Panettone is a popular cake around Christmas time, but what to do with a leftover loaf when the holidays are over? The easiest answer is slice it up and make french toast. You can do this with the big loaves and the miniature loaves, and it might be worth making a trip to the store to get a post-holiday panettone just to serve it up for breakfast. I would opt for the large loaves if you want to serve a crowd and get a miniature one (which is what I used for the picture above) if you just want to indulge yourself.

Slice the bread to the thickness of regular sandwich bread, the prepare the egg and milk mixture as you would for ordinary french toast. Panettone has a sweet, buttery flavor and is studded with raisins, currants, candied citrus and other dried fruits. I didn’t add any sweetener to the egg and milk mixture in this recipe because the panettone is so flavorful on its own. It’s a bit like using cinnamon-swirl bread, where you want to be able to savor the flavors in the bread because they’re great to start out with.

Serve this with maple syrup or honey and you can enjoy a bit of the holidays long after the holidays have past.

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The dough used in danishes is similar to the dough used in croissants. It is a very flaky, buttery yeast dough that takes more than a little bit of time and patience to put together. Sometimes it’s nice to dawdle over a batch of pastry on a lazy weekend morning, but other times it’s nice to get something delicious onto your plate a little more quickly. One solution is to run to the local bakery and pick up some danishes, but another is to make a quick batch of danish using puff pastry instead of a more traditional danish dough. Puff pastry is easy to work with and produces a crisp, flaky delicious danish - especially considering that it takes so little time to make a batch.

The secret to making these danishes so good is the cream cheese filling inside. It is made with cream cheese and white chocolate. The white chocolate gives it a rich, creamy feel and just the right amount of sweetness. A good quality white chocolate (not white baking chips) will have notes of milk and vanilla in it, which will help round out the flavor of the cream cheese. The cream is delicious on its own and bakes very well, staying tender and moist within its crisp puff pastry shell.

Now, if you’re a purist, you could keep the cream cheese danish filling plain and serve the pastries that way. I used mixture of raspberry and peach preserves to sweeten them up a little more. Any flavor of jam will work here, but thicker jams and preserves will tend to spread less during baking and produce a slightly prettier danish in the end. This is another good example of a recipe that you can use as a jumping off point for creating your own variations. The 1,2,3 Puff! Contest that Pepperidge Farm is holding is still accepting entries and a mouthwatering Danish - or similarly enticing pastry - sounds like it would have a great chance of being a prize winner. The grand prize is an all-expenses paid trip to New York (along with some foodie bonuses, like a tour of NYC pastry shops and bakeries!), but that’s just the bonus of experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen.

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It has been a long time since I made a batch of gingerbread pancakes, and an even longer time since I posted about them! I am always tweaking pancake recipes and, while the first batch from a few years ago is still good, a couple of changes make them even better.  Gingerbread really needs to have some molasses to give it a good gingerbread flavor, but it also needs some spices to give it that warmth that we expect from gingerbread.

I kept these pancakes simple, with just cinnamon, ground ginger and some nutmeg in the batter. Freshly ground nutmeg is always the most flavorful, but preground will work if you have none fresh. My favorite part - aside from the maple syrup that I poured all over these - is the chopped candied ginger (Ginger People’s Ginger Chips work perfectly here) that is mixed into the pancake batter. They really add a nice spicy sweetness and are a pleasant surprise when your bite into a little piece! I sprinkled some extra on top of the pancakes to mix in with the maple syrup, as well.

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I suspect that vampires aren’t big breakfast-eaters. They’re probably more of the midnight snack type. This is precisely why I was inspired, as I was looking for a late-night snack during an evening of pre-Halloween scary movie watching, to make these vampire pancakes. These are buttermilk pancakes made with a red, raspberry jam filling that oozes out when you cut in for a bite.

The pancakes are quite easy to make. You start with a fairly standard pancake batter with a little bit of vanilla extract thrown in and pour some onto a preheated griddle. Next, you add a dollop of raspberry (or other red-colored) jam to the center of the pancake as it cooks. It’s a good idea to try and spread out the jam as you place it on the pancake, even putting several little dollops. At this stage, the pancake batter is too delicate to stand up to being spread with jam, and it’s really nice if the jam fills up as much of the pancake as possible. Top the jam with some more batter to cover it completely and cook as you would a regular pancake.

When the pancakes were fresh off the griddle and the jam was still warm, they were moist and tender, with a nice ooze to the filling.  You can taste the vanilla and buttermilk in the pancakes alongside the jam. These pancakes were sweet enough that they didn’t need any additional syrup or toppings before serving, but whipped cream might be a nice touch if you want to serve a little on the side.

I used the same technique that I’ve used on my Vampire Cupcakes and Vampire Cookies to add bite marks to these pancakes before serving. I’m sure that any vampires out there would approve, even if they might prefer a different flavor of filling for their portion.

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I got an interesting tip from a guy at my local Trader Joe’s this week about adding nuts to pancakes. He suggested that I grate the nuts using a microplane or other very fine grater instead of chopping them up. This technique has plusses and minuses. The plus is that you really disperse the nut flavor throughout the pancake, so you can taste it in every bite. The downside is that you don’t get any of the crunch that you get from adding in chopped nuts. I’ll probably use both methods from time to time. This time, I used the grating method to make macadamia nut pancakes.

I simply used my microplane to grate some toasted, lightly salted macadamia nuts directly into some buttermilk pancake batter. You need to watch your fingers a bit as you do this, but the nuts grate down so smoothly and easily that it’s not difficult to handle them at all. I grated the nuts right into the bowl and whisked them into the batter. I could taste macadamia nut in every single bite of the pancake - and it didn’t take very many nuts to let the buttery, nutty flavor come through! I topped the pancakes off with some freshly sliced banana and some maple syrup.

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A toaster strudel is a ready-made, frozen breakfast pastry sold by Pillsbury that was introduced in the 1980s as a rival to the popular toaster treat, Pop Tarts, made by Kelloggs. While the Pop Tart has a firm crust somewhere between a cookie and pie dough in texture, a toaster strudel has a flaky outer layer, more like puff pastry dough or a croissant dough. It toasts up soft, with a gooey, hot filling, and you are supplied with a little packet of icing to drizzle on top of the pastries.

With puff pastry already in my freezer, it seemed like it would be easy to put together a similar version of the packaged product that could be made entirely at home. The puff pastry dough should be rolled out fairly thin before beginning, since the toaster strudels are not thick and you don’t really want them to puff up too much; the pastries should be softer, rather than crunchier. The trick to having these turn out well was in the filling. I used jam, but jam by itself will run out of the pastry and not leave a pocket of filling. To solve the problem, I added some cornstarch to the jam, which thickened it up and helped to hold it in place. Now, if you have a particularly runny jam, you might want to add a little extra cornstarch than the amount I give below, but otherwise you can use any flavor of jam you like.

The pastries should be assembled and baked in advance, then frozen so that they can be reheated on-demand, as snacks or breakfast treats. The packaged toaster strudels come with some kind of “sweet cream” glaze, which tastes a bit like cream cheese. This is probably the one instance where storebought has an advantage, as it is a lot of trouble to make a cream cheese frosting for just one single breakfast pastry. I used a simple vanilla glaze for mine, which was delicious. If I were serving a crowd, I might think about making a thin cream cheese frosting, but then again that’s really not what the freezer-to-oven (or toaster oven) pastries are intended for.

You’ll notice that my baking instructions are for the oven. The pastries will reheat nicely in a toaster oven, as well. While you should be able to put them into a regular toaster, only do so if you are absolutely sure that your pastries haven’t leaked any filling during their initial baking. If they have, that filling might still ooze out and burn in the toaster. I decided to stick with the oven instructions for the recipe below because it is an option for all of the pastries, even those that have sprung a little leak during the initial baking, and since not everyone has a toaster oven sitting on the kitchen counter.

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