16 days of glory go by very quickly, and the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics have sadly already come to an end. Here’s a quick look back at all of the fun we’ve had!
Of course we had to stop by the Olympic Spectacular outside Francis Olympic Field at Wash U in St. Louis…just last month, (future) Olympic gold medalist Alysa Liu visited these same rings!
Chickadee and I made our favorite edible Olympic torches:
And we cooked a ton of (very delicious) Italian food!
Biscotti
Zuppa Pavese
Frullato di Frusta
Italian Bread
Carbonnade à la Flamande
Insalata di Arance e Finocchi
Radicchio in Padella
Limoncello Spritz
Crostata di Ricotta e Visciole
Marinara
Basil Pesto
Ravioli
Zeppole di San Giuseppe
Italian Grilled Cheese
Peposo
Creamy Polenta
Italian Limonata
Sporcamuss
Pork Milanese
Antipasto Salad
Seltz Limone e Sale
Panna Cotta with Berries
We also picked up a few Italian treats from the store:
There were crafts:
And a girls’ outing to go ice skating:
We had fun keeping track of the medal count at the end of every day…here’s a final look at our chart:
I love the Olympics, both winter and summer, so much, and I’m not really sure what I’m going to do with myself now that they’re done…but I’m already looking forward to L.A. 2028!
Bunny and I made a trio of varieties this year, starting with a Milano Cortina 2026 fusion flavor that was filled with cannoli filling in honor of the host country of the Olympics:
We also made plum butter Berliner, filled with homemade Pflaumenmus, which was sehr lecker!
And our final variety was filled with our favorite Guinness mousse and topped with a chocolate glaze:
It was a tasty trio!
As long as I was already frying donuts, I also made German Mutzen from the Rhineland, which turned out very much like beignets:
And here’s a bonus look at our Mardi Gras dinner of “Bayou Queen Punch” and “Tiana’s Famous Gumbo” from Entertaining with Disney:
We had a nice day of feasting, and now we’re ready for Lent!
I’m so excited about the start of the Winter Games, so of I course I planned a day of Italian food for us to try in honor of Milano Cortina 2026. We started the day with a trio of homemade biscotti to enjoy with our coffee (or hot chocolate, as the case may be)…orange-cranberry, chocolate, and traditional flavored with anise.
For lunch, Chickadee and I enjoyed “Zuppa Pavese,” which is toasted bread swimming in beef broth and topped with an egg and parmesan cheese…super warming and delicious! We also made a light “Frullato di Frusta,” a slightly sweetened fruit smoothie.
I guess maybe I do bake bread? I sliced this Italian bread pretty well, too!
The star of tonight’s Olympics Opening Ceremonies dinner was Carbonnade à la Flamande, a delicious beef stew braised in beer:
The best special meals include a special drink, and we really enjoyed a non-alcoholic limoncello spritz made with homemade lemon oleo saccharum:
I think this was one of the best Opening Ceremonies dinners I’ve made!
For dessert Chickadee and I baked a Crostata di Ricotta e Visciole, which is a Roman sour cherry and ricotta tart. The filling was very similar to a cannoli filling minus the chocolate chips, and spread over sour cherry jam.
I’m looking forward to immersing myself in winter sports and Italy for the next two weeks!
Time for a last look back at the festive feasting season!
We started Thanksgiving week by baking…Christmas Funfetti cupcakes? There’s never a bad time for Funfetti!
Of course, the main attraction Thanksgiving week was the turkey dinner:
And seven pies!
We celebrated Nikolaustag with chicken Döner Kebab and gingerbread tiramisu:
The next special dinner was a week later, for Santa Lucia Day, featuring potato pancakes and kielbasa, with cranberry fluff for dessert…and let’s not forget the lussekattes for breakfast!
We had a gingerbread layer cake filled with gingerbread mousse and frosted with molasses cream cheese frosting on Christmas Eve:
And our favorite cherry coffee cake for breakfast on Christmas Day:
But the best meal of the year is the Christmas Day pick-out dinner!
For our “fancy” Christmas dinner, we had bolognese, breaded artichokes, and fresh baked Italian bread:
In keeping with the Italian theme, we had cannoli for dessert:
On New Year’s Eve, we had black bean soup and corn bread:
And our traditional hot chocolate bar, of course!
Our New Year’s Day dinner was enjoyed a day late…I made pork medallions and spaetzle:
And we had a Glühwein-Kuchen for dessert:
We also had a special “Lord of the Rings Day” celebration (on Tolkien’s birthday!), featuring one of the fanciest chicken recipes I make, and “Westfarthing Fairings” from the Recipes from the World of Tolkien cookbook:
For the last feast of the season, Ryan’s birthday dinner, (which also happens to be Epiphany), we had fry bread and chili:
And Boston Cream Pie for dessert:
We did lots of other baking along the way, including a pair of Italian Christmas cookies for Christmas school:
And all of our favorite fancy Christmas cookies…chocolate crinkles, linzer augen, chocolate peppermint, raspberry almond thumbprints, peppermint meltaways, and fig thumbprints:
With the addition of a few of the pudding cookies Bunny made, they created a beautiful Bunter Teller!
For our New Year’s Eve hot chocolate bar, we baked two kinds of hot chocolate cookies:
In addition to the Christmas cracker candy I usually make, we also tried a new recipe that had sliced almonds on top:
And on the last day of Christmas, we baked and decorated sugar and gingerbread cookies:
I made a couple of bonus pies along the way, too:
And a bevy of festive drinks, including standards like egg nog and wassail, and some frappe kits from Aldi:
And just as we made a special dessert at the beginning of Thanksgiving week, we ended Epiphany week with a carrot cake:
I think that’s it for festive feasts and holiday baking…I’m ready to close the Markel bakery for a bit!
Today is Epiphany, but it’s also Ryan’s birthday, and we had one last festive feast to celebrate!
I made chili for dinner, and making chili means also making fry bread to go with it:
And for dessert, I baked a Boston Cream Pie…it’s been years since I attempted this particular cake, and back then, I had a problem with the filling being too thin and running out of the cake. If anything, this time I over-thickened it, but it tasted good, and it stayed put!
The days have long since passed when I used to make baklava every year on Epiphany, and our church doesn’t have an extra service during the week, but I still wore my favorite star-shaped brooch from Erstwilder…it is the absolute perfect star for Epiphany!
I still have one more cake to bake yet this week, and then the festive feasting season will draw to a close!
Before Christmas break started, we decided we should have a “Lord of the Rings Day” and watch all of the movies back-to-back-to-back while everyone was still home on vacation. I picked today for our marathon, but it wasn’t until after we started The Fellowship of the Ring this morning that I discovered that today is actually Tolkien’s birthday! How felicitous is that?!?
I saved the Lavender & Pine candle I bought at the Bath & Body Works semi-annual sale to burn today…something about it seems rather Elvish to me!
We saved the “Vintersaga” mulled fruit drink we found on clearance at Ikea for today, too…it has a very nice “mulled wines of Moria” vibe!
And I couldn’t let the day go by without making something from Recipes from the World of Tolkien…you’d think I’d be sick of baking cookies, but that didn’t stop me from making Westfarthing Fairings, which are flavored with cinnamon, ginger, allspice, and lemon zest…perfect for the days after Christmas!
Our dinner wasn’t inspired by the world of Tolkien, but it was one of the fancier dinners I make, and one that everyone loves…pan-fried chicken and grapes with a creamy mustard sauce served over couscous.
I can’t believe that the random day I picked for our movie marathon was actually Tolkien’s birthday…what a great way to make a fun day extra special!
Thanks to the very unwelcome guest influenza, plus work schedules, we stretched out our New Year’s celebration over three days instead of the usual two!
On New Year’s Eve, I made black bean soup and cornbread:
And we had our customary hot chocolate bar, with a twist…Turkey made the hot chocolate from scratch for us! Chickadee helped me bake two kinds of hot chocolate themed cookies to go with it, too:
And somehow I managed to stay up until midnight to ring in the new year on Gloriana:
New Year’s Day was a pretty quiet day, lacking our usual trip to the mall and the Lego store, and we had our celebratory meal today instead. We spent most of the day watching the last few Christmas movies in our annual rotation, and I made some peppermint frappes from a kit I got at Aldi:
I went with a German theme again this year for dinner, featuring Schweinelendchen mit Pilzrahmsoße (pork medallions with a mushroom cream sauce) and spaetzle, plus roasted carrots and green beans with bacon.
For dessert, Bunny and I made a Glühwein-Kuchen (mulled wine cake).
I wasn’t intending to begin 2026 with illness, but at least we still had a few nice meals to end one year and begin another!
Time for a look back at my favorite food photos of the year!
First up is our favorite St. Patrick’s Day dessert…Guinness cake with Guinness mousse. I added a little extra decoration to the plate with chocolate syrup, and I was really happy with how it turned out!
Next is the cake I made for Ladybug’s high school graduation. Topped with a dusting of powdered sugar and some fresh raspberries, it looked very elegant!
Not all my favorite food photos are desserts…I thought this German potato salad looked especially tasty!
Back to desserts with a Sacher torte…I embellished this plate, too, with a bit of apricot jam and some chocolate whipped cream:
I don’t just think this potato-parsnip soup looks good (which it does), but I also like the area around it, with a candle and the pumpkins we picked this year:
And a bonus photo, because I’m not sure a beverage picture belongs in a group of food photos, but I really like how I staged our Christmas Eve wassail!
I’m looking forward to cooking and photographing new recipes in the new year!
It’s kind of become our custom to have our “fancy” Christmas dinner a few days after Christmas, instead of on Christmas Day or the day after like we used to. But this year, I had to stretch the definition of fancy, because with grocery prices the way they are, there’s no way I could justify buying something like a beef tenderloin or standing rib roast or pork crown roast like I have in the past. So I decided to run with the Italian theme of our Christmas school, and make bolognese, which isn’t exactly fancy, but is really nice, and also a favorite of everyone here that I don’t get to make a lot because it takes a lot of time. I also baked Italian bread and some breaded artichokes, and made a tossed salad to go with it…it might not be the traditional definition of fancy, but it worked for us!
For dessert, I made cannoli, and if that isn’t fancy, I don’t know what is!
It may have different from our usual Christmas fare, but I’m really happy with how it turned out!
It doesn’t seem possible, but Christmas Eve and Day have come and gone already!
Our celebration started on Christmas Eve morning, with Christmas Crunch:
I made time early in the day to deliver gifts to all of my neighbors on Gloriana, and also chased Roald around my island for a bit, trying to get the perfect picture (which I did).
Bunny had to work in the morning, but when she got home, she put the finishing touches on this year’s Advent Lego project, Rivendell:
And then we went to my second-favorite service of the entire church year, Christmas Eve candlelight:
Candlelight being a relative term, as it was still fairly light out when the service was over. We didn’t stop by the city of St. Louis Christmas tree downtown this year, so it was pretty bright for our drive through the Way of Lights!
When we got home, I made wassail, which was a bit of a change for us…I think it may become a new tradition!
And we enjoyed a gingerbread layer cake with gingerbread mousse filling and molasses cream cheese frosting, and topped with sugared cranberries for dessert.
We also played our new Christmas Eve board game, Ticket to Ride Northern Lights. I lost spectacularly, but not as spectacularly as Ladybug won!
We watched the San Francisco Ballet Nutcracker and Rick Steves’ European Christmas, and then I filled the stockings and escorted Mary and Joseph to the stable. I hope there’s never a day when we don’t want to put up the Little People nativity, even though we no longer have any little people living in our home1
On Christmas Day morning, we enjoyed our favorite coffee cake:
And then we went back to church, nice and early so I could get some pictures in front of the beautiful church Christmas tree:
Our church is always beautiful, but there’s something extra special about it at Christmastime!
The family picture we took after the service is probably one of the nicest ones we’ve ever taken!
We opened presents when we got home, and then I got started on dinner, the best dinner of the year, the famed “Pick Out Dinner!”
Setting the table is pretty low-key compared to Thanksgiving, but I still like to make it look nice, including napkins folded like Christmas trees. I added a few small Christmas trees to our traditional centerpiece of the Advent wreath…they balanced out the additional candles I often add quite nicely!
We had quite the spread this year!
We spent the afternoon and evening watching Christmas movies, playing games, and building Lego sets. The weather was far too warm for Christmas (it felt, smelled, and sounded like Easter!), but thankfully the weather isn’t what makes for a good Christmas, and we had a lovely day. And luckily for us, Christmas lasts for 12 days, so we still have our “fancy” (although dialed back a bit this year thanks to rising grocery costs) dinner and more cookie baking to look forward to…and maybe even some colder weather! Merry Christmas!!!
