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The Holidays have zoomed by ever so quickly this year – or I should say last year. My goodness, see what I mean?  Well, there is a few things I want to share with you that is very special to us. One is a little baking session with the girls in our family. Well, at least it used to be girls – now we have a handsome little guy to help us bring some magic ingredients. I think the magic ingredients that the kids do bring each time is LOVE.
This time, the number got quite small, my little sister is living in Cambodia volunteering, my mom had to work, and the other ladies in our family don’t participate in our family traditions unfortunately. Between my sister and I, we had 4 recipes we wanted to pull off. Only 2 got done that evening. Which is still huge efforts with little kids making us work harder ;) We stayed over and enjoyed some morning tea with a few favourite cookies.

Here are the Recipes:

Folded Angels (traditional recipe)

Ingredients: 1.5 cups shortening, 1 sp sour cream, 1 packet of yeast, 1 egg yolk, 3 cups of all purpose flour, 1/2 cup icing sugar for icing, 1/2 cup of plum butter.
Directions: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Combine the yeast with the sour cream and leave in a warm place for about an hour. Mix the shortening, yolk, flour to combine. Add the sour cream with the yeast. Combine well to form a dough like texture (use more flour if you need to). Roll out the dough to about 1/8 inches and cut into squares. You can eyeball the size of the squares but we do them about 2 1/2 inches. (you can lightly draw out the squares on the rolled out dough and plan out how many can fit) To form the angels: cut the square corners inwards but not right to centre. Add a small spoon of plum butter into centre. Fold the top two inner corners into the centre (to make the head) press into the plum butter, and two corners from the sides to make the hands – press gently into the plum butter, enough so they stick or else they will open up when baking. Bake for 20-30 minutes (depending on what size your squares end up). Makes about 3 dozen cookies.

Gingerbread Cookies (gluten-free and vegan)

Ingredients: 2 3/4 cups gluten-free all purpose baking flour, 2 tablespoons ground ginger, 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves, 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg, 1/2 teaspoon sea salt, 2 teaspoons baking soda, 2 tablespoons ground flax seeds, 1/4 cup water, 3/4 cup coconut oil, 1/4 cup maple syrup, 1/4 cup unsulphured molasses, 1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
Directions: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Sift together gluten-free flour, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, salt and baking soda. In a separate bowl, whisk together flax seeds and water until it becomes slightly sticky. In a third bowl (or in my case I used a blender), mix coconut oil, maple syrup, molasses and applesauce. Incorporate the flax mixture into the third bowl. Once fully mixed, slowly add the flour until it is thoroughly incorporated. Drop the dough by teaspoon onto an ungreased cookie tray. Bake for 10 minutes. Cool and serve. Makes two dozen cookies.

Our tradition may sound like we’ve done it for ages, but really the first time we thought of baking together was when my Gabriella was 4 months old and it was her 1st Christmas. I felt stuck at home and my sisters thought it would be fun to come over and bake. We kept saying, how come we’ve never done this before? We have to do this every year!…. and a tradition was born.

Do you have any family traditions that you do over the Holidays? Please share, and if you’ve written about it (it doesn’t have to be baking) leave a link in the comments below ;)

Have a lovely day.