Holiday Recipes! The more calorific the better!

[iamshadow]

Well, I just think I found something I'm going to try for the first time, this Christmas.

Apple Cider Caramels.

What are your favourite holiday dishes? Christmas? Hannukah? Kwanzaa? Secular? Hit us with that festive goodness.

Comments

[northern]

I have made these and they are great! A tip: you'll need to boost the apple cider taste a lot if you want them to taste of it. I have no idea how to, without throwing the amounts off, but yeah. The caramels taste fantastic as they are in the recipe though, just not of cider!

[iamshadow]

I think I'll still give them ago. Maybe if I sprinkled freeze dried apple on top that would do it!

[northern]

Good idea!

[minoanmiss]

You can buy what's known as Boiled Apple Cider from King Arthur Baking Catalog. It's basically apple cider syrup, and would boost the flavor nicely.

The freeze dried apples are also a great idea, and will offer a nice textural accent as well!

Yay cooking!

[iamshadow]

That sounds AMAZING, but I don't know where I'd get it in Australia. I shall have to investigate.

[tibicina]

Really? I never had a problem getting them to taste like apple cider. I mean, you do need to cook the cider down a LOT. You basically start with a half gallon and cook it down to syrup - you want it to the point where you draw the spoon through the liquid and the line holds for a bit. It may also make a difference to start with a really good unfiltered cider, not filtered apple juice. (It probably helps if it's one of the tart cider varieties, too - like pippin, if you can find it.)

You can also substitute in coconut oil or bacon fat in place of some or all of the butter, but both make the end result softer.

I tended to add a lot more spices and a bit more salt than she does. (and by a lot more spices, I mean not just at least twice the cinnamon, but also cloves and sometimes allspice or cardamom or whatever else seems like a good idea)

Also, you can do this with any other fruit juice you want. I used to make about 3 batches a year with my boyfriend (making them isn't bad - cutting and wrapping them, you want a friend, in my experience.) We did the regular apple cider, maitai (pinapple juice, orgeat, coconut oil), pomegranate-green tea-ginger, bacon-apricot with mustard, cloves, and allspice (it was inspired by a ham glaze), curry apple (using an Indonesian curry powder we found that was really heavy on anise), cran-apple-pecan (these ended up kind of meh, but we rolled them in crushed salted pecans and they became much better, but even more annoying to wrap), blueberry with thai basil (any of the more herby things - see also the ginger-green tea above we cooked in the juice while reducing it and then pulled out before it had quite reached the syrup stage, usually in a small bag/cheese cloth). I'm sure I'm forgetting at least one or two kinds.

[iamshadow]

Through an accident of purchasing, I actually have two bottles of pomegranate juice sitting on my shelf. Maybe I'll go that route!

[tibicina]

I will warn you, the pomegranate ones end up super intense, but if you like pomegranate, they're awesome. (Also a LOT darker than normal caramels.)

[iamshadow]

Intense is good! :D

[leeshajoy]

It's a tradition in my family to make Chex Mix as a gift for co-workers, does that count?

[iamshadow]

I had no idea what chex mix was, I had to look it up! I think you can buy something similar here, mixed nuts with added crunchy things like pretzels, or a bhuja mix. I don't think many people out here really make it though, they just buy a premixed packet to put in a bowl to snack on between meals. But then, I make my own muesli from time to time, and I wouldn't say many people out here do that either!

It absolutely counts, if it's something you like to make for people (or even just yourself!) for the holidays. Is it sweet, or savoury?

[leeshajoy]

Very savory. Our mix includes cereal, pretzels, and mixed nuts, mixed with a sauce made from butter, seasoned salt, and Worcesterchire sauce and baked for an hour.

[iamshadow]

An hour! Gosh, you must do it at a very low temperature. I know how fast nuts can burn.

[tibicina]

classic Chex Mix is savory, but there are sweet variations which involve chocolate and powdered sugar and sometimes peanut butter. Though even those end up kind of salty-sweet. Of course, now, you can just buy bags of it. Last I looked they had five or six variations available regularly, but it's not quite the same as when someone actually makes it.

It's pretty easy (they used to print the recipe or variations on it on the chex cereal boxes, so most of them called for at least two kinds of Chex. Along with other things produce by their parent company.)

[iamshadow]

Yeah, I'm guessing it's not a thing out here because we don't have Chex. We have Chux, but that's a disposable dishcloth. :D

[minoanmiss]

I love fruitcake. I recently wrote a post about it, which I won't duplicate, but fruitcake has cultural resonance for me. And also requires lots of alcohol.

[iamshadow]

I love fruitcake. I didn't, when I was a kid, but I do now. Unfortunately, I'm the only person in the house that eats it, so when I make one, I'm eating it forever. My recipe is great, but it produces a huge cake. Last one I made, I froze it, and it took me a year and a half to get through it, and I was a bit sick of it by the end.

[minoanmiss]

I am going to save your comment and hopefully next year we can trade fruitcakes. :)

I bake mine in jumbo muffin tins -- several small fruitcakes ripen faster than one big one, and keep better because they can basically be ledft alone and wrapped up until needed. And people may sometimes be willing to be given a little fruitcake but a big one is really daunting. The baking time is approximately halved plus 15-30 minutes, depending on the density of the batter.

How many eggs does the recipe have? I've found that most cakes scale fairly well in one-egg units, so, if the recipe has four eggs, divide everything else by four and then multiply by the number of eggs desired.

[iamshadow]

Trade recipes, maybe, but I doubt you'd get a fruitcake through customs into Australia. :) Our quarantine laws, especially concerning fruit, are very strict.

My cake uses six eggs, and takes four hours to cook. It says 'serves twelve', but that's a very conservative estimate. It weighs several kilos. I think you'd get about twenty small serves out of it. I would have scaled it down for this year, but I had no idea how, so I didn't bother making it at all.

[minoanmiss]

I have actually gotten fruitcake into Australia before! But it would probably be less postage to trade recipes. :)

[iamshadow]

I'd just hate you to try and it be thrown in an incinerator. Such a waste!

[ladydreamer]

I always make peanut butter kisses. Those are basically sugar, egg, and peanut butter cookies with a hershey's kiss on top.

We used to make a lot more cookies, because my mom would make these huge gift plates to give to family friends and for the shop. That would include various breads (cranberry orange bread, banana nut, zucchini), and other cookies like buckeyes and pecan pick-ups. :)

[iamshadow]

Making cookies and biscuits is definitely festive! I tend to make gingernuts, mexican hot chocolate biscuits, and shortbread. I think there was an earl grey tea flavoured one I made a few years back, but I can't find the recipe right now. That was great. I haven't really experimented with making peanut butter cookies. I think the one time I tried to use it in a cake, it turned out really dry and was a disappointment. My partner loves peanut butter, though. Do you have a good recipe I could try?

I think the only place I can get Hershey's is in the import sweet shop, but they're a little over sweet for me anyway. Perhaps I'd put a chocolate coated peanut on top instead, as my variation. I like crunch, and Hershey's tend to be soft throughout. Or am I thinking of the cups? Have I even had the kisses? I'm not very knowledgeable about American sweets.

I do have an amazing banana, date and pecan bread I make whenever out banana go dark brown before we get to eating them. It's a great, solid recipe that I make multiple times a year that freezes like a dream. (It has icing in that link there, but honestly, most of the time, I don't bother, I just have it warm with butter spread on it.)

[ladydreamer]

There are a lot of complex peanut butter cookie recipes, but I stick with the simple 3 ingredient one:

1 jar (18ounces, 2 cups) creamy peanut butter
1/1/4 granulated sugar
2 large eggs

I wouldn't put a chocolate coated peanut on top. Either make the peanut butter cookies and flatten them before baking with a fork, or pick some kind of milk or dark chocolate to press into the cookie after baking. A "kiss" is a teardrop of chocolate, but if you can't get a hold of it, as long as you get a piece of chocolate to put on top, it would have the same combo of flavors. When you put the chocolate piece on top after baking, it softens a lot, then firms up again as it cools, just enough that you can bite through both the peanut butter cookies and the chocolate in one bite.

Some people use chunky peanut butter to add a bit of texture... I've never tried it.

[iamshadow]

Oh, okay, a square of chocolate is easy, I can do that. I thought a kiss was like a peanut butter cup, with a flavoured centre.

I may try it with crunchy, my partner's a big fan of crunchy. I'll report back and let you know if it all goes horribly wrong! :D

[ladydreamer]

I tried altering the recipe last week to use Stevia instead of sugar. The result was... basically cookies that crumbled to dust at the slightest touch.

There's no shame in cookie mistakes, because you can probably still eat them.

[iamshadow]

Oh, yes, I am used to the perk of eating my mistakes. :DDD

I can absolutely see why that would have failed - stevia just doesn't melt and set like concrete like sugar does. You'd probably need to hack it further and add something else that sets hard to bind it.

[ladydreamer]

The recipe I was using didn't balance the dry/wet very well, and only included one egg. You usually have to lower the amount of stevia because it's so sweet and dry.

I need to practice with the proportions, but just haven't had time. I think a double recipe like my family recipe, with half the stevia and three eggs and maybe a bit of vanilla would have better results.

[iamshadow]

Yeah, egg is probably a good call. Good luck trying it out!

[tibicina]

Crunchy absolutely works. (What you don't want is an overly oily peanut butter. If I'm using natural peanut butter and it's separated, I'll often pour some or all of the oil off the top and set it aside instead of adding it to the dough, or at least waiting to see how the texture is and then adding back what I think I need.)

[iamshadow]

That is very useful to know, because American peanut butter and Australian peanut butter are very different. American peanut butter is a lot sweeter, and different kind of sweeter. We have a strong cane sugar industry, so we have very little in the way of high fructose corn syrup in things, whereas it's the primary sweetener in anything I've had from the US. I didn't know if that would mess with the bake, that I wasn't using the peanut butter it was designed for. I tend to buy the more natural kinds that you have to stir up, so I will approach it the way you have suggested. I can always use the excess oil to cook dinners with, if it isn't needed in the cookies.

[tibicina]

It ends up slightly less sweet if you use the peanut butters without sugar in them, but you can add a little extra granulated sugar if you decide you want them sweeter, though I never found it necessary and I have a huge sweet tooth. (The person from whom I got the recipe basically said 'you can use any kind of peanut butter you want, but I wouldn't use *specific brand* because it's got extra hydrogenated oils added and the last time I did, it ended up leaking oil in a disturbing way.')

I ended up baking them a lot for a while because they are gluten free, and we had some people around who needed that and that way they still got to feel like they got cookies, too. (Obviously, not vegan and not good if you have people with peanut allergies, though I think I saw that you can do it with other nut butters and sunflower butter, but I haven't personally tried.)

[iamshadow]

Yeah, my partner has Coeliacs, hence the appeal. Plus, she loves peanut butter cookie dough ice cream, so actually making peanut butter cookies is a logical step. :)

[tibicina]

You can also mix mini-chocolate chips/small chunks of chocolate into the cookie dough. I make a very similar recipe and do that all the time rather than adding the kisses on top. (I'll also sometimes add finely crumbled bacon.)

(I will note - I love these, but they are slightly-crumbly peanut butter cookies, not the chewy peanut butter cookies - for those you need the more complex recipes.)

[kelkyag]

Potato latkes for me! (With cranberry chutney, because I am an odd duck sometimes, though applesauce is good, too.) Caramel bars for my sweetie. Or maybe that's just my favorite of his family holiday treats that he's shared.

[iamshadow]

We tried making latkes once. They were tasty, but came out very greasy, and there was SO MUCH GRATING involved. I have zero RL Jewish friends (but lots of online ones), so we were just kind of winging it with recipes from the internet. We'll have to try it again. And cranberry sauce sounds like a great addition! (I just spent the weeks around Hannukah laughing at the annual fight on Tumblr over applesauce vs sour cream. Someone suggested ketchup, and both sides united in horror.)

Caramel bars sound yummy! Are they a slice/traybake?

[kelkyag]

Latkes are going to be at least somewhat greasy -- oil (fried in oil) is a feature of Hanukkah food. To minimize that, have the oil hot enough (sadly I don't have a temperature for that, and usually get there by trial and error), let any extra oil drip off when you take them out of the pan, and let them drain briefly on paper towels before eating them. The grating can be done with a food processor or rotary grater, but I'm not usually making so many that grating them by hand is an issue.

The caramel bars are delicious sticky heart attacks in bar format. If cool they even mostly go along with being cut. :) Recipe as I got it follows. I use butter rather than margarine, and walnuts or pecans, and put ~2/3rds of the dough on the bottom layer (and bake that a couple of minutes longer). Making a slight raised edge on the bottom layer and then keeping the caramel a little away from the sides of the pan makes it easier to get them out of the pan unmangled. Do not try to eat them hot -- the caramel holds a lot of heat. Cake mixes for a 9x13 pan, or 15-18oz, seem to work okay. I made them once with a gluten free cake mix, and that worked okay, too. (Someday I'll try a from-scratch base and homemade caramel, but not yet.)

Tuma's Caramel Squares
(Tuma's was a restaurant in Mt. Pleasant, MI, which is where my sweetie's mother's parents lived.)

14 oz lt. caramels
5 1/3 oz evaporated milk
1 German chocolate cake mix (size?)
3/4 c oleo, melted
1 c nuts, chopped
6 oz chocolate chips

Over low heat, cook caramels and 1/3 c evaporated milk, stirring
constantly until melted. Keep warm.

Combine cake mix, oleo, 1/3 c evaporated milk, and nuts. Stir
by hand until dough stays together.

Press half of dough into a 9x13 pan. Reserve remaining dough
for topping. Bake at 350F for 6 minutes.

Remove from oven. Sprinkle chips over crust; spread caramel mix
over all. Crumble reserved cake mixture over caramel. Bake 15-20
minutes longer. Cool and cut.

[iamshadow]

I honestly think a lot of the problem was we didn't have the oil at the right temperature, but it was a while ago, so I can't clearly remember.

Okay, I have a lot of questions (bear with me).

When you say caramels, what do you mean? We have something called jersey caramels that are basically the consistency of fudge, but there are also hard boiled caramel sweets like Werther's Originals, and chewy toffee caramels in between. I'm guessing it's important to choose the right caramels for the recipe!

I've never heard of German chocolate cake. Is it a dense, dark mudcake thing, or lighter, like a sponge? I'm guessing it's like a Sacher torte, but 'German chocolate cake' isn't something I've ever seen on the shelf out here.

I've never heard of oleo. Is that the margarine?

[kelkyag]

If the oil is too cool, the latkes will soak up a *lot* of oil. It's not the only failure mode, but it's one of the more likely ones, especially if the cook is a little nervous about hot oil. (That'd be me.)

Carmel: the sort of caramels the "apple cider caramel" recipe you linked in the initial post makes, but the basic sort that don't have apple cider or cinnamon or chocolate or sea salt (tried once, workable but a bit too salty for my sweetie) or any of the other interesting additions in them. Chewy and prone to sticking to your teeth. Not hard candies, probably not anything grainy, not with a filling. If they're being sold as bagged or bulk candy, they're probably little rectangles individually wrapped in plastic. (Unwrapping them is the most annoying part of this recipe). For baking one can get caramel in large blocks, but I've never found that in small quantities. I've also used commercial caramel dips or sauces (around here, sold for dipping apples or putting on ice cream) -- those need less condensed milk added to them. I currently have "Kraft Caramel Bits" (smaller and unwrapped) to try out, but haven't run that experiment yet.

German chocolate cake: for this purpose, it's the name on the cake mix, but pretty much any chocolate cake mix of about the right size will work. Having tried a range, what my sweetie expects is a lighter/less chocolate cake mix, which will probably be labeled "german" or "devil's food", rather than a darker chocolate cake mix that's labeled "dark" or "fudge cake". (Originally, German's Baker's Chocolate Cake was a cake made with said brand of sweet baking chocolate and a coconut-and-walnut filling/frosting. This recipe does not want a complicated cake mix that also includes the frosting.) All of that said, I gather cake mixes are a USA thing mostly, and may be annoying to find or expensive elsewhere? They mostly contain flour, sugar, cocoa powder, sometimes shelf-stable shortening, leavening, salt, and a smattering of dough conditioners (which I'd like to get away from -- thus the passing mention of wanting to make my own base mix sometime).

"Oleo" and "margarine" are both short for the original "oleomargarine", yes!

[iamshadow]

Okay, chewy caramels. Gotcha.

We have box mixes on the shelves here, they're just not the same as the US ones (what the hell is a 'yellow cake'?), but to be honest, I've been baking from scratch since I was five, and I've always found box cakes to be underflavoured, oddly textured, and, most annoyingly, I can taste all the other crap they put in as a weird, chemical aftertaste. I know they're great for a lot of people who aren't confident in the kitchen, or who have a recipe, like the one above, that relies on a fixed ratio of ingredients, but they're not for me. If I make the recipe, I'll probably just try it using the dry ingredients from a chocolate cake recipe I already use. The worst that can happen is that it's not edible, and that's not the end of the world. :)

[kelkyag]

Yellow cake: If it's not radioactive, fairly boring. Generally vanilla, gets its color from the egg yolks & butter. :)

With you on the box mixes; I've just been timid about potentially botching someone else's family treat (and wasting the chocolate). I'd love to hear what you try and how it turns out.

(Also, my error in the previous comment: evaporated milk (unsweetened), not condensed milk (sweetened). Correct in the recipe.)

[iamshadow]

See, I would just call that a pound cake or butter cake, and it's the most basic thing in the world to make, and a good jumping off point for people without experience or confidence in baking. I guess it's useful to have a shelf stable mix, if you've not got access to fresh ingredients, but if you're going to learn to cook with basic ingredients, I think it's an excellent recipe for a beginner. Rather than buying a box, I'd give them the four ingredient recipe (a pound of butter, a pound of flour, a pound of eggs and a pound of sugar = pound cake), tellthem to buy a cheap digital scale, and encourage them to try it out. It's a good one to start with, because so long as your oven temp is right, and you cook it for the right amount of time, it's hard to fail. It's not like, say, a sponge, where you have to be careful not to knock the air out, and it's easy to modify with flavours you like (citrus zest, vanilla, chocolate chips, nuts, coffee, booze).

[kelkyag]

Those cakes both necessarily involve butter. Mixes, or at least basic ones, usually neither contain butter nor call for any added (usually oil, egg, and water), so those names would be lies. (That said, Joy of Cooking has "white cake" and "golden cake" recipes in its butter cake section.)

I'd hand a newbie a recipe for a cake with leavening for a first try. Pound cake is IMO neither foolproof (partly due to differing opinions on expected results) nor default cake. (Delicious, but not what I'd expect for adjective-free cake.)

The thing I know that's most similar to what mixes produce is what my Mom called cockeyed cake (supposedly because anyone who knew how to make cake from scratch would give this recipe a dubious look). It's likely a wartime rationing recipe. Shelf-stable ingredients, acceptable cake, vegan.

1 1/2 c flour
3 tbsp cocoa
1 c sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1/1 tsp salt

5 tbsp oil
1 tbsp vinegar
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup cold water

Mix-in-the-pan instructions:
Sift the dry ingredients into a 9x9 pan.
Put three grooves in the dry ingredients; pour oil in one, vanilla in one, vinegar in one.
Pour the water over everything.
Mix until smooth.
Bake at 350F for 1/2 hour.

The dry part of that is where I'd start if trying to replace the cake mix in the caramel bars, scaled up and replacing the baking soda and vinegar with baking powder (or the vinegar with cream of tartar).

[tameiki]

Reading through everyone's recipes and discussions made me hungry :)

My SO's sister made these amazing Bonbons. The inside is shredded coconut, minced pecans, powdered sugar, sweetened condensed milk, a stick of real butter (melted), all rolled into small balls and frozen. Dip them into melted chocolate and refreeze. Allow them to warm up to room temperature before serving. It's labor intensive but so very good for a rare treat.

[iamshadow]

Those sound AMAZING.

[tameiki]

I just need to find a nice fainting couch to lay back on while I eat my bonbons. XD

[iamshadow]

I encouraged my mum to replace our broken sofa with one from Ikea that has a long seating section earlier this year, so I basically have my own fainting couch, it's amazing.

[tameiki]

Then you absolutely must have bonbons for your fainting couch. ^____^