Showing posts with label holidays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label holidays. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Valentine's Cupcakes

I tell you, I'm exhausted. It's only Tuesday morning and already it's a hell of week. Between dealing with car issues and meeting with clients, I feel like my brainpower has already been sapped for the next few days. So I'm not going to say too much about these cupcakes - I'll just post the pictures. We can all appreciate a little eye candy, right?




Link

ETA: You can read about how I made the royal icing decorations here and see where I used the rest of them here.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Valentine's Cookies

As promised, here are some pictures of the cookies I made this week. Rolled sugar cookies (using this recipe) with vanilla glaze, royal icing motifs, and piped buttercream. I had so much fun making these! I need to do this more. Enough blather - I'll let the pictures do the talking.



Have a great weekend, everyone!

P.S. To see more of my cookie photos, click here.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Family Tradition: Grammy's Cookies

In my family, on Christmas Eve, desserts take center stage. Yes, the ham and the macaroni and cheese are important -- God forbid anyone try to change that menu -- but that spread pales in comparison to a dessert table so weighted down with homemade cookies and candy that it is shocking the table still stands. My mother and grandmother would spend the month of December crafting peanut butter fudge, chocolate fudge, needhams (aka potato candy), penuche, peanut butter cups, and out-of-this-world candies. The cookies might vary a bit from year to year but the old standbys are peanut butter blossoms, spritz, and sugar cookies.


Oh, the sugar cookies! For years, my grandmother would spend days rolling and cutting Christmas trees, stars, stockings, candy canes, reindeer, elephants (my grandmother collects elephant figurines), and Santas. Another day would be devoted to glazing the cookies and, once the glaze dried to a shiny finish, piping on the final details. The cookies are highly coded, the decorations painstakingly proscribed; the specific design patterns are as much a tradition as the Christmas Eve gathering itself.

Growing up, just about every year, I would help my grandmother decorate the cookies. It was from her that I learned how to make a vanilla glaze, how to make buttercream frosting, how to use gel colors and how to pipe intricate designs. This year, for the first time, instead of aiding Grammy, I got to take responsibility for the whole process. I had a lot of fun making these cookies, and I hope you enjoy looking at these pictures. Click here to see more.



Monday, December 22, 2008

Year in Review: Thanksgivings

When it comes to holidays, we are a family cemented to tradition. Change and innovation do not come lightly. Something as a simple as the suggestion of a change to the Christmas Eve menu has been known to cause actual rioting. So it's no surprise that on Thanksgiving, our table has always been filled with traditional fare: turkey, of course, plus gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips, cranberry sauce, dinner rolls, and roughly one 9" pie for every two people in attendance. Delicious, indulgent, tryptophan-triggering? Of course. But I felt something was missing: the color green. So I asked my mom, who hosted this year's get-together, if I could bring brussels sprouts.


As I mentioned in my review of The Harrison, I love brussels sprouts. This is not an enduring affection but rather a newfound passion, still young and bright and wallowing in the puppy-love stage. You see, prior to this fall, I had never tasted brussels sprouts. Never. But we got some in our CSA one week and for me, it was love at first bite.

For Thanksgiving, I sliced three pounds of loose sprouts in to halves and roasted them with a little olive oil at 400 degrees for about forty minutes. The outsides turn dark, nearly black, but the inside becomes a soft, creamy treat. I tossed the roasted sprouts with crisped pancetta, grated parmesano-reggiano, and some lemon juice. The sprout eaters at the table were very satisfied, and I got to eat the leftovers for days.

Incidentally, this year there was another green dish: Aunt Liz's spinach casserole, which is absolutely delicious. I'm going to get the recipe from her and will write about it in a separate post soon after I do.

You may have noticed the s in the title and thought it a typo. It's not; this year, we were blessed with two Thanksgiving dinners, as my in-laws decided to push their celebration up a few weeks and have a Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings in late October, to coincide with a visit from Great-Aunt Rose. The menu was similar to that at my mother's, with a few variations. Lynn, my mother-in-law, makes an awesome homemade cranberry sauce (while my side of the family is married to the canned kind). Also, because Lynn is Armenian, instead of mashed potatoes, she serves pilaf. (Pilaf holds a very special place in my husband's heart, so years ago I secured his mother's/grandmother's recipe; when he asks what's for dinner and my response includes pilaf, I'm guaranteed praise for days.)


For this early Thanksgiving dinner, I made a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and busted out my piping tips to add some old-school decorations. The pattern was not planned: I just went where the frosting took me, which was apparently back to the 1970s, as the bright orange frosting, inspired by the frosting carrots that top bakery carrot cakes, reminds me of nothing more than the orange formica countertops in the chalet my family once owned.

The carrot cake (based on this recipe -- I skipped the pineapple and used whole wheat flour) was moist and delicious and I had fun making it. My decorating skills have deteriorated, though, so I might have to start using my piping tips more often.