Thanksgivukkah

As I'm sure you heard, Thanksgiving and Hanukkah overlapped this year (on the 28th of November), a rare occurrence that (apparently) complicated things for American Jews who had to have celebrations two nights in a row. Since I'm currently studying in the UK, I had class on Thursday until 6:00pm, so no chance of a proper Thanksgiving regardless of the timing of Hanukkah. So we combined both celebrations and pushed them until Saturday so that our British family (who had to work Friday) could come over, enjoy the day, celebrate Hanukkah and, of course, eat lots of turkey.


We obviously made the basics: turkey, cranberry, mashed potatoes, veg, and my mom's brilliant stuffing. Instead of sweet potato casserole we made sweet potato latkes with scallions (a tip of the hat to Hanukkah traditions). The sweet potato latkes were harder to make than regular ones...probably because sweet potatoes have less starch or something like that. Regardless, the many latkes that fell apart were delicious chef's snacks and the many that held together were delicious with dinner.

I also made biscuits, as usual. But I tried a new recipe this year. They are from Sarabeth's cookbook. They aren't my favorite, but they were easy enough to make in advance (and that was a major requirement). They were very nice, plain old biscuits but they weren't as light and flakey as I'd have liked. That said, they did seem to be very popular, so it was probably just me being overly critical!

In addition to the biscuits, I made cornbread. I was supposed to just make the cornbread, but I couldn't bring myself to do Thanksgiving without biscuits and let's face it, you can't have too many starches. The cornbread is the same one I made at culinary school, but I made it in loaves rather than muffins. I also used a bit less sugar to make it more dinner-y and less brunch-y/dessert-y. It was perfect. And it's really easy to make. I must remember to make it more often!

Now for my favorite part of the meal: dessert. I made two desserts: pumpkin and chocolate bread pudding and Mississippi mud pie. I wanted to make a pumpkin dessert and a pie--since both are traditionally Thanksgiving-y--but I don't really like pumpkin pie. The pumpkin and chocolate bread pudding was a round about sort of creation. I made a double batch of the pumpkin chocolate chip loaf I love. I had been intending on making two loaves to freeze and a couple of trays of mini muffins. It turns out that the mini muffins are really, really mini and after 48 mini muffins and two loaves I still had a ton of batter left. So I made a third loaf and a few mini loaves. I froze one normal loaf and the mini loaves, gave away the muffins (more on those later) and decided to do something with the two normal loaves instead of making something else for dessert. I didn't want to just serve slices of the loaf cake so I thought about what to do with it and settled on bread pudding. On the evening before, I cubed them and toasted the cubes (it's a very moist cake and I needed it to absorb the custard-y base of the pudding). A bit before dinner, I soaked the pumpkin chocolate chip loaf cubes in a very plain bread pudding base (eggs, heavy cream, a bit of sugar, etc) and baked it up during dinner. All that was left was to heat it up a bit when we were ready for dessert.

Of course you know me by now, so you know I'm not just going to serve the bread pudding plain and with Mississippi mud pie on menu I didn't want to serve it with ice cream. So I made a custard sauce (aka crème anglais) the day before and warmed it up before plating the dessert. I also poached apples in a ginger, white wine poaching liquid. I got the idea from Martha Stewart's pumpkin cake with poached quinces (I'd been considering making it, but decided I didn't want to hassle with cake when I was making pie). The perfectly (if I do say myself) poached apples were delicious with the pumpkiny, chocolaty, custardy bread pudding. I didn't do a terribly fancy plating job; just scoops of the bread pudding with a healthy drizzle of custard. I figured Thanksgiving isn't exactly a day for fancy plated desserts. Plus we also had the Mississippi mud pie.

The pie was from Baked Explorations (or possibly the original Baked cookbook...) It was incredible! Basically it is a chocolate cookie crumb crust (if you use gluten free cookies here, it's a completely gluten free dessert, by the way), filled with a layer of ganache and a layer of coffee ice cream, and topped with toasted pecans and more ganache. That, unfortunately, is easier said than done. Mississippi mud pie is obviously a classic American dessert and, as it turns out, it's difficult to find the ingredients for it in the UK. I ended up making the chocolate wafer cookies for the crust (a Martha Stewart cocoa-based chocolate cookie). I ran around the city until I eventually found coffee ice cream (at the sixth store I checked). I tried three liquor stores to find a small bottle of Kentucky bourbon (no one in my family drinks it and I didn't want a normal sized--read expensive--bottle for the two tablespoons in the recipe) but to no avail, so I ended up getting an airplane sized bottle of Tennessee whiskey instead.

Ah well, it was worth the extra work and extra stores because the pie was delicious! The homemade cookies really did make for a better crust than store bought wafer cookies. The ice cream was delicious and very high quality (definitely worth going to six stores to find). The toasted pecans were delicious with the coffee and chocolate. And the ganache was perfect even with the whiskey standing in for the bourbon. The desserts were great, the food was delicious, and the company was delightful--Thanksgivukkah was a great success!