Holiday Baking Recipes
Ah, winter. A time of runny noses, holiday spirit, and low Midwest temperatures. What isn’t there to love? In order to embrace the season, Crier has turned to a very tasty pastime: baking! We scoured the internet to find five holiday-themed dessert recipes ranging from iced peppermint lattes to eggnog pudding. Then, we put our baking skills to the test. We came across a few winter wonders, some holiday flops, and a whole lot of mess. So as a way to enjoy the holiday season without getting WHAM’d, join us as we rate five holiday treats!
Iced Candy Cane Lattes – Recipe
Our first sweet treat was meant to be a palette cleanser, something that would keep our mouths feeling fresh and ready to try our upcoming desserts.
You can never go wrong with a little peppermint!
Or, so we thought.
The iced lattes were simple, only consisting of iced coffee, peppermint extract, chocolate syrup, and half and half. This simplicity may have contributed to their lack of cheery, holiday flavor and an overload of classic coffee bitterness.
If you decide to make your own Candy Cane Latte, we recommend that, in addition to the ingredients in the recipe, you also include a coffee creamer of your choice in order to balance out the bitterness of the coffee and the mintiness of the extract.
Alexa: 3/10. The lattes just tasted like coffee and peppermint extract. If you’re someone who makes your iced coffees with like 80% creamer like I do, definitely add some kind of sweetener (vanilla works well, although if you can find a peppermint creamer, this would be delicious!).
Jessica: 2/10. My choice of coffee generally tastes less like coffee and more like a coffee-inspired milkshake, so I was unsurprisingly not fond of this excruciatingly bitter drink. However, I’m curious to know whether the drink would taste better hot since I prefer anything near actual coffee to be warm.
After that flop of a winter drink, we hoped that our Snowy Pinecones would save the day.
They definitely did not.
The Snowy Pinecones seemed simple. Chocolate hazelnut spread mixed with creamy peanut butter, powdered sugar, and Cocoa Puffs sounded like a Reese’s lover’s dream come true.
But apparently, an entire cup of powdered sugar mixed with these already sweetened ingredients is simply impossible to mold into pinecone shapes and just gives you a toothache.
If you, like us, think that this recipe sounds delicious and would like to replicate it yourself, we recommend adding just enough powdered sugar so that you can mold the pinecones into the correct shape (which will definitely be less than the full cup that is suggested in the recipe).
Alexa: 1/10. Although the pinecones turned out super cute (all thanks to Jessica for her handiwork), the sugar overload made for a dry, sickeningly sweet, and almost unbearable-tasting experience. Without all of this sugar, this would have been amazing, and I’m mostly mourning the loss of perfectly good Nutella.
Jessica: 1/10. The effort to mold the peanut butter and Nutella concoction was hardly worth the brown pine-tree-looking shape that it created. Plus, the roundness of the Cocoa Puffs pushed the dessert even further from pinecone likeness. And anyway, the only way to make these even somewhat palatable was to eat the tiniest bit of the mixture with several pretzel sticks to cut through the sugar.
Eggnog-Panettone Bread Pudding – Recipe
After taking a quick lunch break, we decided to tackle the most intimidating recipe on our list: the Eggnog-Panettone Bread Pudding, made with zero eggnog and a type of bread that neither of us had ever heard of.
The recipe calls for this Panettone bread and cautions that it may only be found in specialty Italian bakeries.
We immediately found it in the bakery section of our local Walmart.
And again at our local Walgreens.
Panettone bread turns out to be a type of specialty Italian bread that is baked with a variety of dried fruits inside, including orange peels, apricots, agave, raisins, and lemon peels. With such a wide array of fruits smashed into a singular loaf, we had our doubts.
Yet, we pushed on. We filled muffin tins with chopped cubes of the bread soaked in our homemade eggnog before placing them in a water bath and sliding them into the oven.
Alexa: 5/10. I am someone who has issues with sensory/taste differences when it comes to food, and this dessert has a different texture and flavor in every bite. Some bites were very heavy on the rum while others were lacking in overall flavor.
Jessica: 7/10. I am a HUGE fan of anything eggnog, so to no one’s surprise, this treat was one of my favorites of the afternoon. The dried fruits somehow simultaneously added to and took away from the dish. Some bites contained delicious bits of fruit that brought some bright citrus to the heavy bread and cream. Yet, other bites assaulted my mouth with odd tangy flavors that did not mix well with the nutmeg-y warmth of the eggnog.
After discovering the Bread Pudding to be simpler than anticipated, we were sure that these pops would be cake walk. (See what we did there?) After all, it was just store-bought sugar cookies and cream cheese. What could go wrong?
So very much.
In order to melt the candy melts down to coat the cake pops, we had to set up a double boiler, which—for those who aren’t gifted in the culinary arts (like us)—is a metal bowl placed on top of a boiling pot of water to ensure that the chocolate melts evenly. This terrifying combination of metal instruments required us to enlist the assistance of Alexa’s mom, who helped us get to the final step: dipping our cake pops.
However, we quickly realized that covering a cake pop is not nearly as easy as it seems when you do not have enough melted chocolate to completely submerge the pop. But, we made it work by rolling the pops back and forth before plopping them onto a tray and coating them in snowflake sprinkles.
Alexa: 8/10. Although the cake pops were super sweet, I thought that they were the lightest and most delicious treat that we had made all day. They were very easy to make, only requiring a stand mixer, cream cheese, and store-bought sugar cookies, which was very nice after the stressful eggnog pudding recipe. The themed sprinkles we used turned out to be very hard when cooled (which was not easy on the teeth!), so I would recommend either going without sprinkles or using softer ones.
Jessica: 7/10. The cake pops, though delicious, were a bit too sweet for me. Although I am generally a big sweets fan, I wish there was some saltiness in the pops, so they weren’t super sweet cake coated in super sweet chocolate. It might not help that I’m not a huge fan of store-bought sugar cookies. Pro tip: For fuller coverage with your melted chocolate, finger paint the underside of the cake pop near the stick.
Finally, we ventured toward a jolly take on a cookie classic: the Hot Cocoa Cookie.
We crossed our fingers that this would be the relaxing conclusion to our long day of baking.
But it wasn’t so simple.
Before we could start on the actual cookies, we had to make a chocolate ganache to fill them. After letting that chill in the fridge for a few hours—despite the recipe stating that the ganache could be made up to a month ahead of time—we began to mix together our batter.
Though the dough was easy enough (aside from Jessica somehow managing to spill the dry ingredients all over her sweater), the process of stuffing each cookie with a ball of ganache and 5 mini marshmallows made us reconsider our choices. Once stuffed, each cookie reached the size of a tennis ball, and they ultimately spread out to about 4 inches in diameter after cooking.
If you do not have a cookie scoop or ice cream scoop, be warned that you will find yourself covered in a chocolatey mess that isn’t discernible from the rest of the cookie after they cool.
Alexa: 6/10. I had the biggest hopes for these cookies. They were the first recipe that we found for this venture, and they looked like ooey-gooey marshmallow chocolatey goodness. However, the cookies turned out very unsatisfying and insanely rich. Eating more than half of this cookie at once might cause a chocolate-induced coma, but if you’re a chocolate lover, I would definitely recommend giving this recipe a try!
Jessica: 5/10. Double chocolate cookies are one of my favorite types of cookies, but these cookies were each so chocolatey that I couldn’t eat more than half of one at once! Plus, the filling was lackluster since I couldn’t taste any marshmallows, and after they cooled off, the ganache became one with the cookie.
Final Thoughts
And finally, our official rankings of these holiday treats (in order from best to worst):
Alexa:
- Snowflake Cake Pops
- Hot Cocoa Cookies
- Eggnog-Panettone Bread Pudding
- Iced Candy Cane Lattes
- Snowy Pinecones (let’s be honest we all knew they would end up here)
Jessica:
- Snowflake Cake Pops
- Eggnog-Panettone Bread Pudding
- Hot Cocoa Cookies
- Iced Candy Cane Lattes
- Snowy Pinecones
Despite our many mishaps and questionable baking abilities, we embraced the holiday spirit to create a jolly assortment of baked goods and other treats that might leave us in a food coma dreaming of sugar plum fairies and figgy pudding.
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