Christmas Eats

Thanks everyone for the congratulations comments on my last post. 😀

Before Christmas gets too far away, I wanted to share some of the things I made for Christmas. First the best one:

This is the BEST fudge ever. My cousin even hugged me and said “thank you for bringing this fudge into my life.” 🙂

It’s not too difficult to make, though it does take some time and dirties a lot of dishes. I’ve made it almost every single year for the holidays for like 7 years. Movie Mom always requests it. It makes a 9×13 pan, which is a LOT of fudge. I took it to three different family events and it still wasn’t all gone! Which means I ate way too much of it the past few days while I was painting the trim in the kitchen (more on that later).

Cake Balls

I’ve been wanting to make cake balls for awhile. You can click over to the official recipe if you want, but basically you bake a cake then crumble it up and mix the crumbs with frosting. Then form that mixture into balls and cover with confectioner’s coating (almond bark). You can use any kind of cake, any kind of frosting and any kind of almond bark. So the possibilities are endless!!

I used a chocolate cake mix with dark chocolate frosting and then both vanilla and chocolate almond bark. I forgot to take a picture of the pretty cake balls, but here’s a shot of the cake ball rejects that weren’t good enough to make the platter:

I had a little trouble with the cake ball batter though. It was too moist and didn’t want to form into balls. So I stuck the mixture in the freezer for awhile and that seemed to help. But then it would just warm back up and get too sticky again. At the end I got frustrated and just clumped the last little bit into lumps on the cookie sheet (hence the “rejects” shown above).

I’d like to make these again because they were super tasty. They only made it through two family events before they were gone. And I’m pretty sure I saw one of my cousins sneaking out a napkin full of them when he was leaving Movie Mom’s house.

If you have made cake balls before, do you have any tips or tricks for making them?

I had also planned to make red velvet cupcakes, but with being sick I never got around to it. I may make them tomorrow for New Year’s Eve. The red color just makes them so festive for this time of year.

Non-Sweets

We didn’t have a traditional holiday dinner at any of the family events I attended. At MIL’s we had brunch. At Movie Mom’s we had sandwiches and appetizers. I made vegetarian baked beans. Sorry no recipe to share because the seasoning was from a mix.

Then at my aunt’s house we had soups. We did this last year and it was a huge hit. People make about 3-4 different kinds of soup and then everyone else brings appetizers and desserts. It’s nice because no one has to worry about a turkey or ham and all the side dishes. And there’s a lot of variety for everyone (including a veggie option for me). This year one of my aunts made vegetarian chilli, so I made a big batch of cornbread. It was basically a double batch of this recipe with dairy-free substitutions. It was a hit!

Did you make anything special for the holidays? Do you typically have traditional holiday dinner or something else? Since I don’t eat turkey anymore and I have never liked ham, I don’t really miss having traditional holiday dinner. Although last night I did get a craving for stuffing a bought a mix for this weekend. Hehe.