It's been a while since my last post, and what better way to renew the blog than with holiday baking! For the renewal of this blog, my dear friend Veronica and I will be co-hosting many of the entries. Last week we had our annual holiday baking extravaganza. In one day, we try to make a couple dozen different kinds of cookies. We have our favorites, and we try new recipes, and overall have a fun, exhausting day.
This year we made five different kinds of cookies, a tray of baklava, and Veronica made four dozen of her incredible cinnamon rolls.
The cookies we made are: snowballs (also known as Russian tea cakes), rocky road bars, hello Dolly's, rugelach, and ginger cookies. The rugelach recipe came from Food Network's website, the snowballs is a family recipe, and the rest came from the fantastic "The Ultimate Cookie Book" by Catherine Atkinson.
Overall the baking went really well. The day started with putting together the dough for the rugelach, as that needed to cool in the fridge for at least an hour before rolling. When it came time to roll the dough, we used a small marble slab, which made rolling the dough much smoother and easier. We focused on the more time consuming items first. Veronica started in on her first batch of cinnamon rolls, and Bekah started chopping up walnuts and pecans for the rugelach, baklava, snowballs, and hello Dolly's.
When it came time to make the baklava, we didn't have enough chocolate chips. We did, though, have plenty of powdered sugar and unsweetened cocoa powder. Veronica, nonchalantly used a double-boiler to make her truffle chocolate, which was so incredibly smooth and decadent. It smoothed out nicely on the filo dough, and after the baklava had set, it piped well for a decorative top.
Our 'runt' of the baking day turned out to be the ginger cookies. We had bought some candied ginger for the top of the cookie, but, it turned out, no powdered ginger for the baking. Veronica used mace as a substitute, as it is in the same 'flavor family'. The cookie came out very crunchy and, well, a bit hard. This was one of the new recipes, so we didn't know what to expect. Our resident ginger-lover, Bekah's boyfriend, Neil, gave us our 'official' review, and unfortunately he felt that the cookies definately needed more ginger. We may try this recipe again in the future, but we'll definately need to have some proper ginger powder on hand!
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