Merry Christmas!! I hope you all well and enjoying this glorious day celebrating the birth of Christ with friends and family. This weekend has been a busy one with baking and food preparation and I thought I would share two different recipes with you today, in case you’re in the baking mood as well. I tried to post this a few days before Christmas but some illness got in the way of that. Better late than never though, so here it goes!

Egg Nog Cookies

The holiday season is prime time for egg nog and if you have a little bit to spare, make up a quick batch of these melt-in-your-mouth cookies!

• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour (I used the Krusteaz Gluten Free pictured below)
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 3/4 cup salted butter, room temp
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 2 large egg yolks
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup eggnog

Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees. Wisk together all the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl and then set aside. In a stand up mixer, whip together the butter, white sugar, and brown sugar until fluffy. Mix in the egg yolks next, one at a time. Add the vanilla extract and egg nog and then turn the mixer on to a low speed. Slowly incorporate the dry ingredients and mix until everything is combined.

Once a nice cookie dough has been formed, you’re ready to start placing dough on the cookie sheet. You can place parchment paper on a cookie sheet if you want but I used silicone baking sheets instead. I also used a cookie dough scoop to make each one the same size. Place in the pre-heated oven for about 14-16 minutes, or until slightly golden brown on top. This recipe made about 30 cookies.

Homemade Marshmallows

I’ve recently seen pictures of huge, homemade marshmallows in cups of hot chocolate and they’ve always looked so much better than the store-bought ones, so I really wanted to give this a try. The end result was totally worth it!

• 3 packages unflavored gelatin
• 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
• 1 cup light corn syrup
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons pure vanilla extract
• Powdered sugar, for dusting

Combine the gelatin and 1/2 cup of cold water in the bowl of a stand up mixer, with the wisk attachment, and let it sit while you make the syrup portion. Next, in a small saucepan, combine the sugar, corn syrup, salt, and 1/2 cup water and cook until the sugar dissolves and the liquid becomes more clear. Then, turn the heat to high and cook until the syrup reaches 240 degrees on a thermometer. Once 240 degrees has been reached, remove the syrup from the heat.

Turn the mixer on to a low speed and then SLOWLY add in the HOT syrup with the dissolved gelatin. Turn up the mixer to a medium-high speed for about 15 minutes, until the mixture becomes thick and fluffy. Also add in the vanilla extract during this time. It would be really fun to add in candy cane bits or other flavored extracts to make these more unique–but ideas for next time.

With a sieve, dust a glass baking dish with powdered sugar. Pour the marshmallow mixture into the pan–quickly too because it will start to solidify, smooth out the top, and then dust again the top with more powdered sugar. This will need to sit out overnight so that it can dry out. I just placed a clean towel over top of the dish.

The next day you can cut the marshmallows into shapes! I just went for cutting them into squares this time but you can use all sorts of cookie cutters to get them in fun shapes. Voila!! These are so much creamier than the store-bought ones and they just have an extra element of “umph.”

I hope you have fun making these recipes and I hope you have an even better rest of your Christmas Day! See you in the next blog post!

Love from, Amy.