A Christmas Tradition

When I was younger, my sister and I often liked to help my mother bake. Now in no means was my mother the best baker around but she generally tried her best. When my sister and I grew older, my mom decided to let us bake rather than her guiding us along. So the two of us, would bake cookies for the holiday season. Now that my sister is busy with her job, it's usually just me who does the entire baking but my family still loves the treats relentlessly.

The holidays are one of my favorite times of the year. It doesn't even have to be Christmastime, it could be thanksgiving and other types of holidays. I try to be as festive as I can. Since Christmas is coming up in such a short amount of time, I thought I'd bake some holiday treats that can be enjoyable for the entire family. A recipe that my mother has baked since I was very young. 

Ingredients!

2 large eggs 

3/4 cup of sugar 

2 1/4 cup all purpose flour 

2 tsp baking powder 

3/4 tsp salt 

1 tsp of rum extract (this makes a great substitute for vanilla) 

1 cup eggnog (i chose to use the vanilla eggnog because that's all we had and substituted that instead of just adding in vanilla later on) 

1/2 cup of fruit (optional; i didn't use this because i don't like fruit in my bread)

1/2 cup of walnuts (grinded) 

(Taste of Home's 2000 Quick Cooking)

The first thing that I did was to mix together the sugar, eggs and eggnog.

In a separate bowl, I mixed together all the dry ingredients, meaning the flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl together. 

To be honest, i didn't really mix the dry ingredients together, i just kind of put them together and left it like that.

After that, i poured a little bit of the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and then mixed it. I would continue  to mix the wet ingredients along with stopping when everything seemed to be mixed, to add more dry ingredients until all the dry ingredients was mixed with the wet ingredients

everything all mixed up together 

.   When everything was all mixed together, I greased two 8x14in pans with canola oil (Taste of Home's 2000 Quick Cooking) and let them sit while I continued to prepare the batter. if you were to include the fruit into the batter, this is when you would do it. to include the fruit or the walnuts into the batter, you would pour a little bit of the walnuts/fruit in at once and then mix it so that the batter overlaps the walnut/fruit. Continue to do this until all the walnuts/fruit are gone. 

the walnuts all mixed together 

When everything is all mixed together, you pour the batter into the two pans. (Taste of Home's 2000 Quick Cooking Annual Recipes). 

This was the batter in both of the pans and before I put them in the oven. I put them in the oven and left them in there for 45 minutes before I came to check on them. To check on them, you should put a toothpick in the middle of it, and if it comes off clean, then it's down. If it's golden brown, it could also be done.

When the bread is done, take it out and immediately put it on a cooling rack. It should cool for twenty minutes until you're able to eat it. (Taste of Home's 2000 Quick Cooking Annual Recipes) 

what are some of your favorite christmas traditions? 

(Taste of Home's 2000 Quick Cooking Annual Recipes: Every Single Rapid Recipe from the past Year. Greendale, WI: Reiman Publications, 1999. Print.)