Holiday Eats

Miss Yunks had a very foodie holiday.  She ate delicious treats and spent Christmas day with her family.

I started the day with chocolate pancakes.

I added some leftover chocolate ganache to my pancake batter and topped the finished pancakes with butter and maple syrup.  I like to have a balanced breakfast of carbs, sugar, and chocolate.  I wouldn’t actually recommend doing this.  And not just for the obvious reason.  The ganache made the pancakes drier than usual and the chocolate taste was muted.  Chocolate chips make a much better pancake, but you know how I like kitchen experiments.

Then I was headed to my cousins’s house for the afternoon.  I wanted to bake a cookie to bring, and when I read about these Hot Chocolate Surprise Cookies from Macaroni and Cheesecake I knew these would be my Christmas cookies.  I baked the cookies the day before and followed the recipe almost exactly.  The only difference I made was I let my marshmallows toast a little longer in the oven so they were not only melty, they were were slightly browned.

Christmas morning I made the chocolate frosting.  The frosting is more of an icing; the recipe calls for melting the butter, not creaming it.  The finished cookie really tastes like hot chocolate, and it has a marshmallow surprise.  Sorry for ruining the surprise!

Earlier Christmas week, I attempted to make soft salted caramels after reading Megan’s recipe.  I don’t have a candy thermometer, so I followed her tip that it takes about an hour to heat the caramel.  I guess I had my heat up too high because when I tested my caramel in a glass of water, after 30 minutes, it hardened immediately.  I poured the caramel into my prepared pan over wax paper and it hardened into a 9 x 13 sheet shaped hard caramel sucking candy.  It was too hard to cut with my wimpy knives, but I managed to break off a piece and taste it.  It was really tasty – a hard salted caramel sucker.  It just wasn’t what I intended.  I took a day to think about what to do with my hard candy slab and Christmas day I decided to hammer it into small pieces.

The wax paper really stuck to the hard caramel, but after hammering the slab into little pieces, the wax paper peeled (mostly) right off.  I packed some little pieces of candy in little baggies to share with my family.

Problem solved!

My cousin also made a dessert for the family.

Foodie ambition runs in the family!  She made this Spiced Chocolate Torte Wrapped in Chocolate Ribbons from the Bon Appetit magazine cover, and did a damn good job!

After I sufficiently stuffed my face, I played with my little cousins.

Josh showed off his new hockey mask and t-shirt

and I fed baby Eva and held her while she slept!

How was your Christmas? What’d you eat?