Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! Wishing you all a peaceful holiday season, and festivities packed with love and joy 🙂
We are celebrating with salads (you are welcome to check out my recipes here), with baked ham and cabbage rolls, and with a huge variety of sweets: my mom’s beloved spice cake, vegan pastries and cranberry cookies, Swiss hazelnut cookies, as well as Preppy Kitchen’s cranberry orange scones.
We are also celebrating with a new treat which brims with delicious nostalgia: gingerbread Linzer cookies filled with lemon marmalade.
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I found lemons on sale at the grocery store recently, and I decided to make marmalade for the first time. The BBC Good Food recipe was a success, and the pungent lemon flavor delivered invigorating taste and heartwarming notes of comforting joy.
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Summer vacations used to be a straightforward affair. My parents would book a room at an inn deep in the heart of the mountains, a bucolic setting filled with green rusticity. Our meals were simple: bread with tomatoes, and sometimes feta from the local market. We would spend our days sightseeing, talking with the locals, and sampling wild berries in the fresh, pure air.
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I can’t remember the name of the village, but I do remember us stumbling upon a small shop one morning. When we went in, our eyes got bigger seeing the shelves heavy with jars of citrus marmalade, with large oval labels written in a foreign alphabet. Thick like honey, viscosity clinging to the spoon, dark amber colored and concentrated citrusy (pits, peel and all), this marmalade was like nothing I’d seen or tried before. Its intricate bittersweetness would brighten my breakfasts and dinners for months – a glimmer of color, a taste of hope in a sea of gray…Â
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I rediscovered this favorite flavor and memory when I made this lemon marmalade – an emotional moment of reconnecting with my roots and my story. I decided to pair the marmalade with the spice-infused warmth of gingerbread cookies, using Ann Clark Premium Gingerbread Cookie Mix (you may remember me collaborating with Ann Clark before here, here, here, here and here)
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I made the gingerbread Linzer-style. I love Linzer cookies, but I don’t think I make them as often as I should, not just for Christmas (my one and only mention of them on this blog is here).
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The beauty of the gingerbread-lemon flavor combination shines through in flavors and in thoughts – a potent mix of past and present, of dreams I had and of joys I have. A fitting celebration of Christmas for me and my family, for which I am very grateful.
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What’s on your holiday menu? Will you be making Linzer cookies? And are you a fan of citrus marmalade? Let me know in the comments, and have a wonderful time 🙂
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