It is 6:30; I slept in for an hour and a half!

Now it's time for the TL Cooking Hour: Holiday Edition

This year (let's be honest, this is every year) I'm making something my family calls 'googlehoff'

It's a bastardization of the word 'kugelhopf' which is a coffee cake of Austrian origin, passed down for at least four generations in my family.

Usually it's made in loaf form, with a delicious rind of sliced almonds and apricot jam all over the crust, but I lack bread tins

So I'm baking heresy cupcakes, which will probably (hopefully) be delicious anyways, as it means that we will have more edge bits than you'd usually get. 8D

This recipe is further going to be bastardized by the fact that I am using almond/coconut milk, flax eggs, and gluten free flour, so I fully expect sweet-soaked hockey pucks

(not sweat-soaked. ew)

This recipe keeps using 'oh, a 1/4 cup of butter here, a 1/4 cup of butter there'

I think I might have melted about a full cup so far, holy crap

I'm not much of a baker; whenever I see the amounts of sugar and butter going into recipes like these I'm always a little shell shocked.

Oh MAN that moment when a particular scent brings back memories all the way from childhood!

apricot jam, brown sugar and butter mixed together is a smell of christmas morning to me like nothing else

oh oh

so...

the amount of batter used in a loaf completely fills 12 cupcake tins and I haven't even baked it yet

:I

Is this one of those times when I should put a baking tin underneath for the inevitable over-puffed over-spill?

On the plus side, the batter is delicious >_>;

alright, fuckit, it's in the oven!!

On the double-plus side, cupcakes don't seem to take nearly as long to cook as a full-on bread, so we'll have these in and out in no time!

I miss having other early-birds in the house to chat with at like 8AM, man. Back home I'd have my nanny (gramma, though that side of the family uses different terms) to blather with

She's one of those women who is at once intensely competitive and had at some point decided to take on the essence of 'grandmother' and so does it the damned best

Undisputed bake-lord in our family, she always whips up chocolate fudge (her mom's recipe, my great-nanny) in addition to all of these European nibblies

Make no mistake, we're like 5th gen Canadians; this side of the family just loves traditions and takes a lot of pride in them.

especially when it comes to getting fat. Being on a basically paleo diet since meeting Kat and now working out are the only things that are keeping me from turning into a perfectly round ball

That and intense dish washing, which is something I'm about to disappear to do!

Gugelhopf update: oh thank god, the predicted 'hockey puck' way that gluten free baking sits without rising is saving me from the fact that if this were normal bread, it would have risen WAY over the tins

Why is gluten so magical and yet so freaking bad for allergies?! >:C

I love the way that baking fills up the entire house with delicious scents... this is the best.

alright, they came out just fine! Time to go wake up the lady and start the xmas gift opening bonanza!