Category — Holiday + Special Occasion Recipes

Christmas is almost here! Yay. That means it’s gingerbread time. Every year we have a theme party, which last year resulted in the Gingerbread Casbah. This year the theme is “Christmas in Summer” so we took Santa to the Southern Hemisphere with a Gingerbread Christmas cabana!

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Around Christmastime, there is no shortage of sweet treats to be had in our house. Leading up to Christmas Eve, my mom and I spend a few days in the kitchen filling plates and trays and bowls with a panoply of sweet treats. Whether your sweet tooth demands caramels, fudge, cookies, or candies, we have generally got it covered. My brother-in-law Steve has fond memories of highly specific treats from his childhood, so in the spirit of giving, I try to comply with his candy-coated Christmas wishes. One thing he loves to have at Yuletide time is Bourbon Balls. It’s amazing how crushed Nilla Wafers, melted chocolate and some booze rolled into a ball combines into such a taste treat! Use good quality bourbon and watch them disappear. Since Steve is a tequila lover, this year I think I’ll make half the batch with Añejo in place of bourbon.

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My parents travel a lot, and on a trip to the UK last year, my Dad became obsessed with Thornton’s toffee. He went through several bags that were supposed to be gifts, and started ordering it on the internet at exorbitant prices. I looked around for recipes that might approximate the taste and texture, and last Christmastime we replaced our old standby toffee recipe with this one from Epicurious.

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One of the most searched and clicked recipes on this site is Robert’s Chilaquiles. That means that a lot of people have had the benefit of my friend Robert’s wonderful recipe for chilaquiles, which makes me ¡muy feliz! Robert’s recipe for this Mexican breakfast treat involves layers of fried tortilla triangles, scrambled eggs, chorizo, cheese, and a spiced tomato sauce. However, after spending a long weekend in the neighboring Mexican towns of Puebla and Cholula, we kind of got hooked on chilaquiles verdes–made with a green tomatillo sauce in place of the red.

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For about 4 years, I have been using a recipe adapted from David Chang’s recipe for short ribs that was printed in the New York Times. (This was in 2006, before David Chang and Momofuku were super famous–at that time I didn’t even know who he was.) It is one of my favorite recipes for a dinner party and everyone loves it, but I felt like I was in a bit of a rut. I needed something spectacular to christen my new and much improved kitchen, so I decided to go with a Thomas Keller recipe for short ribs.

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My friend Laura likes chocolate cupcakes with vanilla frosting. I told her husband I would surprise her with a very special version of that flavor combination so I made her some homemade Hostess cupcakes. These are fun because they look like a boring chocolate cupcake with shiny glaze, but they have a surprise inside- a big yummy blob of vanilla frosting!

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As you know Easter was last weekend, so this post will actually not be useful to anyone for approximately 381 days- but I don’t really care because I don’t blog for money or anything, and I took nice pictures and if I don’t write down what I did I will surely forget. I’ll try to remember to re-post this in a more timely manner next year. Until then… allow me to “resurrect” the Easter spirit (ba-dam-cha.) I’m here all week, folks.

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I like Easter because it was my grandmother’s favorite holiday, so it always makes me think of her and brings up many fond memories. Also, because there’s nothing more fun than dying eggs and hiding/finding them with nieces and nephews! And finally, because I get to eat lots of ham and cheezy potatoes. So in that spirit, here is a roundup of some of my favorite and most Easterrific ideas… enjoy!

Last year I cut up some old neckties from a thrift store and made these gorgeous silk-dyed eggs… a stunning result from a surprisingly simple project!

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My nephew turned 5 recently and swore he wanted a circuit board cake. At the 11th hour he decided he wanted a car cake instead. Online searches for car cakes yielded a lot of lameness and ugly-ass cakes, so I winged it. Wung it? Whatever. I figured something out, and was pretty pleased when it actually, totally looked like a car.

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And now for something completely different: the GINGERBREAD CASBAH.

The gingerbread casbah came into being because every year, we throw a themed Christmas party for around 100 of our closest friends. Since we just took a honeymoon to the Middle East, we thought we could try out some new tricks at a Middle East-themed Christmas party. After all, that is where the whole Christmas thing started, right? An evite full of bad puns later (“we are Beiruting for you to come”, and so forth) we had our “Christmas at the Casbah” party ready to go, and all we needed was an impressive centerpiece.

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