It’s the most wonderful time of the year…
Seriously, it’s our favorite time of the year.
The holidays are always special to us. We take time off to be with each other, our friends, our families, and of course our cats. It’s a wonderful way to wrap up the year and get some well deserved rest in. Baking always manages to keep us on our toes right up until Christmas Day. This year was our first holiday season as home bakers and boy was it loaded full with orders!
We really love giving people variety options around certain times of the year. Normally, being a small home bakery we don’t get to offer this luxury because it would simply be impossible to maintain and not waste loads of baked goods. However, offering pre-orders for variety boxes with specific pick-up dates makes this dream possible and we savor the opportunity to give our customers more flavors.
For our first official holiday pre-order event, we went all out with new seasonal flavors, decorations, and packaging. Wanting to truly offer something that isn’t on our menu any other time of the year, we expanded our variety boxes to include multiple different baked goods that we offer including our macarons, artisan cupcakes, cocoa bombs, and cookies (NEW).
Being the holiday season, we were inspired to offer fresh seasonal flavors as well as some of our favorites. For macarons, we brought back Orange Cranberry and Sugar Cookie Dough. Orange Cranberry has an orange zest buttercream with a cranberry jam in the center that just screams holidays with hints of cinnamon and nutmeg. Sugar Cookie Dough is a sturdy version of edible cookie dough that works perfectly with macaron shells and has a rich vanilla flavor.
We wanted to offer four flavors for our variety boxes as options and decided to really brainstorm over what flavors scream the holidays to each of us. We settled on Gingerbread and Peppermint Mocha. Peppermint mocha was a chocolate ganache infused with peppermint and espresso (everyone should add espresso to their ganaches in my opinion). Finally, our fourth flavor was a Gingerbread buttercream that included various holiday spices, a dash of orange, and a teeny bit of molasses really sent it home. We are obsessed with these new holiday flavors and can’t wait to bring them back next year.
In addition to the new macaron flavors, we wanted to give some seasonal cupcake flavor options for our customers who are more interested in cakes than cookies. Sticking with our previous theme, we went to work on essentially making our macarons turn into cupcakes! We ended up with Peppermint Mocha, Gingerbread, Vanilla Bean, and Orange Cranberry Mimosa cupcakes as our final flavor combos.
The Vanilla Bean is our awesome vanilla cupcake batter with the added bonus of vanilla bean paste. Peppermint Mocha was a rich espresso chocolate cake with peppermint extract (seriously they were so good and perfectly balanced). Gingerbread was really traditional for a soft gingerbread cookie, just in cake form with all of those spices that gingerbread lovers (like me!) adore. Finally, we had an Orange Cranberry Mimosa cupcake which was an orange mimosa cupcake filled with our cranberry jam in the center because we all need a little booze to survive holiday season right?
In all honesty, we can’t thank everyone enough for a FULL YEAR of support for our little home bakery. It has been a blast and we look forward to many more years of bringing delicious treats to our customers.
Happy Holidays!
-Kat & Kyle
