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!
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!
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!
We spent all winter staring out the window waiting for this day to arrive…the day of the St. Louis Cardinals home opener!
We had our usual Opening Day feast, with a minor twist. I decided to make my German recipe for the month, Sauerkrautkuchen, as an appetizer…I figured the sauerkraut gave it baseball vibes, at least for those of us who like kraut on our brats! Of course we also had our traditional Opening Day nachos, too:
For dinner we had hot dogs and brats, and Fitz’s Cardinal Cream soda. I always have to have a Chicago-style dog on Opening Day.
This year, instead of buying a Cardinals cookie cake, I made my own! I served it with Cherry Cardinals Crunch ice cream from Schnucks:
For me, fashion is always an important part of a celebration…I haven’t worn this particular jersey on Opening Day for a few years, so it was time. I paired it with my Cardinals necklace and earrings, plus my Loungefly (not pictured).
Now we just have to wait and see how the game turns out…there was a rain delay, so they got started late, but they’re winning as of right now!
Now that I’ve been making Berliner for a few years, I feel pretty comfortable with the process of frying and filling them, so this year, I decided to focus on creating new flavor combinations! First I made a Black Forest variety, filled with the cherry topping from my Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte and topped with a chocolate glaze. Next up was s’mores, filled with marshmallow fluff and topped with the same chocolate glaze plus crushed graham crackers. Finally, I made Lebkuchen-inspired Berliner, filled with a gingerbread mousse and topped with a white chocolate glaze and crushed spice cookies.
I also made some traditional jelly filled donuts with blackberry jam:
I’m looking forward to coming up with more flavors in the future!
It’s been over a year since I took a look back at some of the German recipes I’ve been making, but I’ve continued to try something new (or a new variation on something old) most months, and mostly thanks to the monthly recipe share in my Rare Dirndl Facebook group.
Reformationsbrötchen (Luther’s Rose Reformation Rolls)
Kinderpunsch (Non-Alcoholic Glühwein)
Linsensuppe (German Lentil Soup)
Dampnudeln (Steamed Buns with Warm Vanilla Sauce)
Neujahrsbrezel (Sweet New Year’s Pretzel)
Zitronen-Berliner (Lemon Custard-Filled Donuts)
Pflaumen-Berliner (Plum-Filled Donuts)
Custard-Berliner (Custard-Filled Donuts)
Hungarian Beef Goulash
Buchteln mit Marmeladefüllung (Baked Yeast Dumpling)
Flammkuchen (“Flame Cake”)
Tomatensalat (Tomato Salad)
Kaiserschmarrn with Cherry Compote (Torn Pancakes)
Engelsaugen (Thumbprint Cookies)
Schupfnudeln (Potato Noodles with Sauerkraut and Bacon)
Besides these new recipes, I continue to make old favorites on a regular basis…German cooking has become quite a staple in our household! I can’t wait to find even more German recipes to try!
Now that Epiphany has come and gone, I guess the holiday season is officially over (I’m still not taking my Christmas tree down yet, though!). Let’s take a look back at the festive feasts and holiday baking we enjoyed during the holidays!
As I did last year, I kicked off Thanksgiving week by making pumpkin-chocolate chip cookies:
Speaking of Thanksgiving, we enjoyed our traditional feast:
And TEN pies (the bonus cookie butter pie was still in the freezer)!
We had chicken döner and gingerbread whoopie pies for our postponed St. Nicholas Day dinner:
And for Santa Lucia Day, we had lussekattes, potato pancakes and kielbasa (a day late), and white-chocolate cranberry cupcakes:
We didn’t have a fancy dinner on Christmas Eve, but we did have a carrot cake filled with gingerbread mousse:
For Christmas Day breakfast we had our favorite coffee cake:
And the best meal of the year, the pick-out dinner!
I think our M*A*S*H Day dinner counts as a festive feast, because Tony Packo’s was a Christmas gift.
On New Year’s Eve, we had fondue:
And the hot chocolate bar:
New Year’s Day was a full German feast of schnitzel and spaetzle and red cabbage:
With a Black Forest cake for dessert:
We had one more turkey dinner while we waited for the first snowstorm of the year:
And our traditional snow day dinner of French toast the next day:
Our festive feasts always end with Ryan’s birthday dinner…this year, we had chili and fry bread:
And a Frango Mint cake for dessert!
Of course there was plenty of cookie baking, starting with the French Christmas cookies we made in school:
And all of our favorite Christmas cookies!
It made for a beautiful Bunter Teller!
We also enjoyed Christmas Tree Cake treats all season long, including both standard and big cakes, donuts, and ice cream:
And a few festive drinks along the way…wassail and eggnog:
This has been a great season of feasting…now it’s time to give the kitchen a break! (Who am I kidding…I’m already planning the next cake I’m going to bake!)
How is it 2025 already?!? It hardly seems possible that we’re at the quarter mark for this century. We’ve had a rather German celebration for the last two days, starting with fondue for dinner yesterday.
And of course we had our traditional hot chocolate bar for dessert…I was very excited about the addition of hot cocoa and marshmallow Hostess Donettes this year!
We watched Apollo 13 and Ocean’s 11, and I made it to midnight (but just barely) to ring in the new year in Animal Crossing.
This morning we were at the Lego store before they opened so we could look for a few new sets…the line was incredible, but we still managed to find everything we were looking for!
We did some shopping at Target and the Asian store and stopped for boba at what I think was a place we hadn’t tried before:
And we had another German meal for dinner:
Plus Black Forest cake for dessert:
Not a bad way to say “goodbye” to one year and “hello” to another…Guten Rutsch!
Following the success of “Sandwich Week,” I decided to go with another themed series of meals, this time one of our family’s favorites, breakfast-for-dinner! We started with a pair of recipes from The Wizard of Oz: The Official Cookbook…”Follow the Spiral Omelets” with “Cornstalk Cheese Straws.”
We were originally going to have waffles the second night, but I found out my German recipe for the month was Kaiserschmarren (the Kaiser’s torn pancakes), so I made that instead, with a homemade cherry compote on top:
Of course we had breakfast sandwiches, this time on croissants with a side of tater tots:
I made one of our old Disney dinners of “Chef Mickey’s Breakfast Pizza” with tropical fruit on the side:
And we had breakfast burritos with blueberry-peach smoothies:
It’s been quite some time since I made breakfast casserole, so we had that with homemade blueberry muffins:
And for the finale I made French toast and bacon.
I’m trying to decide what theme I might do next…Tex-Mex is looking popular!
It’s been quite a few years since we last had a German feast for the Fourth of July, so that’s exactly what we did last week. The menu was somewhat different…this time around, we made all of our Oktoberfest favorites, starting with pretzels:
And pretzels call for fondue for lunch, which I served with pickles and brats as well:
The main course was schnitzel:
I served it with family favorites such as spaetzle, red cabbage, pickled beets, and sauerkraut:
It’s one of my favorite dinners, no matter what time of year it is!
The real star of the feast in my opinion, though, was the dessert. I decided to deconstruct the components of my Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte recipe, and serve Black Forest sundaes. They were so delicious, and I’m pretty proud of my culinary creativity!
It’s fun to plan an unexpected meal for a holiday every now and again!
