Category: Holidays

A Patriot Tea Party: Almond Cookies, Queen Cakes, and Berry-Flavored Tea

Posted July 4, 2019 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes, Holidays / 0 Comments

Happy 4th of July, folks!

I hope you’re all enjoying a relaxing day with family, friends, and good food. I definitely am! We’re off visiting my husband’s side of the family today, and we’ve got a weekend in Indiana planned with my family next week. In fact, a visit to my family in June gave me the idea for today’s post, which is dedicated to Felicity Merriman, the American Girl doll inspired by the American Revolution.

I first got my Felicity doll when I was just a little girl (six? maybe seven years old?). We did EVERYTHING together, so much so that I’m actually surprised she survived my childhood in one piece. But survive she did, and my mom kept her safe in storage for years until I had a house with room to store her. Last month, I finally got to take her home! As I went through her box of accessories, it got me reminiscing about all the good times we had. The funny thing is, I had been stressing about what book to feature on the blog in July, but when I realized that my scheduled posting day fell on Independence Day…well, a Felicity recipe was just too perfect to pass up!

For today’s recipe, we’re recreating teatime at Miss Manderly’s house from the book Felicity Learns a Lesson. In the story, Felicity must learn to balance her patriot sympathies with her new friendship to a loyalist named Elizabeth. At teatime, Felicity has to choose between drinking tea (which her family is boycotting) or refusing and thereby endangering her friendship with Elizabeth. Her quick solution is awfully clever, and I want to commemorate it today by recreating Miss Manderly’s tea table: an inviting spread of queen cakes, hard biscuits, and black tea.

I used an almond variation on my own sugar cookie recipe for the hard biscuits, but it was trickier to find a queen cake recipe. I wanted an authentic colonial recipe, but it also had to have instructions that would make sense in a modern kitchen. In my search, I stumbled across the blog The English Kitchen, which sounded promising. The recipe there was perfect: quick, easy, remarkably tasting…and not much altered from the colonial version! The only change I made was adding nutmeg, since some variations on queen cakes call for mace (which comes from the same plant), and bits of brown spice are clearly visible in the queen cake illustration in Felicity Learns a Lesson.

Then came time for the finishing touch: a custom tea blend! It’s been a long time since I’ve created one of my custom Adagio teas, so it was fun to stretch my tea-making muscles again. This red, white, and blue inspired blend is flavored with raspberries, blueberries, and almonds to make a rich tea with a distinct hit of juicy berries. I love it with a little sugar and milk.

So fire up some fireworks and put on the kettle. It’s time for a Patriot Tea Party! 😀

NOTE: This post is not sponsored by or affiliated with Mattel, Pleasant Company, or the American Girl brand.

Christmas News & Life Updates: Goodreads Awards and Jan. 2019 Blog Schedule

Posted December 22, 2018 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Blogging, Book Events and Tours, Holidays / 0 Comments

Merry Almost Christmas, everybody! Today I’m putting the finishing touches on gifts and getting ready to hunker down for the last remaining weeks before we bring the Little Miss into the world. In the meantime, I’ve got some exciting life updates to share with you guys:
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THE GOODREADS CHOICE AWARDS

As many of you may remember, my cookbook A Literary Tea Party was nominated in the 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards. The winners were announced at the beginning of the month, and I’m thrilled to say I placed 4th in my category! 😀 There was some tough competition—including cookbooks from Ina Garten, Bobby Flay, and Giada De Laurentiis—so getting 4th place was really exciting for me. I flailed about it on social media quite a bit, but this is the first chance I’ve had to announce it on the blog. Thank you SO much to everyone who voted! 🙂

Pssst! If you’re looking for a last minute Christmas gift, you can still get my book before Christmas if you order through Amazon!
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NEXT YEAR’S BLOG SCHEDULE

In my pregnancy announcement post, I mentioned plans to approach next year in 3 phases: hiatus, 2 posts per month, then back to full schedule by the end of the year. I recently had a big blog-related project come up that I need to start working on ASAP, so the plan has changed some. I can’t give full details about the project yet since it’s not officially official, but I should be able to shower you all with the awesome news by early spring. 🙂

As for 2019 blog plans, I’ll still be on postpartum hiatus for January-March. I scheduled some past posts to republish on Thursdays so it won’t be a total dead zone around here, but I don’t know how often I’ll reply to comments and such. After March, my plan is to do 1 post per month for the rest of the year. With 2 kids under 3 years at home, I’m gonna need the extra time for Operation Super Secret Project! 😉

There’s a silver lining, though: you guys get to pick what I make for the monthly posts! If there’s a food you’ve always wanted to see featured on the blog, shoot me an email through the Chat with the Chef page! It can be a specific literary recipe (like, say, the Queen’s tarts from Alice in Wonderland), or if you want to see a certain book featured but don’t care which food I pick, you can tell me about that too.

And you can start sending your requests now! I want to build up as many ideas as possible before March so I have the option to work ahead (and time to read the book, if it’s one I haven’t read). So if you’ve already got something in mind, send it my way! 😀

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That’s all from me for now!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everybody!

Scooby Doo Tie-Dye Spook Cupcakes

Posted October 25, 2018 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes, Holidays / 0 Comments

Ghosts are an essential part of the Scooby-Doo cartoon (even if they do usually turn out to be just some guy in a mask 😉), so I thought it would be fun to make a ghost-themed dessert for this month’s menu. I loved the idea of making spook cupcakes, and I decided to tie-dye the frosting for some psychedelic 60’s flair, perfect for Scooby-Doo! I started with my go-to chocolate cupcake and vanilla frosting recipe from my cookbook and gave the frosting an orange, lime green, hot pink, and light blue swirl. Then I used this recipe to make my own homemade marshmallow ghosts (but you can totally go with store bought ghost Peeps, if you want). These sweet little specters are a perfect addition to any Halloween menu or Scooby-Doo birthday party!

Note: The marshmallow mixture for the ghosts needs to set overnight.

Easy Homemade Vegetable Stock (Part of My No Food Waste Challenge!)

Posted March 28, 2018 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Holidays / 3 Comments

With Easter just a few days away, Lent is coming to a close. For my Lenten sacrifice this year, I decided to eliminate as much food waste as possible from my life, and one of the ways I chose to do that was by saving vegetable scraps to make stock. I’m happy to announce that just last week, the ziplock bag in my freezer was FINALLY full enough to make a batch of stock! Yaaay! I’ve provided the method I used in the post below. It’s a slight variation on this method from Serious Eats. It’s super easy and versatile, just right for helping me maintain my low-food-waste goals when Lent is over. Plus, I’m thinking plain vegetable stock and bread would be an appropriate Good Friday meal, since it’s simple while still being healthful. Enjoy! 🙂

Toasted Meringue Cheesecake with Gingerbread Crust (part of my No Food Waste challenge!)

Posted March 13, 2018 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Holidays / 2 Comments

As many of you know, I gave up food waste for Lent to help me develop the habit of using all the leftovers and extra ingredients I always have. I’ve improved in some areas, but I’ve also discovered new challenges (like actually finding time to MAKE the recipes I’ve planned out! lol). Since we’re about halfway through Lent, I figured now was the perfect time for another update, and I’m happy to say the the recipe I’m sharing today was a lot of fun and turned out great!

When I made my Wuthering Heights gingerbread manor, I had a bunch of leftover gingerbread scraps from trimming the baked cookies while they were still hot. As much as I love snacking on them (the Mister and the Little Mister do too!), it’s hard for two full-grown adults and a baby to eat a whole gingerbread house in a reasonable amount of time, even if you don’t count the cookie trimmings. I knew they’d go to waste if I didn’t find a use for them, so the brainstorming began.

I loved the idea of making a gingerbread cookie crust, but of course, you need something to fill the crust, right? Luckily, I also had some spare cream cheese and egg whites that needed using up as well. Thus, the idea of a meringue cheesecake was born! I used this cheesecake recipe and this meringue recipe, and I must say I’m very pleased with the results! The cheesecake recipe was easy, and it came out smooth and delicious. Plus, it looked great with the toasted meringue on top!

I think my favorite part was the balance of flavors. The light, fluffy meringue complimented the rich, creamy cheesecake, and the spice from the gingerbread was welcome without being overpowering. We ate it right up! 🙂

Chocolate Mocha Frosting: An Update on My No Food Waste Challenge

Posted February 20, 2018 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Holidays / 6 Comments

At the end of January, I posted this year’s plan for my annual Lenten sacrifice: cutting down on food waste. One of my goals in this challenge is to always find uses for leftover ingredients. I had an extra container of Greek yogurt after making orange poppy seed cake, so I decided to use it to make this no-measure chocolate cake from Food 52, in hopes that it would serve as a go-to method for using extra yogurt in the future.

“But this isn’t a post about cake,” I hear you say. “This is a post about frosting. What gives?”

You’re absolutely right. And the reason this isn’t a post about cake is because I managed to majorly screw up what was supposed to be an easy recipe. >.< Pro tip: ALWAYS read ALL the ingredients and instructions before starting a recipe, even if you’ve read them before and think you remember. In short, don’t be like me and just wing it.

First off, the recipe called for full fat yogurt, and mine was fat free. Mine was also two ounces less than what the recipe called for, so I added a couple ounces of sour cream to make up the difference and increase the fat content. The recipe also called for self-raising flour, so I made my own using some instructions I found online, though I couldn’t helping thinking that the suggested 3 tsp of baking powder and 1 tsp salt sounded like a lot for one single-layer cake.

When I tasted the batter, it was just…off. Slightly bitter and oddly sharp. I became VERY worried about this cake, but I couldn’t throw it out since the whole point of the exercise was to avoid waste. Once baked, the flavor wasn’t as bad as the batter, but still very weird. It was also WAY too dense and moist on the inside, even though it was thoroughly baked.

This sad fail cake clearly required some buttercream TLC. And that’s where this chocolate mocha frosting comes in! I wanted something rich to mask the weird flavors in the cake, so I experimented with adding cocoa powder and instant coffee to my vanilla buttercream recipe. It was FANTASTIC. I’m definitely adding it to my list of go-to frostings. The Mister even liked it, and he normally won’t touch anything with coffee in it.

At the end of the day, I may have made the most depressing chocolate cake ever, but I came out with a delicious new frosting recipe. So I guess it evens out? Plus, I technically met my goal of using up extra ingredients, so yay for that! 🙂

No Food Waste: My Lenten Challenge

Posted January 30, 2018 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Holidays / 4 Comments

Ash Wednesday is just a couple of weeks away, which means I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’d like to give up for Lent this year. As someone who cooks for a living, I always seem to have a surplus of ingredients left over from recipes (a cup of sour cream, half an onion, a partial carton of beef stock, etc.). I know I can and should re-purpose this stuff so it doesn’t go to waste, but I never know off the top of my head what to do with it. Every time I open the fridge, I see them sitting innocuously on the shelf, and I remind myself that I should hunt down a recipe that uses them. Then I shut the door and immediately forget about it, my good intentions resulting in nothing but shriveled onions and waaaaay expired sour cream.

This year for Lent, I’ve decided to tackle my chronic food waste problem. My goal will be to all-but-eliminate food waste from our household in three big ways:

Start saving vegetable scraps to use for stock

Sure, plants are biodegradable, but it just seems like such a shame to throw a way a technically edible part of the plant (like potato peelings or broccoli stalks) when I could save it instead. I have a great vegetable stock recipe that uses veggie scraps, but it takes me a long time to accumulate enough material to make it. I probably should have started a cache of frozen veggie scraps ages ago, but that’s kinda the point of all this: to get me to do what I should already be doing. Hopefully I’ll have enough scraps stored up to publish a post about the stock recipe soon! Added bonus: like many families, we abstain from meat on Fridays during Lent, and homemade vegetable stock is a great start to a meat-free meal.
- Subgoal: Learn about (and implement?) urban composting. We rent our house instead of own, so a compost pile for our vegetable scraps isn’t really an option. However, during Lent I’ll be looking into urban composting to see if it’s a good fit for us.

Organize my fridge so leftover ingredients don’t get pushed to the back and forgotten

This is the main culprit of my waste: I forget I have things. Then I clean out my fridge a month later and find containers of food I could have easily used. Right now my organizational method stinks (probably since it consists of NO method), so I need a way to make sure the random odds and ends are always visible.
- Subgoal: ALWAYS find a use for these items. It wouldn’t be much of a sacrifice to pat myself on the back for serving leftover sour cream with tacos once during Lent. Instead, I want to challenge myself to ALWAYS find a use for extra ingredients. If I make a Lenten commitment, I know I’ll be more motivated to find recipes that use them. I’m also planning to make a Pinterest page of any recipes I permanently add to my weeknight cooking repertoire as a result of this challenge (and hopefully right posts for some of them!).

Eat all the leftovers

Since Lent is just as much about sacrifice as it is about making a positive change in your life, I can’t turn a blind eye to my difficulty with leftovers. I easily get bored when my meals are too repetitive, so if it takes more than a few days to finish a dish I made, I start ignoring it in favor of other food (even if I know it will go bad soon). The final part of my Lenten challenge will be to always finish leftovers and prioritize the items that will go bad sooner.
- Subgoal: Give more food away. When I cook for other people, I’m really good about keeping things professional and tidy. I pull my hair back, wash my hands, and NEVER lick my fingers. What I’m NOT good at is maintaining that same standard when I do my blog cooking. You can usually find me at 11 am on a Monday morning, still in my pajamas, with a beautifully finished dish in front of me while I stand there with uncombed hair, licking my fingers after I adjust the garnish for the millionth time. This makes me reluctant to give blog food away. It just feels gross to give away a batch of doughnuts when I know I licked glaze off my fingers as I plated them (or fear a stray hair may have fallen into the batter). This means we sometimes wind up with more food than we can eat, and some of it gets wasted. So from now on whenever I cook for the blog, the hair goes up and the fingers stay clean. No more sad food that I’m too ashamed to send to the office with the Mister!

So that’s my challenge! Starting on February 14th, I’ll be sharing an intermittent blog series chronicling my journey to less food waste. I can’t promise that I’ll post on an exact schedule (since I’m not exactly sure what I’ll consider worth sharing), but they’ll most likely appear 4-5 times throughout Lent, most likely on Tuesdays.

Normally I don’t post about stuff like Lent because it’s not relevant to what I blog about, but this year is a little different. I know there are other people out there who want to cut down on food waste too and might want to see what I learn during this process. I also want to hear from people who are succeeding where I’m failing.

So here are my big questions for you guys as I set out to eliminate food waste from my life:

Do you use urban composting? If so, got any tips for a newbie?

Have a fridge organization method you love? Share it!

Clue me in on any recipes you turn to when you need to use up extra ingredients! 🙂

a

Jingle Bells: Thoughts on my 4th Anniversary

Posted December 26, 2017 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Holidays / 2 Comments

Every year on my anniversary, I like to write a post that reflects on one aspect of my wedding and highlights its wider significance to my marriage. On my first anniversary, I wrote about my wedding ring; year two, the flowers in my bouquet; and year three, the priest’s sermon. I was planning on telling the story about my wedding dress this year, but as I was hanging the jingle bell ornaments on our Christmas tree, I realized that this is a perfect year to talk about the special significance of those bells.

A Literary Christmas Cookie Exchange: Bookish Cookie Recipes for Your Holiday Party

Posted December 20, 2017 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Holidays / 1 Comment

I love a good cookie exchange. It’s a great chance to experiment with something new or whip up a crowd-pleasing classic. A couple years ago I made pumpkin madeleines with cream cheese frosting for a cookie exchange by riffing on my go-to madeleine recipe, and I was oh so pleased by how well they were received (definitely one of my prouder baking moments).

Sadly, I won’t have a chance to attend any exchanges this year, but I volunteered to bring some homemade cookies to my family’s Christmas get together. I decided to make Jo’s Christmas gingerbread from my Little Women menu. They couldn’t be more festive, and gingerbread is a favorite treat of the Little Mister (while I was recipe testing for my cookbook, he ate all the limbs off a poor gingerbread man before we could stop him).

Cookie exchange or not, I figure I’m not the only one who wants to try a fun new cookie recipe for the holidays. I’ve made loads of book-inspired cookies in the past that are perfect for Christmas, so I decided to share a few of them below! There’s Jo’s gingerbread of course, but also Sherlock Holmes’ brandy snaps, Romeo and Juliet’s Italian sandwich cookies, and many more. So bake up some bookish fun for Christmas! Your bibliophile friends will thank you. 🙂

A Toast to National Book Lovers’ Day: 7 Literary Drinks

Posted August 8, 2017 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Holidays / 0 Comments

Tomorrow is National Book Lovers’ Day, so to celebrate I thought it would be fun to share a special roundup of book-themed drinks. 🙂

Why drinks, you ask? Well, I figured drink recipes are something quick and easy you can throw together on a whim, which is important for a holiday like this (one that lands on a weekday and is the sort that some people don’t hear about until the last minute). After all, just because you haven’t got time to run to the store doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to toast your love of books, right? 😉

The recipes listed here include cocktails, nonalcoholic punch, hot chocolate, and even Earl Grey lattes. So we’ve got something for everyone—whether you wanna party it up with an Edgar Allan Poe cocktail or get cozy with some of the White Witch’s hot chocolate.

Cheers, and happy Book Lovers’ Day! 🙂