As I stated a few days ago, I had wanted to post this recipe just before Christmas, but weather forced us to change our travel plans and leave early. Leaving early didn’t really make much of a difference anyway, as, instead of missing the crappy weather, we drove right into it! Snow, sleet, freezing rain, we had it all, and the mixture was coming down so hard the highway was covered in about 3 inches of nasty, slippery slush. We watched 2 cars slide off of the road right in front of us and saw numerous others in the ditch. Luckily we only had about 60 miles of that stuff, then it turned completely over to rain a few miles south of the Illinois/Wisconsin border and we were able to continue our travels relatively stress-free, which is more than I can say for the thousands stranded by the storms over the holidays. I hope that each and every one of you made it to your destination safely and had an enjoyable holiday.

As for the recipe, for someone who doesn’t care for eggnog too much I sure seem to have a number of recipes that use it as a flavoring agent. Go figure! I first served this for Christmas a few years ago and it was a big hit. Since then I have made a few times for groups both big and small, with positive reactions every time.

While I consider this a “Christmas” meal, it is a great breakfast anytime during the holidays as it is simple to prepare and seems rather upscale-you don’t have to tell anyone how simple it is! This would also make a great breakfast for New Year’s Day, after a night of imbibing a little too much. Nothing in the recipe is a real assault on the tastebuds-a good thing when nursing a hangover, and in fact the little alcohol left in the dish after flambeing the rum helps with a little “hair of the dog.” You could serve this any time of year actually, if you made your own eggnog, but keep it simple on yourself and serve this during the holidays when store bought eggnog is readily available.

Eggnog French Toast with Bananas Foster Sauce

12 slices French or Italian Bread, cut on a bias, 1″ thick
3 cups Eggnog, store bought is fine
1 cup milk
3 each eggs, beaten

4 each bananas, peeled and sliced 1/2″ thick
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/3 cup dark rum
3 Tbsp. butter

Combine the milk, eggnog, and eggs and mix together. Soak both sides of the bread slices in mixture and saute on a griddle set over medium heat and brushed with a little butter. Cook until golden brown on both sides and cooked all the way through, about 5 minutes per side. Don’t let the french toast brown too quickly or the middle will be soggy when the outside is done. Meanwhile combine the butter, and brown sugar in a saute pan and heat over medium high until the brown sugar melts. Add the rum and carefully flame it. Do this by allowing the rum to heat up then igniting it with a long handled lighter. Be careful as it can ignite rather quickly and in bright light the alcohol flame can be almost invisible. Lean back as you light it so as to not, accidentally, light your hair on fire!!! Once the flames die down add the sliced bananas and spices. Cook just until the bananas are warmed through. Add the butter, remove from heat and swirl until the butter has melted into the sauce. Serve each person 3 slices of the french toast topped with the banana sauce. Garnish with a sprinkling of powdered sugar, and maybe a strawberry or two if you want some color.

Just wanted to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!! I had planned on getting in one more post before today, with a great Christmas breakfast, but due to weather we travelled a day early and I wasn’t able to get it in. No problem though as the recipe makes for a great morning after breakfast after a night of drinking on New Year’s Eve, so you can expect my recipe for Eggnog French Toast with Bananas Foster Sauce in the next few days-a perfect way to re-motivate after having done a little too much celebrating.

I hope that if you were travelling, your travels got you to where you wanted to be, safe and sound, and without too much hassle and delay.

May your holidays be filled with love, laughter, and of course great food and drink!!

Happy Holidays!!

One of the best things about this time of year are the Gingerbread houses.  I love building them and love to see what other people have come up with.  It’s always interesting to see what others do and I am often able to learn a trick or two from each piece I look at.  I’ve kind of been out the gingerbread building game for the last couple of years, but this last little adventure, with my daughter, reminded me of how much I like building and decorating them.  I can’t wait until she gets older and we can take on some serious projects together.  But, for now I’m happy building a few simple houses and letting her “decorate” them as she sees fit (meaning trying to fit candy on every available surface there is!). 

No list on gingerbread houses would be complete with a link to The Grove Park Inn Resort & Spa.  They hold the premier gingerbread house contest in the country with entries coming in from coast to coast.  I hope to someday make it there either as a contestant or just to browse, enjoy the efforts of others and soak up the holiday spirit.  For now though, just check out the pictures from the best of this year’s show here.

Craft Elf has a great, indepth site for the novice gingerbread house maker. They’ve got a lot of great information and very detailed explanations and pictures for building your house.

It’s not often I hawk a product or a book here, on my blog, but with this month’s theme being gingerbread, I felt I had to give a nod to this book which can be found on Amazon. I own this book and have for a number of years. It is full of great ideas and the recipes all work well. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in getting into the making of gingerbread houses.

And because I can’t get enough of over-the-top gingerbread houses, here’s another site filled with large, ornate houses.

Yesterday we got as far as cutting and baking the gingerbread pieces. Today it is time to assemble and decorate. But before we can do that we need to make some Royal Icing to use as our glue.

Royal Icing
1 each egg white
1 tsp. cream of tartar
2 1/2 cups powdered sugar

Beat egg white just until it loosens up. Add cream of tartar and powdered sugar. Stir until fully incorporated. You may need to add more sugar, to get a thick, frosting like consistency. Using just enough icing to adhere the pieces, build the base of your house, like in the picture below, using heavy cans of food to hold the pieces together as the icing hardens. This probably won’t be enough but I prefer to work with smaller batches and make it more often.

Use only enough icing to hold the pieces together, initially. This helps the icing dry more quickly than when it it loaded on. After it dries and the pieces are somewhat secure, you can then go back and reinforce the joints with more icing. Only after you have a solid base, with joints that have dried, can you then add the roof. The same rule applies here; add only enough icing to cement the pieces together to speed the drying process, then go back and reinforce. As you can see from the picture below, I have found it easiest to place the roof flat on the counter top and prop up the house. This works for small houses, but not large structures.

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One of my favorite pastimes during this season is making Gingerbread houses.  I have made all kinds of Gingerbread houses from the very large and ornate to the small and simple; I love making them all.  I have created a number of large “centerpiece” houses for various functions and benefits, my favorite being the large church I created as the centerpiece for the gift table at my own wedding.  It was over 2 feet long and the steeple stood almost that high.  With large, candy “stained glass windows, Golden Grahams as roofing shingles and a full array of bells in the steeple the project took weeks to complete, but I enjoyed almost every minute of it.  Then there was the time, as chef of a country club, when I had to make 30 mini Gingerbread houses for kids to decorate.  I didn’t take the simple way out and make them out of graham crackers but cut out and “glued” together 30 of the little things.

Look for Part II where we put the house together and let my daughter have her way with it.

It’s been a few years since I last made a Gingerbread house, but this year my daughter is 3 and I figured it would be a good time to restart the tradition. Of course she is still too young to help Daddy build a Gingerbread house, but she would be more than capable of decorating one, so I set out to build a couple of houses, one for her and one for the neighbor boy who I thought would also like to decorate a house.

The making of Gingerbread houses is not a single day task, unless you want to drive yourself insane. I find that I like to spread it out over 3-4 days, if making an average sized house, many more if making a large or elaborate structure. Day 1 – make and chill the dough. Day 2 – roll out, cut and bake the dough. Day 3 – assemble the house. Day 4 – decorate the house. Of course some of these steps can be combined into single days, but as a working stiff, I find that breaking it up this way makes each step easy to accomplish while still allowing me time to do other things after work.

Gingerbread Dough

2 sticks (1 cup) butter, softened
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup molasses
5 1/4 cups Flour, all purpose
2 tsp. baking soda
2 tsp. ground cinnamon
2 tsp. ground ginger
1/2 tsp. ground clove
2 pinches salt
3/4 cup water

Cream together the butter and the brown sugar, beating until light and fluffy. Add the molasses and mix well. Sift together the flour and baking soda and add, along with the spices and salt. Once well mixed add the water and mix to incorporate. Chill dough at least 3 hours, or better yet, over night. Meanwhile draw out your template for your house. For a basic Gingerbread house you will need 2 sides, a front and back and 2 roof pieces for a total of 6 pieces or 3 template pieces.

To make a house with the same dimesions as I have pictured your side template should be 3″ tall x 4″ long, the template for the front and back (same template for both, just no door or window cut out for the back) is 5″ wide, a side height of 3″, and a roof slope of 5″. The roof template will then need to be 5 1/2″ tall (the extra 1/2″ for overhang) by 5 to 5 1/2″ wide (again to provide some overhang in the front and back and taking into account the width of the gingerbread pieces on the front and back).

After you have let the dough chill for the appropriate amount of time you then need to roll the dough out. Use plenty of flour to dust the dough with, to prevent sticking and roll it out on parchment paper cut to fit your cookie trays. The reason for this is once you cut the pieces it is easier to move the whole parchment paper so that you don’t accidentally stretch the dough out of shape. For a smaller house like this, roll the dough out to about 1/4″ thick, for larger structures you will want the stability of dough rolled out to 1/2″ thick. Place your templates on the dough and cut out the pieces cutting about 1/8″ larger than the templates. Bake in a 350F oven for 20-25 minutes. Remove from oven and allow to cool, for 5 minutes on trays before transferring to a cooling rack. While still slightly warm shave the pieces down, using a serrated knife, to the exact size needed.

If you want to created glass windows or stained glass windows, use a hammer to crush up hard candies such as Jolly Ranchers. When the dough has 5 minutes more to bake, fill window with crushed candy, mounding it up in the center. Return to oven and finish baking.

A quick word about edibility. This recipe makes a great dough that provides both a good flavor and good stability. If you are not so concerned about edibility then there are few things I would recommend doing. First off, I would double all the spices. Doesn’t make for great eating but all those added spices helps keep the Gingerbread house fragrant for quite a long time. Also I would lower the heat to 325F and bake the dough for about 35-40 minutes. This will dry out the dough even more making it more stable, but also much tougher on the teeth.

It’s December 1st, and that means only 24 days left until Christmas, my favorite holiday of the year. Not only is it Christmas, but my wife and I celebrate our anniversary right around that time (Dec. 30th) along with my parents and grandparents. So, as you can see the holiday is a very special time for me.

I figured I would start the Christmas season off with a simple pie recipe. While it may be simple, it packs quite a punch in the flavor department. I tend to not drink a lot of eggnog. I’m not a big fan of it though I do like Tom & Jerry’s, which at their most basic are a frothy, warmed up version of eggnog. I also tend to use eggnog as a flavoring agent in many recipes this time of year, but I just can’t bring myself to drink more than a glass or 2 during the holiday season, and then only if spiked with copious amounts of bourbon.

My wife on the other hand loves eggnog and will drink a considerable amount over the next few weeks. Because of her love for eggnog I dedicate this recipe to her.

Eggnog Pie

1 each Pie crust for a 9″ deep dish pie
1/2 cup Sugar, granulated
1 pinch Salt
2 cups Eggnog (store bought)
4 each Eggs, large
Nutmeg, freshly ground

Preheat oven to 425F. Par bake pie crust for 7 minutes. Remove from oven and allow to cool while making filling. Reduce oven heat to 350F. In a large bowl beat eggs. Add sugar and salt and stir until mostly dissolved. Add eggnog and continue to stir until all sugar is dissolved. Try not to beat too much air into filling. Pour into pie shell, coming just below the edge of the crust. You might have a little extra filling. Don’t over fill the crust. Sprinkle with fresh ground nutmeg and place in oven, on a cookie sheet in case it overflows. Bake for 40-50 minutes. To check a custard for doneness, jiggle the pie. The custard should still wiggle like softly set jello. Don’t overcook the pie or it will lose its smooth, satiny texture and become grainy. Allow to cool on tray for 20 minutes then transfer to a cooling rack. Allow to cool completely before cutting. I even prefer to refrigerate it for a couple of hours to make sure it has set completely before cutting.