We are expecting 4-6 more inches of snow today, this has been a very snowy December! It is very tempting to move to the equator. I have to shop for our Christmas Eve dinner and our Christmas morning breakfast. We always have Italian food on Christmas Eve and egg nog french toast on Christmas morning.
I have a rather odd Christmas tradition of watching The Godfather 1 and 2 on Christmas Eve night. I stay up until the wee hours of Christmas morning helping Santa get the house ready for the kids, as we watch these two wonderful movies. Santa tends to leave his snowy white shoe prints all over the living room floor just as I am turning off the DVD. Nothing puts me in the holiday spirit more than hearing the line, "leave the gun, take the cannoli"!
A big thank you to the very talented artist Marsha at Tumble Fish Studio for giving me this award. Please check out her colorful and unique style, I am the very lucky owner of a few of her creations!!! Her Etsy shop is wonderful!!!
Do you lose gifts that you have squirreled away for the holidays? When I find a gift during the year I store it in my "prize closet" and retrieve it for the holidays. Unfortunately, I always seem to lose something in the closet. I am currently tearing the house up looking for a sock monkey, a gold Richard Nixon pin covered in faux pearls and a signed book. I only have five days to find them, yikes!!!!
Madeleines are one of my favorite cookies and I love the special madeleine pans you need for baking them! It does not seem correct to call these little spongy cakes "cookies", maybe cake-ies would work.
Madeleine Recipe
Yields about 48 medium sized madeleines.
4 eggs
1½ cups sugar
1 teaspoon grated lemon rind
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
1½ cups butter, melted and clarified
You will need:
Madeleine mold/pan
Large bowl
Sauce pan (or double boiler)
Measuring cups
Measuring spoons
Pastry bag
#4 plain large tube
Preheat oven to 350°F
Grease madeleine molds well
Combine eggs, sugar and lemon rind in a large bowl.
Heat over hot water, until warm.
Remove from stove and beat in a mixer at high speed until they are light, fluffy and tripled in bulk.
Add vanilla, fold in flour, then melted butter.
Be careful not to beat after flour is added.
Fill a pastry bag, fitted with a large plain round decorating tube, with the batter.
Squirt batter into the cavities of the madeleine mold, filling them 2/3 full.
Bake about 10 minutes, or until tops of cakes are golden.
Remove from molds immediately.
Grease molds again, refill with batter and bake.
Continue until all batter is used.
One of the loveliest holiday cookies is the Italian pizzelle. My grandmother, Josephine Ungaro made the most delicious and delicate version of this cookie. It is usually flavored with anise, lemon or vanilla. This year I am going to dust off my pizzelle maker and try my hand at turning these cookies into cannoli shells. I will have about a one second to shape the warm cookies around a wooden dowel before the cookie hardens. Wish me luck!
This weekend I made sugar cookies and I had to quadruple the recipe, yikes! I got a headache from all the crazy math skills I had to whip out. I could have asked my 10 year old to help, he could do it in a fraction of the time (pun), but that would be pathetic of me. I always hold my breath while the first batch is baking. If my little reindeer start growing 20 times their original size, I know my arithmetic was a little off. Are you baking for the Holidays???
