To be honest this flavour combo might freak some people out since rosemary is often paired more with savoury dishes. All I can say is...be brave! It might take a couple of cookies before they start to grow on you, but trust me and give them a go! The shortbread just melts in your mouth (thank you butter!), and the rosemary gives it such an interesting piney flavour.
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One of my favourite things about the Christmas season is baking family recipes. No surprise there. Ha! I know a lot of "Christmas-y" baking is often finicky and/or expensive, which is why it's such a special treat. Now these cookies aren't particularly hard to make, but they do take quite a while. There's dough chilling involved (oh the horror!), rolling out tiny pieces of dough, baking, and then dipping. Did I mention that this recipe makes a million cookies? You might be so sick of rolling and dipping by the end that you'll have to console yourself by eating all of the cookies!
But these are totally worth it, I promise! The way they melt in your mouth is just divine, and the cinnamon sugar adds the most wonderful texture too.
This recipe is one of my Grandma's, which means it's extra special when we make it. She still has it on her baking trays, my mom and my aunt both bake it too, and I know that it'll be a recipe tradition that I'll carry on as well. So, without further ado, here is the recipe for Almond Crescent cookies!
recipe: Grandma Holloway
yields: approx. 50 cookies (depending on the size)
Directions:
In a large bowl, mix together the butter, sugar, and ground almonds thoroughly.
In a small bowl, sift together the flour and salt. Then, add to butter mixture, mixing until combined.
Cover dough with plastic wrap, and chill for about an hour. This is to make the dough easier to roll out!
Roll dough into tiny logs about the length of your index finger, and the same diameter as a pencil, so pretty small! (You can make them larger if you wish, although you may need to adjust the baking time accordingly.) We used the method of rolling the dough into small balls to get the dough to come together nicely, and then rolled them into little logs. (See pictures below.)
In a small bowl, combine cinnamon and sugar. Roll the logs around in the cinnamon and sugar mixture until well coated. Gently bend each of the logs into a crescent shape, and place on a pan lined with parchment or a silicone baking mat.
Bake at 325 degrees for 14-16 minutes.
If you want to dip your cookies, warm up your chocolate, and either dip each ends of each cookie into the chocolate and place onto parchment to set. Or, place the chocolate into a ziplock bag, cut a very small hole out of the corner of the bag, and drizzle the cookies with chocolate.
Serve!
Ingredients:
1 cup butter, room temperature
1/3 cup sugar
2/3 cup ground almonds
1 2/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
[Optional]
Chocolate - for dipping
Happy Christmas baking!
-Kelsey
How in the world is it December today? Seriously, time is just flying by! I already hate how it gets dark so early, and can't wait for the days to start getting longer again soon. As a blogger who uses natural light 99% of the time, Winter really makes it harder to get your stuff done!
Anyway, enough complaining! Now, for those of you who have been following me for a while will probably be aware of the fact that I'm not a huge coffee drinker. At all. So whenever I go out for "coffee" with someone, I'm totally not getting coffee. But what would a person drink on a dark and chilly night you might ask? Hot chocolate of course! It's often my drink of choice in the cold months, and making your own is oh so good.
I used dark chocolate for this recipe since it's the best...I mean, my favourite. Haha. But you can totally switch it out for the chocolate of your choosing. Also, salting your whipped cream is the secret to making this drink a homerun. Seriously! I know it seems weird, but the salt, whipped cream, and the richness from the chocolate just come together in a beautiful melty delicious masterpiece. I find that the salt really brings out the flavour of the chocolate, and also cuts the sweetness just a tad. So, don't be scared! Just do it.
recipe: Jordyn & Kelsey Siemens
yields: 2 very large mugs of hot chocolate
Directions:
1) In a medium saucepan, combine the chocolate and whipping cream at a low heat, stirring constantly.
2) Once the chocolate and whipping cream are melted together, add your milk and water.
3) Heat until it reaches your desired temperature, and pour into your mugs.
4) Pile the whipped cream high! Sprinkle a bit of salt and chocolate shavings on top, and serve.
Ingredients:
10 oz dark chocolate, chopped
2 tablespoons whipping cream
2 cups milk
1/2 cup water
whipped cream
coarse salt
chocolate shavings
So there you have it! I love melting down chocolate instead of just using cocoa powder and sugar, and you can go pretty crazy and use different flavoured chocolate bars too!
Happy December!
-Kels
Let the Christmas baking begin! I'm excited to be sharing a few Christmas-y recipes in the next few weeks, and you can always browse through my archives for some more Christmas classics!
We make several different types of bark every year for Christmas, including cranberry almond, peppermint bark, and (my favourite) toffee pretzel bark. If you do decide to check out some of the other bark recipes I've linked here, please have a good laugh at some of my old photos. Oh my!
What I love about bark is that it is so stinkin' easy and so delicious! Seriously, you just throw a few things together, and bam...you're done! And it looks like you did way more work than you actually did. That's called a win win situation folks.
recipe: slightly adapted from: Jean Pare - Holiday Entertaining
Directions:
1) Grease a 10x15 inch cookie sheet with graham crackers. You might need to cut some of them in half or in quarters to fill in the edges.
*If there are any gaps between the crackers and the edge of the pan, the caramel will run off!
2) Sprinkle half of your almonds evenly over the crackers, and set aside.
3) In a medium saucepan, melt together your butter and brown sugar.
4) Bring mixture to a boil, and cook for 3 minutes.
5) Immediately (and gently) pour your caramel mixture over the crackers. The caramel doesn't have to be quite even over the crackers, as it will magically even out while it bakes in the oven!
6) Sprinkle the rest of your almonds over the caramel.
7) Bake at 350 degrees for 7 minutes. Remove and allow to cool.
8) Carefully heat up each of your chocolates (separately). I just did them in the microwave and stirred them often as they can burn easily.
9) Place each kind of chocolate in a small ziplock bag, cut a very small hole in one corner of each, and drizzle each chocolate over the bark.
10) Allow the chocolate to set before cutting. Then serve!
*These freeze well! So you can pop some in your freezer and pull them out as needed.
Ingredients:
Graham crackers (soda crackers work well too!)
1 cup butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup slivered almonds
1/4 cup white chocolate melting wafers
1/4 cup dark/milk chocolate melting wafers
Also, please don't judge me on the recipe title. It was a real struggle. I really wanted it to be descriptive, and then just ended up describing exactly what it was.... #foodbloggerproblems
Anywho...Happy Thanksgiving to all you Americans out there, and Happy Thursday to the rest of the world!
-Kels
I FINALLY have another hair tutorial for you. Let it be known that this was done in our kitchen, with me trying to figure out my sister's studio lights, and using self-timer for every photo because my remote has gone missing... Yep. It was quite an ordeal!
Read MoreIt was love at first sight when I saw this dress, and I knew it would be perfect for the upcoming holidays! First of all, there are deer on it. Second of all, it's green! So there you have it....my super technical decision-making process for picking out clothing.
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Yesterday we made incredibly addicting
, and today we're here with an even easier recipe for peppermint bark! Truly, this isn't much of a recipe, but it's too good not to share.
Peppermint Bark
Ingredients:
white chocolate*
candy canes
*you can get fancy with your white chocolate and use Callebaut, or you can go the cheaper route and just use white chocolate melting wafer.
Directions:
1) First, place your candy canes in a large plastic bag, and use a meat hammer/rolling pin/etc to smash them into small pieces. You can use a fine strainer to sift off the very fine candy cane dust to save for later (we sprinkle it on top to decorate the bark.
2) Melt your white chocolate in a large saucepan.
3) Stir in the candy cane bits, and pour mixture onto a parchment lined baking sheet.
4) Sprinkle with the super fine dusty and/or sprinkles. Allow to cool in the fridge, and then break into chunks and serve.
*In addition to serving this as traditional bark chunks, we also piped some of the chocolate into snowflake molds! These worked wonderfully, and were a nice change from the norm.
Again, this bark is dangerously addicting! So make it at your own risk!
p.s.
♥ kelsey and jordyn
These cookies come from the very creative mind of Miss Jordyn! She is a pro at melding recipes, and coming up with new ideas in the kitchen. This time, she took her famous
triple chocolate cookie
recipe and wrapped it around mint patties.
Rich and chocolatey, these decadent cookies are best saved for special occasions....like Christmas! They are also quite finicky, and we don't recommend them for beginner bakers!
We love drizzling these cookies in white chocolate, and then sprinkling with red and green sprinkles for Christmas. It'd be fun to mix up the colours of the sprinkles for different occasions, and we've also used crushed up candy canes!
Chocolate Mint Patty Cookies
Ingredients:
1 cup butter
1 cup Sugar
3/4 cup Brown Sugar (packed)
2 Eggs
1 1/4 cup Cocoa Powder
1 3/4 cup Flour
2 tsp Baking Soda
Mint Patties (we used pearsons)
Directions:
1) Place mint patties in the freezer.
2) In a large bowl, cream together butter, sugar and eggs.
3) Mix in cocoa powder, flour and baking soda.
4) Take a few mint patties out of the freezer, and start molding cookie dough around each one. You want as little cookie dough as possible around the mint patties....otherwise your cookies will be too wide and flat and have a bulge in the middle.
5) Continue taking out a few mint patties at a time, and forming cookies until you have a complete pan.
6) Stick your pan of cookies back into the freezer, and repeat the process.
7) Once you have another pan of cookies complete, place your first pan into your oven and bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes.
8) Repeat until cookie dough is used up.
9) If you want, you can drizzle with white chocolate and decorate with sprinkles!
*The key of these cookies is to keep the mint patties as frozen as possible before baking, as well as placing the cookies in the freezer for a bit before going into the oven. Otherwise all your minty-goodness will leak out.*
These cookies are truly not for the faint of heart. I'm going to give it to you straight....These bad boys are tricky. They take a VERY long time. And they might even kick you in the shins. Sometimes they WILL (not might....they will) turn out like this:
But that's okay, because you'll get the hang of it. And these cookies are definitely worth the effort!
For the white chocolate drizzle, I melted a few white chocolate wafers, and used a small ziplock bag with a small cut in one corner to drizzle it on.
And sprinkles if you want, and you're done!
One of my favorite things about Christmas baking is that your house smells amazing all the time! These cookies don't disappoint, and will fill your house with delightful minty chocolate goodness.
p.s.
♥ kelsey
Hello, I'm Kelsey!
I grew up on (and now work at) my family's apple farm in the beautiful Fraser Valley, BC. I love cats, salted caramel anything, and have an unhealthy addiction to doughnuts. Read more here!
©2014-2016 KELSEY SIEMENS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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