Christmas morning breakfast menu

For as long as I can remember we've had the same thing on Christmas morning.  It's funny, we all love this breakfast, but for some reason we only make it once a year.

What I love about it is that both dishes are made the night before so that the morning you (or in my case, my Dad) gets up first and pops them in the oven.  I'm usually sitting by the tree going through my stocking when this happens - yes, I still get a stocking :)

Spinach strada

Ingredients:

 - 6 croissants, cut in half lengthwise (you may not use all of them depending on the size

 - 6 eggs, room temperature

 - 1 1/2 cups milk, whole or skim (I wouldn't use nonfat) 

 - 1/2 tsp salt

 - 1/4 tsp pepper

 - 1/4 tsp nutmeg

 - 1 package frozen spinach, thawed and well drained

 - 1 1/2 cups (6 oz) shredded monterey jack cheese (optional - pepper jack cheese for a bit of a kick)

 - 7 oz crumbled feta cheese

 - optional - mushrooms, thinly sliced and then roughly chopped

Directions:

Place croissants crust side down in lightly greased 9 x 13 baking dish. Sprinkle spinach out evenly over croissants (if using mushrooms, add at this time).  In a separate bowl, whisk eggs, milk, salt, pepper, nutmeg. Pour egg mixture over spinach and croissants.  Press croissants down so that liquid can soak into them a bit. Sprinkle cheeses evenly over strada. Cover and refrigerate 8 hours or overnight.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Take strada out of the fridge and let come to room temperature, about 15-20 minutes.  Uncover and bake 40-45 minutes.  If cheese gets too dark too quickly, cover with foil while baking.  Serve warm.  This is even better the next day or for brunch with a big green salad.

Bubble bread

(also known as monkey bread)

Ingredients:

 - 1 package frozen white dinner rolls, thawed

 - 1 box (4 oz) butterscotch pudding (not instant)

 - 1/4 cup white sugar

 - 3/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar

 - 2 tsp cinnamon

 - 1 cube butter, melted

 - optional - chopped pecans

Cut dinner rolls into 2-3 pieces each.  Mix pudding, sugars, cinnamon and nuts. Sprinkle a bit of the sugar mixture on the bottom of a lightly greased bundt pan.  Dip each piece of dough in melted butter and roll in sugar mixture.  Place dough in pan.  Sprinkle with remaining sugar and pour remaining butter over rolls. Cover and refrigerate 8 hours or overnight.

Remove bubble bread from fridge 30 minutes before baking.  Leave covered and in a warm place to allow the rolls to rise. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Uncover and bake 35-45 minutes. Cover with foil if top browns to quickly.  Let stand in pan for about 10 minutes.  Place plate upside down on bundt pan and flip over.  Tap bundt pan if bread doesn't fall immediately. Serve warm and with lots of napkins.

Hope your Christmas morning is filled with family, friends and yummy, delicious food!

LMF

Merry Christmas!

Christmas Eve is one of my favorite days of the year.

I hope you have a wonderful Christmas Eve and a very Merry Christmas!

See you in the New Year!

LMF

Christmas at my house

My tree:

It's pretty small so I have it on a table to keep Pacino from playing with anything while I'm at work.  But I love pulling out all my ornaments and decorating it.  

When I was living in London, my parents and brother came over and we celebrated Christmas there.  I bought this very Charlie Brown tree from ASDA but wanted some really beautiful ornaments.  I found some at The White Company, Zara Home, House of Fraser and treated myself to a couple at Harrods.  That's where the gold cross is from on the top of the tree - my favorite ornament.

I must admit, London Town knows how to do Christmas.

When I moved home I packed up all my ornaments and brought them back with me.  I'm so glad I did.  It's such a great reminder of my time there.

 These ornaments were too big to fit on my little tree but I love the colors.  It was hard to find this sort of taupe-grey color in a christmas ornament that I wanted.  I placed them in a glass bowl on my console.

I have all these beautiful colorful ornaments that didn't fit on my tree.  I piled them in another glass container and a basket on my bar.  

I posted yesterday about the card holder I made here.

This is one of my favorite cards on it.  She knows me so well :)

My DIY rosemary wreath {here}. 

{via}

I saw this image on tumblr and printed it out and framed it for my mantel.  

It looks like Pacino's nose. :)

Stockings are hung.

Presents are wrapped and under the tree with some of my favorite gift tags.

Hope you have a wonderful holiday weekend!

LMF

Glitter Clothespin {diy}

I'm bring you the world's easiest and fastest diy.

I needed a pretty place to hang my holiday cards.  

Usually, I'd put them on the mantel but since it's pretty much the new standard to send photo cards, they don't tend to stand on their own very well.

Supplies:  

- bag of mini clothespins (from Michaels - 50 for $1.79 with 40% off coupon)

- double sided tape

- scissors

- glitter :)

TADA!

A little anti-climatic, I know.  Could you see where this was going?

I just strung some twine across my mirror and taped to the back. It seems to be holding up just fine.

I'm kinda loving them.  I think they'd be adorable on place cards or gift tags too.

LMF

Weekend

I had a very Christmas-y weekend and loved it!  I can't believe Christmas is only 6 days away.  Did it come fast this year or what?!

The Nutcracker at the San Francisco Ballet with my mom and aunts.

They made it snow when you walked it to the opera house.  It was sort of magical :)

I love when the Christmas tree just grows and grows and grows!

Ice Skating in Union Square - it's become our Christmas tradition. 

Drinks at the Top of the Mark and dinner at Delfina - it was perfect!

We had a Christmas tree decorating party at my parents house.  And Thanksgiving dinner too, since my brother didn't make it out for T-day from New York.

And we tortured Pacino a bit.

Doesn't he look like the dog from the Grinch that stole Christmas?!

Sunday was candy / cookie / cake making with my mom, and of course, football, 

and my favorite: wrapping presents!

LMF

Gift tags {Free Printables Roundup}

One of my favorite parts of the holiday's is wrapping gifts.  

I love finding the perfect present for someone, but I think even more so, 

I love the pretty paper and beautiful ribbons.  

I'm a goner in shops like Paper Source.

I've been finding loads of free gift tag printables on some gorgeous blogs.  

I thought I'd share in case anyone else out there loves paper and string too. :)

I'm completely in love with these from Sweet Muffin Suite.

Have you ever visited Pencil Stitches? Such a lovely blog!

From the beautiful Southern Weddings Magazine Blog.  I love the 'Merry Christmas y'all' tag!

From Nicole's Class Blog. I love the red with Tiffany blue!

Style Me Pretty posted gift tags and pretty printable gift wrap.

I'm kind of loving the white and red print paper.

And the gift tags from Style Me Pretty are just too stinkin' adorable!

From Creature Comforts Blog:  

There were tons of styles on Creature Comforts Blog, these were just my favorite.

From Hey Look:

I love Hey Look's from last year too!

Did I mention all of these are free?!

Thank you so much to all these generous ladies!  I'm am so in awe of your talents!

If you need me, I'll be on my living room floor surrounded by scraps of paper, boxes and ribbons, probably with tape stuck on me somewhere, with the Christmas tree lit, a cup of hot cocoa and Love Actually on the tv. :) 

Here's the first few wrapped gifts under my tree.

Please note the tag-less-ness here and you'll understand the need for this post. :)

LMF

Rosemary wreath {diy}

A week or so ago, I saw this post on the pretty blog on how to make a rosemary wreath.

And then saw this image on tumblr

And thought I needed to try it.

I'm pretty happy with how mine turned out and my dining room is so fragrant now.

LMF

White chocolate peppermint pretzels {FAIL}

So while everyone else is posting gorgeous photos of their Christmas decor, beautiful diy gift wrapping and yummy holiday recipes, I thought I'd shared my failed holiday attempt. 

Here's my pretty photo of all my ingredients:

I was going to start the post with something about a super easy festive treat that only has three ingredients.

And then I started making it and all the peppermint pieces started falling off and the white chocolate got all drippy and clumped in the peppermint.

I attempted to clean the pan up a bit for this next photo.

I know where I messed up.  I should've crushed up all the candy canes really well before I started.  

But while I was crushing them I noticed all this pink dust flying around.  So I put my ziploc bag in another ziploc bag and continued to crush them but more dust came out again.

I decided there was enough fine candy cane crushings in the bottom of the bag for me to roll the chocolate covered pretzels in. So I began.  

Turns out I was half right.  The fine candy cane dust stuck to the chocolate but then it rubbed against the big candy cane pieces and fell off.

You know when you picture something in your head and you're like "this is totally going to work!" and then you do it and you're like "that was never going work!"

Here's my one and only good one:

If anyone has any ideas how to crush up candy cane without getting it all over your kitchen, I would love to hear!  It is seriously every. where.

I blame pinterest.

LMF

Pumpkin pull-apart bread

Dan claims that he isn't really into sweets.  But I made this over the Thanksgiving holiday and suggested we bring some over to his parents house. He said he'd have to think about it. :)

Pumpkin Pull-Apart Bread

Ingredients:

Dough

 - 2 Tbsp butter

 - 1/2 cup milk

 - 1 1/4 tsp active dry yeast (1 envelope)

 - 1/4 cup sugar

 - 3/4 cup pumpkin purée

 - 2 1/2 cups flour

 - 1/2 tsp salt

Filling

 - 3 Tbsp butter

 - 1 cup sugar

 - 2 tsp cinnamon

 - 1/2 tsp freshly ground nutmeg

*Note - instead of cinnamon and nutmeg you can use 2 tsp of pumpkin pie spice

Glaze

 - 2 Tbsp butter

 - 1/8 cup brown sugar, heaping

 - 1 1/2 Tbsp milk

 - 1/2 cup powdered sugar

 - 2-3 tsp vanilla bean paste (or 1 Tbsp vanilla extract)

For dough:

Melt butter in a sauce pan over medium-high heat.  When it starts to turn brown, stir it so it doesn't burn and turn black.  This can happen rather quickly.  Once it's all golden brown remove from heat and carefully add milk.  It's best to add room temperature milk or temper the milk by adding a bit of the hot butter to it first.  Return to stove and heat through.  Pour mixture into mixer bowl fitted with a dough hook and allow to cool to approximately 100-110 degrees F.  I don't have a candy thermometer so I just test with my finger.  The mixture should be pretty warm but not too hot to stick your finger in.

Once the mixture has reached the correct temperature, add the yeast and sugar.  Give it one light stir and then let sit for about 8 minutes.  You'll know it's ready because it will be very foamy on top and cloudy.  Add the pumpkin purée, 1 cup of flour and salt and knead on low.  Continue to add the rest of the flour 1/2 cup at a time.  Once all flour is in, knead on low for 6 minutes.  Dough should be smooth and elastic and only slightly sticky.  If the dough is too sticky, add additional flour 1 tablespoon at a time. {When it's cool outside I don't need to add any additional flour, but I've found on hot days I've needed up to 4 Tbsp more. Go figure.}

Place dough in greased bowl.  Make sure to roll dough over in the bowl so all sides get covered. Cover with clean towel and leave in warm place (i.e. on top of dryer, in sunny window, etc. )  Let rise for 90 minutes or until the dough has doubled in size.

{Before rising}

{After rising. And after my mom stuck her fingers in the dough to check it}

For filling:

Brown butter following same process as above.  Combine sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg in separate bowl.

On a floured surface, roll out dough into a 12 x 20 inch rectangle.  {This does not have to be perfect - as shown by my "rectangle" below.}

Brush melted butter all over dough and sprinkle sugar-cinnamon mixture on top.  Press sugar firmly into dough so that it sticks.

Cut dough lengthwise into 6 even strips.  Stack strips on top of each other and cut into 6 even portions.

Layer strips vertically into greased loaf pan (as shown below).  {Some sugar probably spilled off the strips.  I scraped this up with my knife and sprinkled it on top.  It made for a delicious crustiness. I highly recommend it.}

  

Cover loaf pan with clean towel and allow to rise again in a warm place for 30-45 minutes.  Strips should be puffed up and fill pan (as shown below).

Bake dough in preheated oven at 350 degrees F for 35-40 minutes or until it's dark golden brown on top.  {Your house will smell amazing!}

For the glaze:
Heat butter, milk and brown sugar in saucepan and bring to a boil.  Lower heat and whisk in powdered sugar and vanilla, until smooth. {Instead of vanilla you can add 1/2 or 1 tsp of rum if you'd rather.}

Pour glaze over warm bread in loaf pan.  I used a knife to separate the strips a bit so that glaze gets in all the little crevices.

Full disclosure - I've had a draft of this post since May.  I never posted it because I needed photos, but whenever I was making this, I just wanted to get it in the oven and never stopped to grab a couple shots.

I know it seems like a lot of steps, but it really is so easy and so delicious.  I hope you enjoy!

I think we're adding this to our Christmas breakfast! :)

LMF
*original recipe adapted from here, initially found via.