Baking for the holidays

By Sherlyn Garcia,
BlueDevilHUB.com Staff–

Towards the end of the year is when the most holiday baking occurs, a.k.a, Christmas time. According to a survey commissioned by Fleischmann’s Yeast and Karo Syrup brands, “73% held a higher level of excitement for baking during the holiday season.” Davis High’s home economics class has decided to participate in holiday baking by making snickerdoodles and are now making gingerbread houses.

Making the gingerbread houses from scratch is a three to four day process starting off with making the dough and then letting the dough sit overnight. The following day the students have to roll out the dough, bake the pieces, cut the pieces and assemble the house, and on the last day the students have to make frosting from scratch and decorate the house.

“It’s a stressful but fun process,” junior Isabel Herrera Perez said.

For Perez, sometimes she makes the dough the day of to bake the cookies but other times, store bought dough is the way to go and starts baking the day of and finishes that same day.

For the people that want to make the dough from scratch, home economics teacher Jeanne Pettigrew has some tips and advice to help along the way.

“Special cookies such as Snickerdoodles or Chocolate Molasses Crinkles always look impressive and are not ordinary and are not as much work as are rolled cookies. For the cook, planning ahead around family activities make cookie baking possible family holiday traditions of shared activity and that is what counts as we look back,” Pettigrew said.

For many families, baking cookies like snickerdoodles is a tradition that means a lot.

“Baking is an integral part of the holiday,” said Jessica Herb, a Baking brand manager at ACH Food Companies, Inc.

Following with the same survey, “78% of respondents try to incorporate cinnamon in baked goods for the holidays.”

Master pastry chef Albert Kutternig ,who owns a bakery in Davis called Konditorei Austrian Pastry, emphasizes on the quote, “less is more.”

Kutternig grew up in Austria until he was 14 years old. His father got him into baking in the village he used to live in, hence the pastry bakery including Austrian in its name.

In Kutternig’s opinion, baking something like snickerdoodles makes people think they have to add a lot of cinnamon to make the snickerdoodles taste good but that is no true.

“You have multiple spices to add in certain pastry’s, [so] in snickerdoodles you don’t need to add a lot of cinnamon because you have other ingredients and spices to add […] if you add just the right amount of rum and the right amount of cinnamon it should enhance the taste of the snickerdoodles. If you can taste the rum, you added too much and you ruined it,” Kutternig said.