Nougatkipferl have never been my favorite of my Christmas Cookies to make. There are a number of things wrong with the recipe that I have been using for years, not the least of which is that nougat is really hard to find in the US. Substituting Nutella has usually worked, however this year, Nutella’s ingredient / composition changed somewhat (to much controversy, actually), and that made it more difficult to bake with. So, after a fail or two with the dough, I started from scratch and came up with this recipe. It has a little bit of corn syrup in it, which is not my favorite thing, but seemed to help with the dough’s consistency when I was rolling it out.
holidays
Every year, I seem to make another variation on cranberry sauce. There have been versions with ginger, apple, port wine and this one, with Rosemary and White Balsamic. It’s a great little combination, though you really have to like rosemary as it is pretty powerful as far as herbs go. It will go great with your turkey dinner though. Tick tock, almost Thanksgiving!
It’s getting to be that season where you might have to “feed a crowd”. You know, those times when there might need to be enough food for a dozen, or two dozen people. Enter this pie. It’s designed to feed a crowd, between 20-24 people. It’s a pretty big canvas too, so you can easily work on your lattice skills or, as I did, play with some cookie cutters to make a cute little pattern of flowers. Either way, it’s yummy and will be sure to be enough for the whole gang.
I don’t do a lot of baking for Halloween. I *like* Halloween, and if I had more occasion to do so, I’d come up with some creepy ideas for sweet snacks, but as one can’t hand out homemade cookies to trick-or-treaters, I usually just limit my baking to one thing. This year, it’s these sandwich cookies. I used one of those imprinting rolling pins which didn’t work particularly well, but c’est la vie. Next time I will skip the baking powder in the dough. They taste great though.
PS: I think that the skulls look a little like Star Wars Storm Troopers, but I might just be imagining things.
Next week is Diwali (Deepavali). I’m not Hindu (nor am I anything else), but in one description I’ve read, it described Diwali as a celebration of victory of light over darkness, good over evil, knowledge over ignorance, and hope over despair. Those are ideals that I can get on-board with. One of the things that many of my Indian friends have done is have given sweets for Diwali, so I thought that I would try making some myself. I’ve never made this type of sweet before, and I know that it isn’t a very traditional recipe in any way, but they were easy to make and taste amazing. So Happy Diwali to one and all!