12/19/97

Holiday Sweets

I do not bake. Unfortunately my kids don't quite accept this, and still harbor fantasies about baking cookies with Mommy. In fact, they don't want to stop at cookies. They want to make chocolate truffles. To appease them, I searched my cookbooks for a recipe. I ended up online where I did find an easy chocolate truffle recipe. And along the way, I found these holiday treats to share with you. Have a safe and happy holiday season!

Baking with M&M's

Each month, the M&M bakery features a new Mini Baking Bits recipe. This month's creation is a beautiful, but complicated-looking, Festive Cookie Tree. For those of us without extensive baking experience, M&M offers a library of baking tips. Did you know leaving large empty spaces on your baking sheets can cause the cookies to burn? Cooking with colorful and tasty M&M's should delight kids of all ages, and M&M includes an extensive archive of recipes.

Christmas Cookies

These twenty-five Good Housekeeping recipes are illustrated with mouth-watering photographs. Even if you don't plan to touch that oven, these cookies are fun to browse, and browsing doesn't add an inch to your waistline! If you do indulge, you'll find the nutritional breakdown (calories, fat, etc.) listed with each recipe. To search Good Housekeeping's complete database of more than 3000 recipes, use the Recipe Finder button at the bottom of any recipe page.

Hanukkah Donuts

The young State of Israel has created many of its own customs. One is serving Hanukkah sufganiyot (jelly doughnuts), which are fried in oil to symbolize the miracle of the oil that lasted eight days instead of one. This holiday tradition reflects Israel's melding of East and West. The fritter is of Sephardic origin. But the jelly filling and sugar coating come from European immigrants who ate apricot-filled glazed doughnuts on Hanukkah. This sufganiyot recipe from Epicurious divides the work into adult and child steps.

Mrs. Claus' Kitchen

I immediately liked Mrs. Claus because she begins with five rules for the kitchen, including my favorite: Always clean up when you are finished. Recipes are presented in three categories: Elf Bedtime Snacks, Santa's Favorites, and Reindeer Cravings. All the recipes are kid-easy and full of kid-appeal. For example, did you know reindeer love wormy apples? You can make them by spreading peanut butter on apple slices, and topping with yummy, gummy worms. Most of these recipes don't even require baking!

Reader's Digest Gingerbread People

For eating or hanging on your tree, Gingerbread People (remember when they were called men?) are a taste of Victorian Christmases past. Decorated with cinnamon red hots and gumdrops, who could resist them? For those even more ambitious, Reader's Digest has instructions for an old- fashioned Gingerbread House. The littlest ones will enjoy this craft more if you build it in stages by baking one day and decorating the next.

The following links are either new discoveries or sites that didn't make it into my newspaper column because of space constraints. Enjoy!

Kwanzaa

Michael's Virtual Gingerbread Houses

Please send questions or comments to feldman@surfnetkids.com.