There is nothing more exciting than sitting down at the table with your family during the holiday season and enjoying a great meal - followed by a great dessert. But after years of hosting your family's holiday parties, your relatives can often begin to predict what you'll make each year. "Let me guess ... lemon meringue pie" or "We can always count on your pound cake." Instead of being the predictable party host you've been for years, or even decades, why not add some flair to your menu with these fun and unique holiday desserts?
Honey Cake Pudding
Desserts
Honey Cake Pudding is well loved by many and is one of the unique holiday desserts with origins in South Africa. With more of a bread pudding consistency, it is sweet like cake and tastes great with ice cream or custard. The ingredients include traditional cake items such as flour, butter, milk, sugar, baking soda and eggs, but what makes it stand out from other cakes is its use of liquid honey. Instead of baking it in a cake pan, it is baked in a bowl, and when is retrieved from the oven, the ingredient mixture creates a consistency that is gooey in the middle with a golden crust on top. Yum!
Gingerbread House
Making a gingerbread house is a wonderful way to get the children involved in making holiday desserts for the family. Creating one of these unique little houses gives your entire family a chance to exercise their creative muscles, and the final product is one to be treasured forever (or at least a month). To get your children excited about gingerbread houses, show them pictures of the final product - they look so tasty no one can resist. Then make the shopping trip to buy the ingredients a family event. They'll love it!
Making a gingerbread house is traditionally a two-day project (unless you buy a gingerbread house kit, which has recently become widely available) so prepare yourself for lots of baking, a big mess, and a great deal of fun. The first day of the project is spent baking the house and the second day will be spent in the decoration phase, which is the best part. You can cut out all sorts of fun shapes to represent doors, windows, trees and much more, and buying fun candy like M&M's, Tootsie Rolls and Candy Canes for the house's decorations will ensure that your children will have some munchies to snack on as a reward for their hard work. If you'd prefer to preserve the house for guests to see you might be disappointed to find everyone wants to tear into the tasty treat. If this is the case, take some great pictures and have a blast eating the house - it wasn't going to last forever anyway, right?
Orange and Lemon Ice Treat
Not your traditional cake our pie, orange and lemon ice is a mix between a drink and a treat making it one of the more unique holiday desserts out there. It is considered to be a gourmet blend, so when you present this unique delight to the family they'll feel very special. The dessert is made, of course, with real lemons and oranges, but what really makes it stand out is its use of Grand Marnier. The addition of lemon rind and sugar makes it a fabulous option for the family.
Chocolate Turtle Cheesecake
This is one of the tastiest holiday desserts on the list! Filled with gooey caramel and sweet and crunchy pecans, you and your family will fall in love with this cheesecake. The preparation time for this dessert is about 45 minutes and the actual baking time is 30 minutes, so you need to set aside at most an hour and a half to make sure it turns out right. But trust me, it's worth the time. The full list of ingredients include caramel squares, evaporated milk, chopped pecans, cream cheese, sour cream, milk, and chocolate pudding in a chocolate pie crust, which means the children will be all over it - and so will you.
Caterpillar Cake
This is another fun option to add to your list of holiday desserts. Your children will have a ball working with you to create this fun cake. You start by getting 12 snowball cupcakes for the caterpillar parts and red or black string licorice with gumdrops for decoration. Arrange the 12 cupcakes on a baking sheet then attach the licorice as legs and the gumdrops as eyes, then bake until done - very easy and fun!
Carnation Famous Fudge
I know you're thinking, "How dare you bring us another chocolate recipe?" But you have to admit, chocolate is a staple of holiday desserts (and if it isn't, who cares?). The cool thing about this dessert is that it can be made by using items in your kitchen such as Carnation evaporated milk (hence the name of the recipe), Nestle chocolate chips, margarine, and marshmallows - you can also add butterscotch and other fun tidbits to give it that extra flair. But the best part of this dessert is the guarantee that if you didn't shock and amaze your family with the other holiday desserts on the list, you will with this great fudge treat!
There are tons of other holiday desserts that can tickle your fancy, and I suggest you search and search until you find the right ones! But hopefully one of the treats will make your mouth water enough to consider making it for your family. When the time to cook rolls around, you will already have so many aspects of the meal to worry about, that being able to remove holiday desserts off of your list of concerns is a welcome surprise. And it's possible that when you taste one of the very tasty treats above you won't want to go back your lemon meringue pie and pound cake. Give one or more of these great desserts a try - I'm sure you and your family will not regret it.
Fun Holiday Desserts You'll Love
Jeffrey Meier at Jam727 Enterprises at http://www.thearticlehome.com blog offers even more detailed information on a wide variety of topics.