Waffles And Ice Cream Bar, Yum!
As with all things good, the holidays inspire you to change, or at least tweak and put a modern twist on traditional family recipes like waffles and ice cream. We think it’s the secret behind happy holiday memories.
Growing up it seemed like we were always in the kitchen, we loved gathering and cooking as a family. But, we can especially remember making desserts.
Warm feelings still come to mind just thinking of one holiday tradition – Baking Day. All of our aunts, cousins, family, and friends stopped by throughout the day to help us bake. Our family was large, so our kitchen was jam-packed from morning until early evening.
It was a day filled with music, singing, laughing and tons of food. Everyone was excited to join in, so we always had extra aprons on hand and lots of snacks. We set up a table with cheese and vegetable trays, mini sandwiches, pigs in a blanket and one giant bowl of Chex mix. No-one left empty handed or hungry.
An enormous dessert table and a baking day is still part of our family tradition. One of our go-to favorites is our favorite Pumpkin Bread recipe. We love that with this one simple recipe you can make either pumpkin muffins or bread. Our special way of serving this dessert is with homemade cinnamon sugar butter. It’s to die for delicious, and without fail everyone always asks for the recipe.
Pumpkin Waffles
Pumpkin bread and muffins also make fabulous hostess, and holiday thank you gifts. Or, you can pop them in the freezer for your family. Our all-time favorite, however, is to use this same recipe to make pumpkin waffles for our holiday ice cream bar. This is a must try dessert, it’s delicious, fun, and easy to make.
We found after a big meal; people needed to stretch and move around. An ice cream bar, where everyone mingles and builds their dessert is the perfect way to re-energize a crowd. So, it was no surprise when this quickly became the new tradition for all our gatherings.
Waffles & Ice Cream Bar
After you try it a few times you’ll find it never disappoints – it’s one of those desserts that continually reinvents itself. The best part is, you can easily feed the masses or you can scale it down for smaller parties or Book Club meetings.
We’ve used an ice cream bar with brownies for summer parties, Toasted Pound Cake topped with fruit for dinner parties. But for festive parties, it’s pumpkin waffles topped with caramel sauce and pecans.
We love the holiday season because it means we get to recreate our holiday memories. It also means a trip to the grocery store to make sure we have plenty of food and snacks on hand, so we’re always prepared to be the perfect hosts. Now, all we have to do is go home turn on music, put on our aprons and wait for our guests to arrive.
Happy Baking,
Linda & Andrea
