Baking Into the Holidays
As the air turns cool, our bakers trade summer fruit for spice, nuts, and the pies that make a table feel like the holidays.
There is a morning every year when the summer fruit is suddenly gone and nobody quite announces it. The berries thin out, the stone fruit disappears, and the ovens turn toward something warmer — apples and pears, brown butter and toasted nuts, cinnamon and cardamom and clove. Holiday baking season has arrived.
On Ovendrop you can watch it happen right on the drop calendars. Pies get deeper and spicier, breads turn enriched and golden, and the cookies that show up in December have been on someone's family recipe card for forty years.
What the season is really about
Fall and holiday baking is less about any single ingredient than about a feeling — the one that lands when a warm pie comes out of the oven and the whole house smells like it. It is comfort food in the most literal sense, and it is the time of year our bakers most want you tasting something they grew up on.
Nowhere is that clearer than with the Scandinavian bakers, for whom this stretch of the calendar is the whole point.
Lucia's Nordic Kitchen in Maple Grove, working from a grandmother's handwritten recipe cards, put it best:
Christmas is not a date for us, it is a smell — cardamom and almond and a hot iron. When people taste the krumkake, half of them are suddenly eight years old again. That is the whole job.
The centerpiece is almost always a pie
If one bake defines the season, it is the pie. A good holiday pie is equal parts fruit, fat, and patience, and the distance between fine and unforgettable usually comes down to the crust. If you are baking your own this year, it is worth watching someone fuss over the details:
What to look for
- Apple and pecan pies — the classic holiday centerpieces, and the first to sell out.
- Cardamom and cinnamon breads — enriched, golden, and made for a slow morning.
- Heritage cookies — krumkake, alfajores, and the rest of the once-a-year batches.
Our advice for the season: order earlier than you think you need to. Holiday drops fill up fast, and the best bakers close their books well before the day itself.
Written by The Baker's Table for The Baker's Table.
