Christmas Brunch!

This year for the Big Family Christmas, we decided to have brunch for everyone - what a wonderful excuse for holiday mimosas!! Also, using these handy recipes, you can make them the day before, wake up at a reasonable hour, and appear to be slaving over the stove while managing to look pulled together with a clean house - fabulous!

Breakfast Bake

I used this recipe but doubled it - we didn't end up using all of the bread, and I also let it soak overnight making the bread bits extra fluffy! I worried about sogginess, but it's the same texture as french toast, and incredibly tasty and a well rounded meal with the bread group, dairy, veggies, meat, and only missing fruit! We served it with salsa, and technically tomatoes are fruit, so we hit all 5 food groups, hurrah! With 10 adults and 3 kids (who didn't really eat it), we used 2/3 of the doubled recipe - quite a success!

Non-Log Yule Log

It's that time of year again for the annual yule log experiment, and this year it went a wee bit awry! I decided that since it was brunch, I'd like to make it more of a coffee cake style dish, and it turned out amazingly tasty! However, the sponge cake was not cooperating and did not want to detach itself from the cozy home it'd made all rolled up in a towel, so it peeled off in crumbles to my chagrin. Luckily, I had my Trusty Ted who thought it'd make a wonderful layered dish a la tiramisu, but frozen! And it was!!

My cake still used the same sponge cake recipe as last year, but rather than the 1/4 C of cocoa powder, I put in the same amount of flour mixed with cinnamon and nutmeg. The flavor was excellent! Perhaps I just rolled it up too fresh out of the oven? Still not sure what went wrong, but when life gives you lemons... eat whatever you can with them!

Next step was the ice cream - we made our first ever batch of coffee ice cream! Delish!! The recipe calls for whole coffee beans so we chose some that were cinnamon hazelnut flavored, and the hints of hazelnut definitely pulled through because there was a distinct nutty flavor!

After the layers (cake, ice cream, cake, ice cream, cake), I iced it with a very yummy cream cheese frosting (I only used half of this recipe since we only iced the top - even then, I used about half of that! So for a yule log, I still think half of a recipe would do!), and then topped it with pre-baked crumbly bits for a bit of extra texture! It turned out incredibly tasty, and even though it was small, it was quite rich which served everyone (kids too!) with a little left over for the quality control team ;)

All in all it was a very merry Christmas, and I hope post-brunch naps were had by all!


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