Chocolate Dipped Shortbread Cookies

A typical Christmas with my family consists of a full day's worth of Chinese hot pot. Three meals (and snacks in between) of beef, lamb, fish balls, squid, napa cabbage, taro, tofu, seaweed, noodles, and my mom's famous dipping sauce. Cookies, especially home baked cookies, are usually nowhere to be found. Not exactly your typical American Christmas, but it's what I always associate with the holidays. It's what makes me nostalgic; what all the lights and buzz remind me of.

It's been a few years since I've spent the holidays with my family, life takes you in other directions sometimes. So last year, yearning for a piece of home, Phillip and I went out for hot pot in Chinatown on Christmas day. It wasn't as good as mom's, but it did ease the homesickness a bit.

In a change from tradition, this year there will be lots of cookie baking and no hot pot (only because I already got my fix last week). However, I still want to honor the non-typical ways people can celebrate Christmas, so I present to you a slightly non-typical cookie in the form of chocolate dipped rhinos.

Chocolate Hazelnut Long Johns: The Great Donut Experiment of 2015 & why I will not be eating donuts for the next 365 days

This. This was one of those recipes. You know, the kind that takes weeks and weeks of testing, where there's always something just a little off. Where the thought of giving up seems so enticing, but you've put so much effort into it already that defeat is not an option.

Let's dive right in, shall we? First was the filling. How do you make a chocolate hazelnut filling? In my first two tries, the custard was cooked with finely ground hazelnuts then strained over and over and over again. It was impossible to strain out the super fine hazelnut meal through a mesh sieve, and the custard was far too thick to strain through a cheesecloth. Third time around, I thought up a brilliant idea of using hazelnut milk instead of whole milk. Unfortunately, nut milk does not have the same properties and chemical composition of real milk. The custard never set with the same amount of egg yolks and cornstarch. The fourth time I added an extra egg yolk and doubled the cornstarch, and while thicker, it still never set. I gathered it had something to do with either the absence of milk proteins or milk fat, but there is a surprising lack of information about the chemistry behind cooking on the internet (if you have a scientific explanation, please message me I'd love to know). Hesitant to add even more thickening agents to the mixture, I then made another version of hazelnut milk, using real milk instead of water, simmering it with ground hazelnuts, and letting the mixture steep before straining. So I guess you could call it a hazelnut milk milk. Ta-da! Success.

Ahem, then there was the whole after-30-minutes-the-donuts-were-greasy problem. Fortunately the internet did have a solution for that: frying in vegetable shortening instead of oil. The short explanation is because vegetable shortening is solid at room temperature, the grease doesn't seep out after frying as it does with liquid oil. One more kink to work through, the dough wasn't quite as soft as I would have liked. The solution: more sugar, more egg, and we finally have a donut I'm proud to share. Cue the sigh of relief, here.

Homemade Croissants

I think this is as far as I go. What else is left to do, left to master, after making homemade croissants? Have I peaked? Is it all downhill from here?

I jest of course, but these croissants. These croissants! So flaky, so buttery, so good. Three-years-ago me (you know, the one who was making hockey puck biscuits because she couldn't read directions) would have never thought that current me would ever successfully make croissants. I won't sugarcoat it though, they are a labor of love. They take an entire day to make, and that's if you start early in the morning. I find it more manageable to split the process over two days. The technique is fairly straightforward, you just need lots of time, a rolling pin, a ruler, and a heck of a lot of elbow grease.

Hazelnut Cake with Chocolate Sour Cream Frosting

You know when people ask you what camp you sit in: cake or frosting? Growing up, I had always considered myself a cake girl. I had always been the girl who scraped 90% of the frosting off cakes before eating. Turns out it was because I had only ever eaten grocery store cakes where the frosting was overly sweet, made with powdered sugar, butter, way too much food coloring...and nothing else.

Now that I'm older and know what good frosting tastes like, my answer would be "neither." I sit in neither camp. Because one without the other is incomplete. One without the other is nothing by itself.