Hello everyone. I hope you all had a very enjoyable holiday and took advantage of the well-deserved time off. For many of us, the holidays resulted in numerous opportunities to feast on various meals and a great deal of turkey. If you are like me, and not particularly a fan of turkey, it may be that you were saving your appetite for the desserts that would be brought out after the holiday meal. Christmas desserts in my family often consist of traditional Greek pastries which usually include melomakarona (a soft pastry made from flour, olive oil, honey and walnuts) and kourabiedes (a soft butter cookie coated with copious amounts of powdered sugar). These pastries are deliciously sweet but I find that they tend to lack many flavours reminiscent of the holidays, such as peppermint and chocolate. This year I decided to put some of my newly improved baking skills to use and created some Christmas themed sweets as a surprise for my family to enjoy. Firstly, I wanted to create a muffin that could satisfy my entire family so I decided to make a cherry almond muffin. These muffins included the sweet and tart flavour of cherries that appeals to my dad’s palate, the warm aroma of toasted almond slivers which always sends my mom running into the kitchen to sneak a few to herself and the soft crumbly texture of the muffin itself which is greatly appreciated by the elderly members of my family. These muffins were a definite hit. Yet what resulted in even more excitement at my family Christmas was my butter tart platter. Every time we have any sort of family gathering all my relatives long for my butter tarts and devour them within minutes of their arrival. I admit that I sometimes get a little lazy when it comes to making the tart shells and opt for store-bought shells, saving me time when I end up having to bake 5 or 6 dozen tarts. This year I ended up making some pecan butter tarts using my tried and tested secret recipe but I also decided to try and make a ‘crazy tart’ version. This version is the one in the centre of the platter and was made using my own dough recipe rather than pre-made tart shells. It consists of the same filling used for my pecan tarts but is loaded with crushed toasted pecans, golden raisins, milk chocolate chips, white chocolate chips and shredded coconut. I thoroughly enjoyed these tarts yet my family still preferred my original pecan tarts. I guess this only goes to show that you can’t always make everyone happy and should stick to what people say they enjoy rather than trying to change a time-tested favourite. But don’t let this stop you from making a batch of something different that you personally enjoy and hiding them in the back of your fridge for a late-night snack. Lastly, I wanted to create a centrepiece for our Christmas sweet table. My sister had told me that she doesn’t have the patience to bake anything and wanted to buy some Christmas cookies. I told her that it would be simple, fun and cheaper to create a platter that would feature various bite-sized cookies for my family to snack on and managed to convince her to come over and assist me with their preparation. We ended up making gingerbread cookies, white chocolate covered pretzels, rum balls, peppermint meringues and chocolate-orange thumbprint cookies topped with powdered sugar. The cookies were then placed on a platter with some Christmas candies before all the guests arrived. As soon as my family saw them, they quickly swooped in and sampled everything before I even had a chance to tell them what each cookie was. Shockingly, or maybe not so shocking, the rum balls were the first to be eaten by the elderly guests and they quickly went back for seconds. Overall, I have to say that I was impressed with how well all of my sweets turned out this year. It pleased me to see the smiles on everyone’s faces and to receive a great deal of compliments on my baking skills. Next year I’ll have to be sure to create more delicious goodies for my family to enjoy over the holidays and hopefully my sister will have gained further confidence in baking and will come over to assist me again. Enjoy the rest of your holidays and I look forward to hearing some stories about everyone else’s holiday creations when we return to class next week.
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AuthorHi everyone. I'm Peter, and I have decided to follow my passion and pursue a career in cooking. I look forward to connecting with you all. Archives
February 2017
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