So this is Christmas

Somehow we made it through another year, and with the December holidays comes lots of baking and eating sugary things. I don’t make the rules; it’s just required.

It seems kind of inevitable that during the month of December I’m going to be baking cookies. Make no mistake, I’m not a cookie person – if I had to choose one dessert or snack I had to eat for the rest of my life, cookies would be last on my priority list. But during December, there is something about baking cookies specifically that seems like a mandatory activity.

My sister and I bake and decorate sugar cookies every year using festive shaped cookie cutters like Christmas trees, stars, candy canes, and snowflakes. It’s such a fun tradition we look forward to, and we’ve been following the same recipe from my Mom for years.

Even though I’m not a cookie person, I do love a chocolate crinkle cookie. For the past couple years I’ve been following John Kanell’s recipe and it never fails. If I’m going to have a cookie, I want it soft and cakey like these, and the powdered sugar crackle really screams winter and Christmas coziness.

Aside from the mandatory cookie baking, this year I really craved cake. Not just a simple tea or loaf cake, a full 2-tier cake with frosting between both layers and on top. I decided on red velvet simply because it felt festive, and I had red food coloring in my pantry. So why not?

The recipe I used for the cake layers was just OK – not anything incredible but definitely a delicious cake I was happy to be eating. The frosting was really the star of the show – Alison Roman’s “Salty Vanilla Frosting” (recipe can be found within this coconut cake recipe). I chose it because I didn’t want a cream cheese or buttercream frosting; both of those options always feel too heavily cream cheese or butter flavored. Like I’m taking a bite out of a cream cheese block or butter stick. I was looking for something that combined the two, and this recipe was exactly that.

Using two nine-inch cake pans made this cake ginormous, so I ended up freezing 8 big slices. I wrapped each in plastic wrap first and then in tin foil. We’ll be saving them for Valentine’s Day, or a gloomy January day where the only thing that can cure the winter blues is a little slice of sweetness.