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Easy Mulled Wine Recipe

Christmas is just a few short hours away, which means that hopefully, you have done all of your holiday shopping, you have your holiday outfit picked out, and you are already enjoying time with your family.

If you answered no to the first two, I am not sure how much I can help with that. But if its spending time with your family you are worried about, I have just the trick: mulled wine!

Mulled wine is the perfect holiday drink for those who are not into eggnog. First of all, it’s wine. Who doesn’t need a little wine when hanging out with the fam? Also, it’s a warm drink which is great for these cold winter days. Lastly, it’s actually really easy to make! Of course, that is key when you are running around the day before Christmas trying to tie up any loose ends. 

Mulled wine gets its flavor from oranges and some classic Christmas spices. Mainly, clove, cinnamon, and cardamom. 

First, bring water, sugar, and the orange peel to a boil to get all those flavors out of the orange zest. Then add the spices. Hopefully, you already have some whole spices on hand (if not, you may need to make a quick trip to the store). Let the spices get all cozy with the orange zest, then turn down the heat before adding in the wine. 

It is very important that you don’t boil the wine.

I repeat, DON’T BOIL THE WINE!

If you boil the wine, all of the alcohol will cook out of the wine, which is the opposite of what you want to happen. 

After about 15 minutes, remove the spices from the wine. Now it’s ready to serve.

I like to add some orange slices to the wine to add a little more orange flavor. 

For those who haven’t had mulled wine before, it reminds me a lot of sangria with a little extra spice. It delicious, trust me. 

And it’s perfect for holiday parties, family gatherings, or when you can’t decide between a warm drink and wine. With mulled wine, you can have both!

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Classic Danish Butter Cookies with a Modern Twist

Danish butter cookies are one of my favorites! I don’t know about you, but around the holidays one of those blue tins always popped up around my house. Whether we got it as a gift or bought it to give as a gift, which I would proceed to eat anyways (sorry, Mom). 

This year I decided to try my hand at making my own Danish butter cookies, which turned out to be so much easier than I anticipated. The dough is just like sugar cookie dough, but not quite as dry. You want to be able to pipe it through a piping tip after all.

I also wanted to mix things up a bit and color my dough for the various shapes of the cookies. I kept it plain for the classic pretzel shape, green for the wreath, and red for the rose.

Since Thanksgiving I have been trying to think of ways I could make flower shaped cookies, using my piping tips. Little did I know the answer was right under my nose!

For the roses I used a 2D tip,the wreath a #32 tip (although you could go a tad bigger), and for the pretzel I used a #10 tip.

Now, the hardest part about these cookies is piping them. Recruit someone with strong forearms, like a baseball player, bowler, tug-of-war champion to do this part for you. 

If you don’t have access to anyone like that, just use two hands to pipe out the dough.

Once they are piped, they can get sprinkled with some sugar or go straight into the oven.

While they do puff up and spread out in the oven, they still maintain their cute shapes! I mean, those roses….I love them! 

I think these butter cookies will be one of my go-to Christmas cookies from here on out. Not only are they a classic, but you can give them a but of a modern touch with some food coloring and different piping tips. 

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Peppermint Bark Chocolate Shortbread Cookies

How many versions of peppermint bark are there? Tons, I bet. I think I have made half of them, myself. It’s a holiday staple!

But there can always be more, right? So I thought I would add this cookie version of peppermint bark into the mix. (Although, I’m sure someone else has already thought of this, so it’s just new to me.

What I like about these peppermint bark chocolate Shortbread cookies is that they are, well, cookies. I would pick a chocolate cookie over a chocolate bar, any day of the week. But for those that need a chocolate fix, there is a nice white chocolate coating.

Speaking of which, for the white chocolate coating of these peppermint bark cookies I just melted down some white chocolate chips and also tossed in a drop or two of peppermint extract to give it even more peppermint flavor.

Then I dunked the cookie right in the melted chocolate. You could also spread the chocolate on the cookie, or drizzle. It’s up to you!

As for the cookie itself, I made a chocolate shortbread, which is one easy cookie to make. Classic shortbread is just butter, sugar, and flour. These obviously also have some cocoa powder.

The beauty of these cookies is that you can use whatever cookie you want, be it homemade or store bought. 

Oh yes, my friends, I am not above buying some store bought chocolate cookies, dipping them into some chocolate, sprinkling with candy cane pieces, and calling them homemade. Okay semi-homemade. 

It’s the holidays. We’re all busy. Work smarter, not harder.

Okay, rant over. Now onto the finishing touche…candy canes!

I threw a couple candy canes into a zip top bag and then smashed the heck out of them until I had itty bitty pieces. Some we’re a bit ittier and bittier, but I liked the contrast of larger chunks and candy cane dust.

While the chocolate was still wet, I sprinked a generous amount of candy cane pieces of top.

And that’s it! Delicious homemade (or semi-homemade) peppermint bark chocolate shortbread cookies. 

Make them asap before the holidays are over!

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Snowflake Peppermint Marshmallows

What is better than peppermint and chocolate? I’ll tell you: nothing! Okay, maybe not nothing, but peppermint marshmallows and hot chocolate are pretty high up on my list of favorites after making these snowflake-shaped marshmallows. 

It’s the perfect treat on these cold winter days with Christmas music playing in the background. It just gets you right into the holiday spirit!

As I mentioned in this post, marshmallows are super fun to make but oh-so messy! You really have to be prepared for powdered sugar and stickiness to be all over your kitchen. But I promise it’s worth it. 

Making marshmallows starts with the gelatin. First, you first bloom the gelatin with water until it forms a thick jiggly blob, like really thick Jello. Next, pour boiling (240 degrees to be exact) sugar and corn syrup into the gelatin while you whisk it on low speed. Then, turn the speed up high and watch the liquified sugar and jiggly Jello blob magically turn into this light, fluffy, marshmallowy substance.

Once the mixture becomes pretty thick (about 10 minutes of whisking), it’s ready!

Before this whole baking experiment starts, you will want to prepare a baking sheet with parchment paper and powdered sugar. In this case, I also crushed up some candy canes and sprinkled them on the baking sheet so that they sticky marshmallow would have bits of candy cane all over. Yum!

Spread the soft marshmallow on the baking sheet and then sprinkle with more powdered sugar and candy cane dust on top. 

After a few hours, the marshmallow will set and become, well, a marshmallow!

I cut out my marshmallows using various snowflake cookie cutters to make them extra festive, but I did spray them down with some baking spray beforehand so that they wouldn’t stick as much. 

You can cut them out in any shape you like. Candy canes would be fun! Or even just big squares or circles. Eventually, they are all just going to end up in a nice hot cup of hot cocoa!

Which is exactly where my peppermint marshmallows ended up. 

I love that these marshmallows not only taste amazing on their own but when you add them to the hot cocoa, they lightly flavor it so that it becomes peppermint hot cocoa. It’s delightful!

Don’t just make these peppermint marshmallows for yourself, though. These would make a great gift or stocking stuffer! Marshmallows last quite a while, so as long as you store them in a bag, people can enjoy them long after the holidays!

However, I have no room to judge you if you keep these all for yourself. I didn’t share these with anyone! They didn’t last long enough. 

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Gingerbread Village Cake

 Every year around Christmas time I convince myself that I should make a gingerbread house. From scratch. But I never actually go through with it. I think I have been burned by gingerbread houses in the past. The pieces never fit together well, so they end up just awkwardly stuck together. Or the house ends up collapsing under the weight of all the candy and decorations (maybe I am a little heavy handed with the candy and decorations). 

So this year, instead of kidding myself I decided to make a gingerbread village cake! It was the best of all worlds because I could still bake the gingerbread from scratch and decorate them to my heart’s content, but I didn’t actually have to build a whole house! Except for the two little ones on top. But those were so cute, I couldn’t resist (I used this cookie cutter)

I took inspiration for my little gingerbread village cake from the canal houses in Amsterdam. I am not sure why. I certainly have never been to Amsterdam or seen a canal house in person, but that is that came to mind. 

I made the houses from my gingerbread cookie recipe and iced them with royal icing. I just cut them by hand into various shapes and sizes. Some tall and skinny, some short and fat. Some with flat tops, other with pointed tops. There wasn’t really any rhyme or reason to it, other than I wanted some variety.

Then I went to decorating. I used images from Google to help me figure out the windows, roof, doors, etc. 

For the cake itself, I adapted this recipe for a gingerbread latte cake. Talk about scrumptious! Oh my word, this cake was good! The best part, though, was the cream cheese frosting on top.

After the layers of cake were baked then chilled, I leveled them with a serrated knife. I topped the first layer with a huge dollop of cream cheese frosting and spread it evenly around the surface with an offset spatula. Then set the next layer on top of that and repeated with another huge dollop of icing.

This time, I spread the icing all the way down the sides to cover most of the cake. I didn’t do a huge layer of icing, I just wanted to catch all the crumbs first so they didn’t end up in the outer layer of icing.

After a quick chill in the fridge, just long enough for the icing to set up, I finished icing the whole cake and set it on my cake stand. The beauty of this cake is that you don’t have to be an expert icer because you are just going to cover it with the gingerbread houses.

The little houses just stick right onto the cream cheese frosting. Almost a little too well. I wanted to move one of the houses and it just lifted the icing right along with it. 

To attach the little gingerbread men, I put a dot of the frosting on the back an stuck them right on top of the house.

I did finish off a couple of the houses with a few other decorations. I had these cute holly sprinkles that I stuck right on using a bit of left over royal icing. And I added some candy canes and left over Christmas tree cookies. 

While this cake may have been a bit more work than a gingerbread house, I think I like it even more. For one, when you are done you can eat the cake along with the gingerbread cookies. It’s the best of all worlds! If you also want some candy in there, throw a few more candy decorations on top. That way there is a little something for everyone!

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The Best Gingerbread Cookies

What is your favorite holiday cookie? Mine is gingerbread! To me, gingerbread cookies signal the Christmas season. I rarely have a gingerbread cookie between January and November, so their deliciousness reserved for that very specific time of year when my stepmom makes loads of her famous gingerbread cookies.

This year I made it my mission to perfect my gingerbread cookie recipe. I made cookies last year that were good, but not good enough in my opinion. So I took a couple lessons from my stepmom’s recipe and completely reformulated the recipe. And by that, I mean that I just changed the measurements of a couple ingredients. But it sounds pretty impressive when I say “reformulated”, doesn’t it?

Oh yeah…and I made a video!

What is a bit different in these cookies is that I used both baking soda and baking powder. I didn’t want the cookies to be so hard you would break your teeth, but I also didn’t want them puffing up and spreading out so that when I baked a gingerbread man he would end up looking like the State Puft Marshmallow Man. The combination of the two makes these cookies rise just enough that they are super soft right out of the oven. Even after a few days, they are still nice and airy and not as hard as a rock.

The other trick to getting soft, not super crunchy cookies is to roll them out rather thick. Of course, I use my favorite rolling pin bands to ensure that my cookies are all about 1/4″ thick. 

After all is said and done, these cookies turn out to be perfect (in my opinion). Super flavorful without being spicy. Slightly soft without losing their shape. They are perfect for decorating, but also don’t need a lot of decoration if that’s not your jam. You can just dust them with powdered sugar or sprinkles and call it a day. 

What I am saying here guys is that YOU NEED TO MAKE THESE COOKIES!

Sorry for yelling, but it’s that important to me. If you like gingerbread or know someone who does, this recipe is for you! Consider it my early Christmas gift to you. 🙂

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Holiday Gifts Guide for Food Lovers

 

Guys! The holiday season is upon us! Are you just as excited as I am? I can’t wait to start decorating my Christmas tree (which I am probably doing as you read this) and start shopping for gifts. I love trying to find fun, useful, and unique gifts for my friends and family. But I know, from experience, that it’s not always easy.

One thing I know pretty well is food. So if you have anyone in your life that likes to eat, cook, or bake food, or drink coffee or wine, this holiday gift guide is for you! I have an exhaustive list of gift ideas that I can almost guarantee will satisfy at least one person on your list. 

FOR THE HOME COOK

1| Cookbooks. Pick out one of your favorite, most used, or interesting looking cookbooks that you think your friend or loved one would appreciate. Go one step further by bookmarking your favorite recipe (or the one that looks most delicious). If there are any unusual ingredients, spices, or cookware, add those to the gift along with the cookbook so that they have everything they need to make the recipe you picked out. 

Here are some of my favorite cookbooks:

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2| Kitchen Gear. Any home cook knows the importance of having the right gear. For instance, having the right knife, pot, or even tongs can make a huge difference. If you have a friend or loved one who would like to get more into cooking or you know needs a little upgrade in the kitchen, I highly recommend the following items:

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3| Cooking Classes. There are so many places to take cooking classes these days. Your local Sur la Table and Williams-Sonoma probably offer classes regularly. Often local colleges will offer some cooking classes open to the public. Just do a quick Google search and I am sure you can find several options to suit your loved one’s cooking or dietary preferences. Buy them a gift card or pick out a class you know they will like that you can take together!

 

FOR THE HOME BAKER

4| Cookbooks. The gift idea above doesn’t just have to be for home cooks, it could also be for home bakers! If you know someone, like me, who loves to bake all sorts of goodies, is addicted to the Great British Baking Show, or is constantly watching cake decorating videos on Youtube, well I have some great gift ideas for you!

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5| Baking Accessories. As someone who bakes A LOT, I am all too familiar with just how many baking accessories there are. Nowadays, there you can find anything from basic cookie cutters to intricate piping tips that any baker would love to have in their collection. Here are some of my favorites:

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FOR THE COFFEE LOVER

6| Craft coffee bar. Craft coffee is pretty much the new craft beer. Here in Charlotte, there are craft coffee places popping up everywhere. There is everything from coffee on tap, pour over coffee, and signature espresso cocktails. All for the low low price of $5-10 (yikes!). If you have a coffee lover in your life who may be spending a bit too much on coffee at these fancy coffee shops, why not give them everything they need to make their own craft coffee at home?

Start by picking out how they like to make their coffee. Do they like iced coffee? Pour over coffee? Maybe they just need a shot of espresso first thing in the morning. Don’t worry, you don’t have to buy an expensive coffee maker (unless you really love them) if you don’t want to.

Okay, next pick out the coffee to go with the coffee maker. I love picking out local coffee for friends and family who live across the country. If this is a gift for someone who lives in another city or state, find your favorite local coffee roaster (your local grocery store probably has some in stock) and pick up a bag of BEANS. I stress beans because they stay fresher longer. If your friend is a coffee snob, they will appreciate the coffee beans and will likely have their own coffee grinder (if not, toss one in!). If you can’t decide which coffee to get them, consider a subscription so they can try new coffee every month!

Last, add any coffee accessories.

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FOR THE WINE LOVER

7| A wine subscription. We have one family member who always gets a wine related gift. Every year. Without fail. It’s not because we don’t know what else to get them. It’s because we know it will be greatly appreciated! This year, I think a wine subscription is in order. I think it’s great because it lets them try things they may otherwise overlook. There are some great wine subscriptions options from single-serving subscriptions to let you try before you buy, to subscriptions that send you the whole dang bottle so you can share with your friends (or not).

8| Wine accessories. These make great stocking stuffers for any wine lover. From wine charms to modern wine bottle openers, your wine lover will be happy with any of these gadgets. 

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I hope this has helped you with any of your holiday shopping dilemmas! I know that there is often that one person that whose gift just alludes you. Well, if they love food, coffee, or wine, I am sure they will like anything on this list. If not, give me a shout and I am happy to help!

Salted Caramel Sauce

Salted Caramel Sauce-4

Sometimes I forget how easy it is to make homemade caramel. Caramel sauce to caramel candies, the process of making any form of caramel is so easy and so delicious. This salted caramel sauce was a happy byproduct of a recipe I will be sharing with you later, but has proven to be a handy addition to everything from vanilla ice cream to apple slices. 

If you are planning any sort of gathering this Fall, this would be an excellent addition to your dessert. Making brownies? Add salted caramel sauce. Cheesecake? Add salted caramel sauce. Have a clean spoon you don’t know what to do with? Use it to eat this stuff out of the jar. Yeah….its pretty freaking delicious. 

Salted Caramel Sauce-1

Salted Caramel Sauce-2

Salted Caramel Sauce-3

Also, this exact same recipe would make some wonderful salted caramel candies you could give away as a party favor of holiday treat. All you have to do is let the sugar boil a little bit longer until it gets to a soft ball stage. Here is a handy chart to figure out how long to cook sugar to get it to different stages of caramel. 

What would you put salted caramel sauce on?

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Gifts for the Beauty Queen

1. Urban Decay Naked 2 Palette $50 / 2. Chi Orbit 3 in 1 Tourmaline Ceramic Curler $100 / 3. Clarisonic Mia Cleansing Device $100 / 4. Sally Hansen Salon Pro Gel Nail Colors $10 / 5. GlamGlow Gift Sexy Set $70 / 6. Beauty Blender Makeup Sponge and Blender Cleanser $25 / 7. Channel Ultra Wear Lip Colour in Light Rose $35 / 8. Forever 21 Makeup Bag $10

I am fairly certain that any girl in your life has a little beauty queen in them. They may not do their makeup or hair every day (I’m guilty of that), but most women do care about their appearances. And it is always really nice to get a friend a little luxury that they may not get themselves. Take for instance, the Naked Palette and the Channel lip gloss. Both are purchases I was hesitant with at first because of the price, but in the end they were definitely worth the extra bucks! I guarantee that both will become staples in any makeup routine. Plus, its nice to say you got someone something from Channel! The Beauty Blender and makeup bag are perfect for anyone and you don’t even need to know anything about their makeup routine! For those looking to get that flawless complexion, then the Clarisonic or the GlamGlow will be right up their alley. I love giving nail polishes as a little stocking stuffer or just that something extra, and gel polishes are very popular right now. If you are willing to spend some extra money on your beauty queen, then the Chi 3-1 curling iron might be the perfect gift. It’s currently on sale at Ulta, and I may just have to get one for myself!

What is the best beauty gift you have gotten?

Gifts for the Health Nut

Even if you don’t have a friend that is a full on health nut, there is probably at least one thing above that would appeal to anyone who has a remote interest in fitness. For the runners, the Garmin watch/pedometer/GPS will track distance, calories, steps and the Sony Walkman has the earbuds and MP3 player included in one, compact device so they don’t have to deal with extra wires while running. For the at-home exercisers, the weighted jump rope and resistance bands will add an extra punch to their workout. For the barre-lovers or yogis, the Nike Studio Wraps will give them stylish and practical footwear for their favorite classes. For those that are looking to loose some extra weight in the new year, the FitBit will help them stay on track and Giada’s cookbook will provide them with some healthy meals to keep the pounds off. Then, for everyone, I think a foam roller is the best tool to add to a fitness routine, no matter how mild or intense. It helps relieve sore muscles and promotes flexibility. 
Do you have a health nut in your life? What are you getting them for Christmas?

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