Quite belated, but happy new year! The holiday season may be over, but it’s still “cold season” both in terms of cold germs and cold temperatures so as far as I’m concerned, it’s still the right season for enjoying warm drinks. Specifically, mulled wine. This time I adapted my mulled red wine recipe to use a bottle of that Schwarz Katz riesling wine that comes in a cat-shaped bottle to make a mulled white wine. The result has enough citrus, ginger, and honey to likely cure the common cold, and enough white wine, rum, and spices to banish the winter blues, so definitely give it a try★[Continue Reading/続きを読む]
Pink Champagne Cookies to Ring in the New Year
It’s already 2015 in Japan and here in the US we’ll be greeting 2015 in a matter of hours! I can’t believe it! Time flies! I’ve been back in the US to visit since Christmas, and while Christmas is a much bigger event in the US than Japan (it’s a national holiday here for starters) but I don’t really feel that New Years is quite as big of a deal in the US as it is in Japan. For example, I don’t think there is any sort of special food for the New Years here quite like soba is in Japan–people just drink champagne to ring in the New Year. For that reason, I figured now would be an appropriate time to post the pink champagne cookie recipe I made quite some time ago. [Continue Reading/続きを読む]
Drunken Snowman Eggnog Cake Pops
Christmas is finally this week so naturally it’s time for the last Christmas-y recipe of the year. Eggnog cupcakes would be the obvious seasonally-appropriate “cocktail cupcake” so I was originally all set to make a batch of those as my last Christmas baking endeavor of the year and even had the ingredients stockpiled away. However, last week one of my Japanese coworkers brought some cupcakes she made to work and while they didn’t taste like anything terribly special, the attention to detail she put into to decorating them adorably was impressive. I’m usually the sort to put taste above looks when I bake (mostly because I am too impatient to start eating!), but upon seeing those cute little cupcakes I realized I needed to start putting a little more effort into how my baked goods looked lest I lose to people like my coworker (yes, this is cupcake war). As such, I decided that instead of making normal eggnog cupcakes, I would challenge myself to make these snowman-shaped eggnog cake pops and then call them “drunken snowmen” due to the rum content in the eggnog recipe I use (if that doesn’t kill any germs in the raw egg then I don’t know what will!).
Gingerbread Cookies with Limoncello Icing
Sugar cookies and gingerbread cookies are traditional staples for the holiday season, and when I was a child we had the tradition of making frosted sugar cookies every year for Christmas. Every year I looked forward to cutting out cookies with our stash of festive cookie cutters and decorating them with different icing colors to my little heart’s content, but looking back, making and decorating them was always much more fun than eating them. Frosted sugar cookies are definitely super cute, but they’re also super sweet so it’s easy to get tired of them after a few bites. However, it wouldn’t feel like Christmas without cookies, so for the last couple of years I’ve been making these gingerbread cookies instead, which are a bit less sweet and packed with spicy ginger, cinnamon, and cloves flavor. Plus, I started adding limocello to the icing, so they really are the perfect adult Christmas cookie. If you’re bored of traditional Christmas cookies definitely give these a shot★[Continue Reading/続きを読む]
Mulled Wine Cake Bites (with bonus absinthe cake bites!)
As those of you who have been following me on Instagram know, in the spring and summer I make a fair amount of varieties of sangria and even made some sangria cupcakes, which were surprisingly quite tasty. And since sangria is to summer as mulled wine is to winter, when I was making my last batch of mulled wine I got to wondering if it would be good in cupcakes as well. My friend had a birthday in late November and I figured that would be a good opportunity to put this idea to the test, but since someone else was already bringing a proper cake to the party I decided that cake bites (cake pops without the stick) would make for a better gift since they are easier to take home and keep. The final result was the perfect mix of spicy and sweet and fruity, plus I had enough cake and frosting ingredients left to make a batch of absinthe cake bites (with this recipe) so you’re getting two recipes for the price of one today.