Holiday Baking Game Plan

Each year, the hubby and I sequester ourselves in the kitchen for a weekend and bake up all sorts of delicious treats to hand out to family and friends. In the name of preplanning, I'm trying to nail down our baking list for this year.

We'll of course include our favorite standbys:

Soft Sugar Cookies

Peppermint Bark

And possibly Buttons. They are easy to make and addictively good but they tend to separate if knocked around.

Then I'm looking for another 2-3 recipes. Things that are fairly straightforward to make, are a little out of the ordinary, totally delicious, and nut free.

Here are the recipes I'm considering adding to our standbys:

Big Soft Ginger Cookies

Persimmon Cookies

Crispy Toasted Coconut Cookies

Chocolate Brownie Cookies

Orange Cranberry Drops

Right now, I'm leaning toward to toasted coconut and the ginger cookies. What would your vote be? What are your favorite cookies (holiday or not)? What are your holiday baking standbys?

Applesauce

Faced with a surplus of apples back in January, I went digging for applesauce recipes and found this one. With the glut of apples our CSA is providing us, we've now got the process down pat. Which is good because it's hard to beat warm, just finished cooking applesauce. : )

Zucchini Brownies

Yea, you read that title right. Amanda suggested that we use our abundance of zucchini to make brownies. And since (a) I will readily agree to almost anything if chocolate is involved and (b) we were having company over. I jumped on it. I used this recipe from All Recipes and made a few slight tweaks.

Orange Cranberry Cookies

I realize this is not the most inspired cookie picture. You are going to have to trust me that while these are not the world's prettiest cookies they are quite tasty and very well loved. I found the recipe here and it made a happy addition to our holiday baking. Not only did it add some color to the plate but it was one of the most commented on cookies.

Sauteed Chickpeas and Spinach

I saw recipe over on Perry's Plate that instantly set me to dreaming. Especially because (in the sign of a meant to be recipe) we had everything in the house. A few days later, I threw this together based on my memory of that picture and a quick scan of the recipe.

Bacon Green Beans

For Thanksgiving, we decided to make use of the green beans that the hubby canned this summer. (I was studying, so he got to have all the fun. : P ) A bit of searching brought up this recipe which sounded tasty. I know it looks like a weird mush in the picture but the flavor was really good!

Corn Bread Muffins

What's this? A recipe? Why yes! Now that my exam is over, I've been getting back into the kitchen a bit. I made these for the express purpose of leaving them out to be stale so I could use them in our Thanksgiving stuffing, but since the recipe yielded more than expected, we had extras for noming. I found the recipe at Food Network's site.

Spinach Dip

Catching up on recipe posts again (or trying to!). We made this for our Anti-Superbowl Party way back in February using this recipe as the inspiration.

Nut Free Arugula Pesto

One night the hubby and I were determined to make pesto (which it turns out is just a fancy way of saying grind up your favorite nuts and weeds). However, we had pine nuts and arugula which, according to "teh internets" was not a good match. So we switched our focus to using the arugula and found this recipe which substituted chick peas/garbanzo beans for the nuts. Crazy delicious. Crazy easy. And way less expensive than pine nuts or walnuts.

Fresh Pea Soup

Faced with two weeks worth of CSA peas, the hubby and I were brainstorming what to do with them when he had a brilliant idea. "We should make pea soup! With ham!" I adore split pea soup so I went digging for recipes. Most of the ones I found called for dried peas, but I did find one using fresh peas. We adapted it to what we had on hand and are so very glad that we did. : )

Summer Salsa

After discovering that our turnips were really radishes (oops), I went looking for good radish recipes. And stumbled upon mango radish salsa. Upon seeing that I couldn't resist. I like sweet salsas and I love mango, we were off to the races.

Meatballs (Take 2)

We've made meatballs before. It was our first try and while they were brimming with potential they were also a bit big, a bit bready, and a bit crumbly. So we tried again, this time winging it based on what we remembered. I say we. The credit for this one goes entirely to the hubby. Yay hubby! : )

Mini Sweet Potato Pies

With four forlorn sweet potatoes staring at me from the pantry, I knew that our Pi Day had to include sweet potato pie. Of course, being from California, I'd never made sweet potato pie before. Heck, I'd never eaten sweet potato pie before. Thankfully, in this era of the internet, that was no problem at all, as a wonderful recipe was only a few clicks away.

Chocolate Cream Pie

As part of our Pi Day Celebration, the hubby wanted something chocolatey. So I suggested Chocolate Cream Pie and starting looking for recipes. I figured this one might be onto something when the contributor described it as "fudgy". They were right, and so was I.

No Roll Pie Crust

This no roll pie crust has been on my "must bake" list for, oh, forever. But since we don't make pies very frequently, I hadn't quite gotten around to it yet. And so it was that for this year's Pi Day Celebration we made this for not one, but two types of pie. And it was amazing. And easy.

Chicken Pot Pie Filling Take Two

I couldn't convince the hubby that mincemeat pie would be a nice savory addition to our Pi Day plans (darn!), so we decided to go with chicken pot pie. We made Chicken Pot Pie for last year's Pi Day Celebration as well. However, while that recipe was tasty, it was a little fussy and not quite *perfect*. So this year we decided to try another recipe.

Pi Day Celebration

Today is Pi Day. An official day to celebrate pi. And pie. And heck, it's March. March needs a good holiday. One full of sugar and friends and baking.

This week I'll be posting the recipies from our own celebration and linking them up here.

Delicious No Roll Crust
Mini Sweet Potato Pies
Incredible Chocolate Cream Pie
Chicken Pot Pie Filling (Take II)
Perfectly Flaky Pie Crust

But what I really want to see is what YOU made. How did you celebrate Pi Day? What is your most awesome pie? Link up below for a chance to win one of two pocket pie molds.



One winner will be chosen by random drawing. The other prize will be awarded for most awesome entry where awesome is based on creativity, tastiness, and presentation. The linky will close one week from today, on the 21st and the winners will be announced later that week. (Please be sure that I have some way to contact you if you win, either through your blog or by dropping me a comment or an email with you email address.)

Garlic Chicken and Orzo

Looking for a quick recipe using only what we had in the house, the hubby and I decided to tweak this recipe. Real food in under 30 minutes. Absolutely awesome.

Pumpkin Bread

After the last Pumpkin Bread Adventure, I was on the lookout for a better recipe. You know, one with flavor and spices and stuff. Which is why the very day that Miss Zoot posted her Pumpkin Bread recipe I was in the kitchen making some.

Puffy Chocolate Chip Cookies

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Another recipe from the depths of my draft folder...Puffy Chocolate Chip Recipes. These were part of our holiday cookie baking extravaganza this year as a way to incorporate an old favorite but amp it up a bit.