Book Inspired Holiday Treats to Serve This Winter

The holidays are a great time to reconnect with family and friends. For some, that means celebrating specific holidays while others prefer to bask in the cheer of the season in large group settings. No matter how you prefer to spend your holidays, there’s one thing that all your gatherings will undoubtedly have in common: food!

Very few things in life taste as good or smell as delectable as holiday treats. Even the most simplistic sugar cookie will be enriched by the memories you make while baking them with loved ones. And if you’re looking to add a little bookish flair to your holiday proceedings, there are plenty of book inspired holiday recipes out there to give your festivities a literary spin. Here are just a few of our favorite holiday book inspired recipes!

Christmas Pudding

If you live outside of the UK, Christmas pudding is probably one of those things you’ve heard about a lot in books or in movies but have never actually tasted. Christmas Pudding is a staple in English literature. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Percy almost chipped his tooth on a silver sickle embedded in his slice of flaming Christmas pudding during the holiday feast.

Serve up your own book inspired Christmas pudding this holiday season and wow all your friends with your magical cooking skills. Just a heads up that this recipe is a bit tricky, especially if you opt to flambé your final results. Keep an eye on any open flames and have a fire extinguisher ready if something goes wrong.

Cookies

Cookies are a winter classic. No matter which holiday you’re celebrating, a warm plate of cookies goes a long way to warm the heart when the outside temperatures turn chilly. Break out your copy of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and follow it up with the book’s holiday sequel: If You Take a Mouse to the Movies. Here’s a list of 12 classic holiday cookies to bake this winter to spread some holiday cheer.

Turkish Delight

There’s nothing suspicious about this Turkish Delight recipe. That is, of course, unless a strange witch is offering them to you as you ride through a snow-covered world. If that is what’s happening to you while eating these sweet treats, you should seriously evaluate your life choices.

Turkish delight is the dessert that makes Edmund the White Witch’s prisoner in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But lucky for you, if you make this unique confection all you’ll need to worry about is getting powdered sugar on your shirt.

Turkish delight is pretty simple to make, but you’ll need some out-of-the-ordinary ingredients like cream of tartar and rosewater. This recipe will make around two pounds of Turkish delight, which is about 32 servings. Perfect for a big group gathering!

Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight

What place could be better to be during the holidays than inside the famous Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory? Unfortunately, the Wonka Factory doesn’t actually exist, and even if it did it would be closed for the holidays. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t partake of some of the delicious delicacies described within one of Roald Dahl’s most famous works.

Here’s a great recipe that will knock your friends' socks off. Anyone can just buy a bag of chocolate bars and bring them to the holiday party, but not everyone can make their own chocolate bars. And these are no mere chocolate bars. The whipple-scrumptious fudgemallow delight contains whipped ganache, salted caramel fudge, oozing marshmallow, and of course chocolate!

Palmiers

Do you have a holiday party tonight but don’t have time to run to the store or many ingredients to whip up something in your house? Not to worry. This book themed recipe is inspired by The Paris Wife by Paula McLain and is super simple. The Paris Wife is about Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway’s love story. Set in Paris in the 1920s, the book is full of yummy sounding French pastries.

All you need to create your own palmiers is a cup of sugar and one sheet of thawed frozen puff pastry. Basically, you just sprinkle the sheet of puff pastry with sugar and then roll it into a kind of heart shape, jelly-roll style. Follow the instructions here and you’ll have a sweet surprise ready in under 20 minutes!

Get Cooking with Frostbeard

Did you find any recipes here that piqued your bookish interest? If not, you can find a few other food-themed articles, along with a bunch of additional biblio-themed content on our blog. At Frostbeard, we love connecting with our fans, bet it through yummy cooking blogs or our original book inspired candles. Send us a picture on social media if you decide to tackle any of the above-listed book themed desserts!


Written by Roxie Lubanovic

Co-founder of Frostbeard Studio, creator of bookish candles, and avid reader.