‘Twas the day before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except for one crazy mom.
Ok, so I’m no Clement Moore. I’m not a poet, I’m a blogger. And I’m definitely NOT chef, baker or even basic cook. That’s not to say that I don’t make good food. I think I do (on occasion). However, my cooking never comes out looking ANYTHING like what you see in the magazines or on tv or even at your local restaurant. Part of this is because of my dietary restrictions: my cinnamon sugar chocolate cookies come out looking flat and awful because I use an egg replacement instead of an egg. But they taste great and never last long (despite the fact that I quadruple the recipe).
Like many moms (and dads), Christmas can bring out the crazy in me. I HAVE learned that Christmas morning is NOT the time to try something new and/or vaguely complicated. (The raspberry chocolate Christmas Wreath was a rather sad experience I do not want to repeat.) Besides, who is thinking of food when there are presents to be unwrapped? So my tradition is to start a pot of coffee (ok, honestly to have my HUSBAND make the coffee because he’s really good at it) and throw some Pillsbury cinnamon rolls in the over and leave it at that.
Christmas Eve is a different story. I did not have to work today (make that, go to my paying job) and this Raspberry Cream Cheese Candy Cane Crescent Danish (say that three times fast) recipe caught my eye. So during my weekly outing at Shoprite, I found the ingredients (except for the parchment paper, which I thought I had, but did not which required a late afternoon trek to Foodtown yesterday) and decided to give it a go this morning.
I took photos as I went along. Warning: there are NOT professional or real pretty too look at. I also DID NOT follow the directions exactly step by step. I made the cream cheese mixture and raspberry mixture BEFORE opening my crescent rolls. So they were ready to go once I had the dough laid out.
As I suspected, the dough was the most difficult and messiest part of the equation. Opening the can, the dough rolled out easily. But breaking apart the pre-cut triangles was not simple NOR was then cutting each triangle in half (lengthwise) to make more triangles. If you follow the link you can see how lovely it looks. NOT what mine looked like.
Kind of messy to say the least. Definitely NOT even. And I did “mush” (that’s my technical term) together at the top, actually breaking up some of the triangles to add some dough to the middle.
Spreading the cream cheese and raspberry mixture was simple. And doesn’t look too bad either:
Rolling it all up and the making a candy cane shape? I KNEW that wasn’t going to happen. I considered not even trying, but…
It was too dangerous to do much more!
Into my oven it went. I set mine to 325-ish. My oven runs hot, so I adjusted.
While baking, I cleaned up my mess (there is ALWAYS a mess) and made the powered sugar drizzle, which did not turn out very drizzly (maybe using skim milk had something to do with it?)
After 17 minutes, this is what I had:
Not attractive, but…
I wasn’t even going to attempt to move it to a serving plate. I did my “drizzle.”
(Can you even see it? )
And then cut myself a piece and added a few of the leftover berries to the mix:
Verdict: Once again, it doesn’t look very good, but it does taste pretty good. I may get an F for presentation, but my tummy gives it a B+.
What remains of the danish will be wrapped up. (That is IF there is anything left after my son gets up and devours it.) I’m thinking it might be ok tomorrow or the next day if it is warmed up in the microwave for a few seconds.
Now that this crazy mom is done with her early morning baking, it’s time to move onto laundry and a final clean of the house before the holiday officially begins…so Merry Christmas to all and to all a Good Night/Day/Whenever the heck you might be reading this. (And thank you for doing so!)
Beth Shorten is a life-long resident of Verona. For five years, she has been chronicling life here on her personal site, Bfth’s Boring Blog.
