Heavenly Homemakers

Encouraging women in homemaking, healthy eating and parenting

Holiday Buffet

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Here are some fun and yummy treats you can make to enjoy this Christmas season. I know Christmas is about much more than food…but don’t we all love a great buffet at Christmas time?

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Applesauce Bread

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Homemade Hot Fudge Sauce

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Warm Vanilla Soother

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Warm Chocolate Soother

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Cinnamon Swirl Bread

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Sweet Potato Streusel Muffins

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Christmas Graham Crackers

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Christmas Pizzas

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Christmas Donuts

Cream Cheese Salsa Dip

Ranch Cheese Ball

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Black Bean Salsa

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Peanut Butter Honey Fudge

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Coconut Macaroons

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Snickerdoodles

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Orange Cream Cheese Cut Out Cookies

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Christmas Spice Cookies

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Chocolate Snowballs

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Reindeer Cuties

Last but not least, here are a few of my tips for cooking a delicious holiday meal:

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!!!

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Homemade Gifts

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While you finish eating your  Easy Breakfast Casserole, Vanilla Muffins with Cinnamon Crumb Topping and Gingerbread Men, I thought I’d give you a few links to look through. I love that making Christmas gifts and treats does not have to be expensive or time consuming! Here are a few free or inexpensive ideas for you:

  • Frugal Granola shares that using her Herbal Nurturing ebook will give you great ideas for making soothing remedies, balms and teas for gifts. I would LOVE to receive any of these items for gifts. Make up a batch or two, keep some for yourself and share with others. Unique and practical gift giving at it’s best! You can read my review of Herbal Nurturing here.

Make a sweet Christmas Angel Ornament…easy and inexpensive!

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What gifts have you been making this year??!

 

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Whole Wheat Gingerbread Men

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Whole Wheat Gingerbread Men
It may be that I’ve gone a little loopy with all of the recent Christmas preparations, but for some reason I got really hung up on what I should call these cookies. Are they Gingerbread Men? Or are they Gingerbread Boys? But then, I didn’t want to leave out the girls…so maybe some of them should be called Gingerbread Girls. Or maybe I just go with the politically correct name and call them Gingerbread People?

When did Christmas baking become so complicated? :)

Gingerbread Men/Boys/Girls/People/CookiesYum

1/2 cup melted butter
1/2 cup sucanat
1/2 cup molasses
1 egg
1 Tablespoon vinegar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
2 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
Sucanat Powdered Sugar Frosting

Cream butter, sucanat and molasses together. Add eggs, vinegar, baking powder, ginger, baking soda and spices. Stir in flour and mix well. Cover and chill dough in the refrigerator for 2 hours (more is fine).

Roll out dough on a well floured surface to about 1/8 inch thickness. Use a cookie cutter to cut into desired shape. Bake cookies about 1 inch apart on a cookie sheet in a 375° oven for 5-8 minutes.

If you don’t put your cookies 1 inch apart on the pan, you’ll end up with one cookie kicking another cookie in the head. I tell ya, I can’t even get my cookies to behave sometimes. A mother’s work is never done…

I recommend spreading Sucanat Powdered Sugar Frosting on the cookies. I had a little bit of Chocolate Fudge Frosting leftover in the fridge and used that for faces and buttons.

I figured they wouldn’t mind if I put chocolate on their faces. I know I would never mind if someone wanted to put chocolate on my face. ;)

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Vanilla Muffins with Cinnamon Crumb Topping

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I wanted something cinnamony for our Christmas Brunch (the invented word is pronounced:  sin-uh-money;  not to worry, cinnamony has nothing to do with sin or money, it’s all about the smell and taste of Christmas). I also wanted to use my homemade vanilla. So I played just a little bit and came up with Vanilla Muffins with Cinnamon Crumb Topping. I made mine with a mini muffin tin, but you can use a regular sized muffin tin instead if you prefer.

These muffins are very simple to throw together and will make your house smell just like Christmas while they’re baking. That’s because they’re cinnamony. :)

Vanilla Muffins Yum

1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 cup sucanat (you can use brown sugar if you want)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup melted butter or coconut oil
3/4 cup milk

Cinnamon Crumb Topping

6 T. sucanat/rapadura (dehydrated cane sugar juice) or brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 T. butter, softened

Stir together flour, sucanat, baking powder and sea salt. Add egg, vanilla, butter and milk. Mix until ingredients are combined. Scoop into paper lined muffin tins. (24 mini muffins or 12 regular sized muffins)  Mix together Cinnamon Crumb Topping ingredients and sprinkle on top of each muffin. Bake in a 400° oven for 15 minutes (mini muffins) or 20 minutes (regular sized muffins).

Vanilla Muffins with Cinnamon Crumb Topping

These Vanilla Muffins with Cinnamon Crumb Topping go perfectly with Easy Breakfast Casserole. I also think the cinnamony-ness would taste great with Warm Vanilla Soother.

Up next during our Christmas Brunch:  a great giveaway from Tropical Traditions. Then, to add to our cinnamony pleasure…Gingerbread Cookies. Not only are they cinnamony…they’re gingerlicious. And full of molassessness.

You never knew our Christmas Brunch would be so full of new vocabulary words did you?

(Be sure to leave a comment again on this post for another chance to win one of our great Christmas Brunch Presents!)

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Gratituesday: Tidings of Joy…Somewhere

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(Oh look, this post has the Christmas Brunch invitation! 
That means that any comments left on this post will be included
in the drawing for our Christmas Brunch Presents!)

We’ll pause just a moment in the midst of our Christmas Brunch to offer a little bit of holiday encouragement. Can I get anyone a cup of hot cocoa while we visit?
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Silent night…Holy night…All is calm…wait, really? Where? When? All I’ve witnessed lately is loud evenings that are anything but calm. There are holiday parties to attend, Christmas programs to prepare for, presents to buy, presents to wrap, presents to send, goodies to bake, cookies to decorate, and somewhere in there I’m also supposed to keep up with my laundry.

There are Christmas songs playing all around us everywhere we go. I’m pretty sure they’re supposed to be offering us tidings of comfort and joy, but sometimes I believe that the joy gets lost somewhere in between trying to figure out what to buy for Great Uncle Gilbert and looking frantically for my son’s left black dress shoe for his music recital. Incidentally, Uncle Gilbert already has everything he needs plus everything he doesn’t need, including Big Mouth Billy Bass the Motion Activated Singing Sensation. And by the way, why must I always have to be the one to draw Uncle Gilbert’s name in our family gift exchange?

My husband had a sad little chuckle one day as he stood in a long line waiting to return an item at the store. Many of the other shoppers in line looked weary and haggard, some of them were grumbling about the length of the line and the time it was taking to be helped and in general, no one seemed happy. The music heard through the speakers was what caused my husband to pause as, “It’s the most…wonderful time…of the year!” was being sung out cheerfully in the background. Wow, if this is what we tend to look like during the “most wonderful time of the year” I’d hate to see us all during the most terrible time of the year (which is what, say…flu season?).

I’m not sure it matters how much we plan ahead and try to stay organized during the holidays. This is just a busy time and there’s not much any of us can do about it. 

This is the part of the article where I’m supposed to smile and kindly say, “So let’s all just take a moment to meditate on the birth of our Savior and the reason we celebrate Christmas.” I’m not going to say that though. If I did, I’d be afraid you’d give me a justifiable bonk on the head with a roll of wrapping paper. Don’t tell me to remember the reason for the season! I’m TRYING to remember…I just can’t find the black dress shoe! WHERE is the black dress shoe?!

While we all look for the perfect gifts (and the long lost black dress shoe), I pray that we also find those tidings of comfort and joy that have been offered. I hear they’re great this time of year.

P.S. I don’t really have a Great Uncle Gilbert but if I did, I would never complain about having to buy him a gift. I think.

What are you thankful for this Gratituesday? Write about it on your blog, then come link up with us here. If you don’t have a blog, be sure to leave a comment letting us know what you’re grateful for!

If you are linking up a blog post for Gratituesday,
please copy and paste the following sentence into your post! Thanks!

Join us for Gratituesday at Heavenly Homemakers!

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Sucanat Powdered Sugar Frosting

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Let’s first do a quick sucanat/sugar review for those of you who are new to these ingredients:

Sucanat:  Organic dehydrated cane sugar juice – my favorite form of natural, unrefined sugar to use in cookies and cakes. Recently I learned that you can use sucanat to make your own powdered sugar. It’s very cool! You can substitute sucanat one for one when a recipe calls for brown or white sugar. Rapadura is the same thing as sucanat…just with a fancier name. Rapadura is usually a little more expensive.

White Sugar and Brown Sugar:  Refined sugars that have been stripped of most their nutrients. 

You can read more about natural sugars and sweeteners I recommend (and don’t recommend) here!

Well…I wish this frosting was a little less…tan. But, what can we expect when we make frosting from our homemade sucanat powdered sugar? The darkness of the sucanat is easily disguised in this Chocolate Fudge Frosting, but there’s no way to make “white frosting” unless you use regular  powdered sugar.

Oh, except that Baking Mama mentioned in my Cream Cheese Frosting post that you use honey granules to make powdered sugar, which makes an unrefined, but whiter frosting. I’ll have to look into honey granules.

I did find that this Sucanat Powdered Sugar Frosting worked great for Gingerbread Men. I’ll share a recipe for those fellas later! I think this frosting would also be good on just about any cake you make…it has a very rich flavor.

Sucanat Powdered Sugar FrostingYum

1/3 cup melted butter
1/4 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4-4 1/2 cups sucanat powdered sugar

Blend all ingredients together with beaters, adding your sucanat powdered sugar a bit at a time until your frosting is the consistency you would like it to be.

Be sure to check out our other recipes using Sucanat Powdered Sugar: 

I hope you’re having a lovely time at our brunch. If you haven’t had a piece of Easy Breakfast Casserole, go ahead and help yourself. Be sure to leave a comment for a chance to win one of our Christmas Brunch Presents! Coming up next on the menu:  It’s Gratituesday time…which will hopefully offer you a little Christmas Brunch encouragment during this busy time of the year!

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Easy Breakfast Casserole

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I used to think that making a Breakfast Casserole was a big deal, difficult, complicated and tricky. It seems that the recipes I found called for ingredients I never had and they always overwhelmed me.

One day a few weeks ago, I had an abundance of eggs and a few leftover ingredients from other meals so I decided to experiment. What do you know? You can build an egg casserole with just about anything. Quickly. Inexpensively. Without difficulty. I am very excited.

Here’s the beauty of this recipe:  You can build your breakfast casserole however you want.  This recipe has a few “base ingredients”, then you stir in whatever “add ins” you want…then you top it with cheese…then you bake it. It doesn’t get much easier than that! (And did I mention that this recipe is naturally Gluten Free?!)

Care to take a peek at how easy it is to put together this casserole? Here’s a quick video my son helped me make!

Easy Breakfast CasseroleYum

5.0 from 1 reviews
Easy Breakfast Casserole
 
Save Print
Author:
Serves: 6-8
Ingredients
  • 8 eggs
  • ½ cup heavy cream
  • ¼ teaspoon sea salt
  • 1 cup shredded cheese (I use white cheddar, but you can use whatever cheese you want!)
Instructions
  1. Begin your casserole by whisking together the eggs, cream and salt.
  2. Pour the ingredients into a 9x13 inch casserole dish.
  3. Sprinkle in any "add in" ingredients you wish.
  4. Stir them around with a fork.
  5. Top casserole with cheese.
  6. Bake in a 350° oven for 30-40 minutes, or until the middle doesn't jiggle.

Add In options:

Cooked sausage (I have a wonderful recipe for turkey sausage here.)
Chopped ham
Chopped and cooked bacon
Leftover baked potatoes, cut into chunks or shredded into hashbrowns
Sauteed veggies

Add anywhere from 1/2 cup to 2 cups of any of these “add ins”. You can use a different sized casserole dish, you’ll just need to adjust the bake time. The thicker your casserole, the longer it will take to bake.

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Want to make this ahead of time and freeze it? I do it all the time, making for a super easy breakfast!

Prepare the casserole as directed, then freeze unbaked. Place frozen casserole in the fridge overnight. Bake the following morning as directed, adding a few additional minutes if necessary.

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Menu Plan for the Week

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Well, my baby is turning six on Monday. He is incredibly excited and has been counting down the days for months (not an easy thing to do). I showed Matt a pair of new jammies I had bought for Malachi for Christmas and he said, “Is our baby really that big?” At least it’s not just me. Sigh….

Incidentally, I started this blog about a month before Malachi turned three. I wrote (way back then) about My Baby Turning Three if you’d like to take a look at how little he was (and read about what an issue I have with my baby having birthdays).

You can imagine that now that he’s (almost) six, he just loves it when we call him “our baby”. 

Aaah, I call all of our boys “my babies” every once in a while. The thirteen year old especially appreciates it. ;)

Here’s our exciting Christmas week menu! Be sure to download your free Christmas Menu Planners!

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Sunday, December 19
Oatmeal, peaches
Taco potatoes, applesauce
Pizza casserole, raw veggies

Monday, December 20 (Malachi’s birthday choices)
Cereal
Hamburgers, chips, apples
Pizza (yes, the kind you buy at the store…it’s a Christmastime compromise)

Tuesday, December 21
Mini breakfast pizza, applesauce
Chicken veggie quesadillas, clementines
Toasted sub sandwiches, carrot sticks, fruit salad

Wednesday, December 22
Honey whole wheat bagels, bananas
Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, peas
Dinner with friends

Thursday, December 23
Monkey bread, pears
Sloppy cornbread muffins, green beans
Chicken alfredo, steamed broccoli and carrots

Friday, December 24
Whole wheat waffles
Leftovers
Soup and sandwiches, relish tray, cookies

Saturday, December 25 (MERRY CHRISTMAS!!)
Applesauce bread, fruit
Turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, green bean casserole, bread, pie
Leftovers

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If you’re looking for some menu planning help, I highly recommend checking out Say Mmm! 
It’s a wonderful free resource to help you get organized and on your way to great menu planning!

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Learn here about how to earn free gift cards…for free! 
Don’t you love it when I’m redundant? You get that for free too. :)

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Please be sure to join us all this week for a Christmas Brunch!! 
There will be fun new recipes, craft and gift ideas and presents!!

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It’s a Christmas Brunch at Heavenly Homemakers!

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I know the upcoming week will be a busy one for all of us.  Still, I was hoping you could all come over for a Christmas Brunch? You don’t need to bring anything, please just show up any time that is convenient for you…and invite along any friends or family members who might like to join you. We love a big crowd!

On our Christmas Brunch Menu:

  • Vanilla Muffins with Cinnamon Crumb Topping
  • Easy Breakfast Casserole
  • Gingerbread Cookies
  • Holiday Goody Buffet

Plus, there will be crafts and…presents!  You don’t want to miss the presents! I’ve got a wonderful Tropical Traditions Gift all wrapped up and ready to give to one of you…PLUS several Heavenly Homemakers Gift Certificates!! Yep, under our tree you’ll find three $5.00 Heavenly Homemakers Gift Certificates and three $10.00 HeavenlyHomemakers Gift Certificates (good for anything downloadable in our shop).

Please make plans to join us! Each comment you leave on this post or our upcoming posts with the Christmas Brunch Invitation (as seen below) will be entered in the drawing for the presents! (Limit one comment per person per post.)

Stay tuned…the Christmas Brunch posts begin tomorrow! Bring your appetites…and let the prize winning comments begin!

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Real Tree…or Fake? Question #75

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16 years.  The tree lasted for 16 years.

And then, without any warning whatsoever, the base busted and the tree fell over with a smack, spreading it’s hundreds of fake pine needles all over the living room.

Don’t worry, no one was hurt…and in fact some were even excited enough about the Christmas tree floor smacking drama to take a moment to pose behind the busted tree.

I had bought that tree the day after our first Christmas together as a married couple 16 years ago. I was so proud of that purchase…our first Christmas tree. For half price.   So as silly as it is, I was a little bit sad and sentimental about throwing the tree away and thought instead of trying to rig the base up with some duct tape. You give a mama some duct tape and she can fix anything right? I figured though that it would only hold up for a few hours, or until a nerf soccer ball went sailing through the room…whichever came first. (Yeah, it would be the soccer ball.) 

We made do with a smaller fake tree this year and will see what we find for half price after Christmas this year.

But that leads me to the question of the day. Are you a fake tree family…or a real tree family?

We’ve always done fake. It seems easier to me. But it doesn’t smell  nearly as good.

They should start making scented fake trees.

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