12 Days of Holiday Baking Projects
Welcome to baking central: We've rounded up each category of seasonal baking to help you plan and prep.
We've put together 12 days' worth of fantastically festive treats to celebrate the season with baking and sweets. Craft a picture-perfect centerpiece for your holiday meal finale with recipes for croquembouche, yule logs, and a magazine cover-worthy pavlova wreath. Decorate crowd-pleasing cookies, fill doughnuts, and shatter bark and brittle for holiday parties. Bake bread for seated meals, and assemble trifles for dessert spreads. Here are a ton of ways to bake for the holidays.
Holiday Cookies
Food & Wine's favorite holiday cookies span gingerbread, German Spitzbuben, Italian rainbow cookies, crinkle cookies, shortbread, and more. Slice and bake, decorate, and conquer the cookie exchange.
Pavlova Wreath
Victor Protasio / Food Styling by Chelsea Zimmer / Prop Styling by Christine Keely
This showstopping pavlova wreath is dolloped with vanilla whipped cream, sprinkled with fresh raspberries and pistachios, and adorned with an enchanting toasted white chocolate bark.
Holiday Bread
Jennifer Causey / Food Styling by Emily Nabors Hall / Prop Styling by Shell Royster
From challah to panettone, we have holiday bread recipes for airy, dense, and braided loaves for old and new traditions.
Bûche de Noël with Mascarpone Cream and Dark Chocolate Ganache
A few smart moves make Paige Grandjean's yule log a cut above the rest. It's worth all four and a half hours to make the cake, filling, frosting, and garnish when you serve the assembled dessert.
English Trifles
We appreciate the ease of these desserts that stand out for stunning layers of flavor. Stash thin slices of cake — or cake scraps — between layers of custard, whipped cream, fruit, caramel sauce, or even Girl Scout cookies.
Chestnut Pavlova
This chestnut pavlova recipe is fabulously festive: an exuberant, rich, and luxurious treat for the holidays.
Holiday Doughnuts
Jennifer Causey / Food Styling by Ali Ramee / Prop Styling by Christina Daley
Cinnamon-Cardamom SufganiyotFry up sufganiyot or sfinj for Hanukkah, or take on a doughnut hole croquembouche for Christmas.
Old Fashioned Doughnut Croquembouche
Pastry chef Paola Velez's variation on a traditional croquembouche features homemade cinnamon doughnuts instead of cream puffs and can be assembled 10 hours ahead of time.
Sweet, Giftable Bark and Brittle
Julia Hartbeck
Refrigerate rather than bake to have chocolate bark or nut brittle ready by the pound to set out for snacking, wrap up for gifting, or add to a dessert spread.
Orange-Anise Croquembouche with White Chocolate
Victoria Dearmond, pastry chef at Georgia James in Houston, updates the classic croquembouche — a decadent tower of cream-filled choux pastry puffs encased in ribbons of hard caramel — with an orange- and anise-infused cream filling and a white chocolate drizzle instead of spun sugar.
Gingerbread
Indulge in gingerbread season with cookies to decorate, a decorative trifle, the perfect bread loaves for a holiday brunch, or plated desserts.
Cherry-and-Chocolate Bûche de Noël
© Michael Turek
Chef Dominique Ansel's bûche de Noël consists of a flourless chocolate sponge cake, a rich and creamy filling, and whipped cream frosting. The cake has a deep cherry flavor, it's lighter than many, and it's ready in about two hours.
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