Trader Joe’s Chocolate Peppermint Loaf and Baking Mix ($2.99 per box) is as good as you’re hoping it is. I baked it up in three mini loaves over the weekend and topped it with some candy cane shards from the bottom of the Peppermint Bark bag.
ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley
You don't have to be a Grinch to be looking for something other than a heartwarming, feel good Christmas romance.
I went in to The Sergeant’s Christmas Siege by Megan Crane looking for the Die Hard version of Christmas romantic suspense, and it delivers. I came…
This year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday book deals didn’t do much for me, which means hopefully I’ll have a few more dollars to spend on December new releases. Usually as the year winds down, I use December to catch up on books that I meant to read, but didn’t. The thing is, the…
In the avalanche of holiday treats Trader Joe's rolled out over the last month, one new one caught my eye: Trader Joe's Bourbon Cake mix ($3.49 per box). I've generally liked Trader Joe's boxed mixes and used their lemon cake as the base for my Lemon Elderflower Cake for the Royal Wedding. Bourbon is the…
Chex Mix has been a family holiday tradition my entire life, and probably even before I was around. My aunt used to make it with the requisite Chex cereal, mixed nuts, pretzels and wheat nuts (which I'm not even sure exist anymore). We've never been a garlic bagel chip or Cheez-It, or Goldfish family. But…
Trader Joe's Holiday 2018 products are beginning to hit stores. The company previewed its holiday products on its Inside Trader Joe's podcast, episode 8. Included in its 2018 holiday offerings are buche de Noel ice cream, an advent calendar for dogs, cranberry persimmon relish and perennial favorites, Peppermint Joe-Joe's and Peppermint Pretzel Thins. Keep your…
"Two fingers," he'd say, holding two gnarled, deeply tanned digits up to his glass.
Reaching into the sideboard cabinet, he pulled out a half empty bottle. He poured two fingers worth of brown liquor into the rocks glass and I followed, holding the carton with two hands and topping the booze with at least two more fingers of eggnog. Some years it was Wild Turkey and others Crown Royal, but always whiskey with eggnog.
Like a lot of Japanese-American men of his generation, my grandpa wasn't a super talkative man, but he'd sit at the kitchen table and shoot the s**t over a glass of spiked eggnog, getting chattier as he got deeper into his cups. Even now, there's nothing like a whiff of whiskey and eggnog and nutmeg to put me right back at that table with him during the holidays.
My love for hot cross buns is well documented in the pages of this blog. But I only ever seem to think of them around Easter, when really, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be enjoying sweetened yeast buns with just a hint of spice, currants and candied fruit any ol’ time. Which is what made these Spice Cookies my first choice for this month’s baking theme for Tasting Jerusalem.
You get the flavors of hot cross buns, the spice, the currants, the citrus in cookie form. And while it may seem slightly odd to be making spice cookies in the spring, because the truth is they do taste like the holidays, I couldn’t resist.
I've mentioned before that Betty Crocker's Snickerdoodles are a mainstay of my holiday baking repertoire. It's a cookie I've loved since I was a kid and it's one of Wolf's favorites, too. While he was in NYC this weekend, sending me jealous-making photos from Momofuku Noodle Bar and Il Laboratorio del Gelato, I was in the kitchen whipping up these cookies. (Good man, he brought me some Milk Bar cookies).
With just a quick tweak, you get the cinnamon you're expecting in a snickerdoodle, but with a slow building smoky heat from the chipotle. Two additional changes I do make to the original recipe -- add 1/2 t. vanilla and up the salt to 1/2 t. as well.
Betty's, but one better.
Every Christmas, I find myself making the same cookies. For every other holiday, it's ok to add new dishes, but at Christmas, there’s something comforting about tradition, about knowing that there will be snickerdoodles and chocolate crinkles and that my mom will probably send me a batch of candy cane cookies. But if tradition is just something you’ve done more than once, these chocolaty, coconutty, walnut-studded "brownie meets German chocolate cake" cookies are going to be a new holiday tradition.
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