin coating, so if you want a typical amount of cupcake frosting, you probably need to triple or quadruple it! These looked great, but the actual cupcakes aren't as good as some other recipes we've tried. I'd probably keep the decorating ideas next time, but use another recipe.

You make the trees by drizzling colored melted chocolate over a pretzel stick and then putting on sprinkle "ornaments." The coconut is supposed to look like snow, but you could leave it off if you don't like coconut.

Going back to our cranberry craze, we also made Cranberry Crumble Pie Bars. This is a recipe that uses the same mixture for the crust and the crumb topping, which is always good because it saves a lot of time. These were fantastic. I gave some to Chelsea when she took me to dance and she loved them!!

The recipe includes an orange icing, but we skipped that part because we didn't think we'd like it, and they were still great!

Another one of my mom's favorite recipes was Cookie Butter Stuffed Blondies. It's hard to explain how good these are!!! This recipe uses an unusual technique. You cook half of the blondie batter before you add on the cookie butter filling and more blondie batter and finish cooking. We used Biscoff cookie butter. If you like the flavors of Biscoff cookies, but want them in a softer version, you'll LOVE these!

I think you can tell from the picture how gooey and delicious these are!

My parents have been watching a TV show called Ted Lasso that is set in the UK. The main character bakes shortbread, but they call them biscuits. My mom came across this recipe for Ted Lasso's Shortbread Biscuits Copycat and wanted to try it. This recipe is extremely easy and only has five ingredients, so it's a good kid project and it turns out great!

This shortbread makes the house smell really good while it bakes. Some people light candles that smell liked baked goods, but we never need that in our house!!

Another very good easy baking project for kids is Peanut Butter S'more 7 Layer Bars. You just make a graham cracker crust and then layer on all of the other ingredients.

You can see most of the ingredients in this picture. There are peanuts, peanut butter cups and marshmallows.

Most s'more bar recipes have you add the marshmallows at the very end. These bake the whole times, so that they become caramelized and chewy, which I liked more.

We also made Chocolate Peanut Butter Pretzel Blondies. I thought that these were okay, but not great. My dad and brother liked them, but my mom didn't like them at all. They came out dry. If you try them, definitely cook them for a shorter time than the recipe says, because that might help with the texture.

Another problem with this recipe is that the pretzels fell off of the top with cutting, so I'd probably mix them into the batter more next time.

Do you remember how I told you on my last post that our next cooking project was going to take 100 hours to make? Well we got it done, and we even made two versions! We read an article about making 100 Hour Brownies and decided to give it a try. First you make a batter. As brownie batters go, it's pretty complicated. The batter includes browned butter, espresso powder, cocoa powder, a coffee ice cube, melted chocolate and two kinds of chopped chocolate. Then you let that sit in the fridge for 3 days. Then you bake the brownies, freeze the hot pan for 30 minutes and then put it back in the fridge for ANOTHER 24 hours. My mom said that she hated this recipe as we were making the batter, so of course that meant that we ended up doing it again within a day!!!! It was actually my fault. I had the idea that on the day the 100 hour brownies were ready to eat, we should make the recipe again but bake it and eat it right away, as soon as it was cooled, to see if all of the waiting actually made a difference. Basically it was a baking science experiment!

Both versions of this recipe are VERY chocolatey. The ones that we baked and ate right away were already super chocolatey, but the ones that sat for 100 hours turned out to be even more intense. My mom loves chocolate, but said that eating them felt like being punched in the face with chocolate! We had a taste test and let 17 people vote. It turned out that more people liked the version where we skipped all the waiting!

I'm excited for more winter baking. There are definitely going to be some gingerbread recipes coming, but let me know if you have other ideas for what we should bake next!