{Christmas 2010} food

Christmas food for us is all about tradition.  Well, sort of.  For the past few years we always had our fancy Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve.  It started out that way because we had to travel the day after Christmas and didn't want to deal with dishes and leftovers.  But since we weren't traveling this year, we decided to switch things up a bit.  Our fancy dinner (white bean tuscan soup followed by beef wellington) got moved to Christmas day, making room for a new tradition on Christmas Eve: Santa-boli!

Santa-boli is our usual stromboli with a couple dough cut-outs in holiday shapes.  (We discovered that cookie cutters are an excellent way to make a favorite meal into a holiday meal.)

For dessert, we had Christmas cookies:

Corn Flake Holly "Wreaths" (These will be getting a post all their own tomorrow)

Roll-out cookies with piped royal icing

I tried something a bit ambitious for the roll-out cookies this year... piping and flooding with royal icing.  They turned out great, but I don't know if I'd do it again next year because, holy moly, was it a pain in the rear.  I started with homemade white royal icing, then colored it in batches of green, red, and blue.  I thought I'd save myself a lot of hassle rinsing out the piping bag by using little squeeze bottles, but actually getting the icing into the bottles took forever.  There was also a lot of planning involved because I had to do all the piping first, then dilute the icing with a tiny bit of water to do the flooding.  If I wanted to pipe on top of flooding I had to make sure I hadn't already diluted that color.  Despite all this, I was still pretty excited about how each one looked as it was finished.  Very fancy and professional.  Not to mention delicious.  But I'm guessing next year with a 6 month old baby I'll be lucky to slap on some buttercream and sprinkles. :)