Celebrate Your Family's Holiday Traditions With Baked by Melissa Desserts

Food Is My Holiday Love Language

For me, the holidays are special because they’re bound together by two threads: togetherness and the sharing of delicious food. I love the many ways families show their love through food during the holiday season.

Your family traditions at the dinner and dessert table tell stories that have been passed down for generations. It’s pretty incredible. Eventually, your treasured holiday traditions become special to the next generation, too.

I grew up Jewish, and my memories of the eight days of Hanukkah are intrinsically tied to foods like chocolate babka—a holiday staple dessert that you’ll find at *any* Jewish celebration—and Hanukkah gelt, which are little chocolate “coins” wrapped in shiny gold foil. My dad often makes challah dough, and I’ll whip up challah cupcakes because, well, I can’t help myself. I’m infamous for taking over the kitchen on holidays.

That’s why we love to create flavors in the Baked by Melissa kitchen that tap into your childhood sense of nostalgia, and Holiday—our busiest time of the year—is no exception. We take classic flavors like s’mores, candy cane, pumpkin spice, and hot cocoa, flip them on their heads, and make them perfectly bite-sized with unique, exact ratios of cake, filling, and frosting. (P.S. Read more about our flavor creation process here.)

Green Goddess Salad Recipe

I made this Green Goddess Salad last summer for my girlfriends and it knocked us all off our feet. It is a vegan pesto dressing with all the green veggies you have on hand. Feel free to improvise anywhere you see fit! Nuts, greens and oil in the dressing can be subbed out for other varieties you have on hand, and you can do that for the veggies in the salad as well. Go wild!

This salad stays delicious in the refrigerator for up to a week! It tastes great alone, but my favorite is to eat it with chips like salsa. You can also use it on sandwiches or tacos.

Hot Cocoa Cake Recipe

Imagine an entire cake that tastes like the bottom of a mug of hot chocolate. That’s this guy.

Ingredients for Hot Cocoa Cake:

2 sticks unsalted butter (+ more for greasing your cake pans)

2 cups sugar

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

4 large eggs

3 cups A.P. flour

½ cup store-bought cocoa mix

1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder

2 tablespoons baking powder

¼ teaspoon fine sea salt

1 ¾ cups whole milk

Once you’ve got your ingredients at room temp, preheat the oven to 350ºF and you’re ready to get started. You can decorate with decadent marsh icing and top with copious amounts of marshmallows.

How to Make Hot Cocoa Cake:

Butter your cake pans or line them with parchment (pro tip: butter the parchment too!)
With your hand-mixer or electric stand mixer with a paddle attachment, whip the butter on high speed for 1 minute. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, then add sugar and beat on high speed for 2 minutes.
Mix in the vanilla extract at medium-low speed and add eggs one at a time. Make sure to reincorporate anything on the side of the bowl.
Combine flour, cocoa powder, hot cocoa mix, sea salt, and baking powder in a separate bowl.
Use the lowest speed setting to combine ½ of the flour mixture. When that’s incorporated, add ½ of the milk and the rest of your wet & dry ingredients. Mix until smooth.
Bake until the middle of the cake feels springy to the touch. This is called the “fingerprint test.” Remove from the oven and allow to cool before icing the cake.

“Can’t Believe It’s Not a Doughnut” Cake

I’m a huge doughnut gal normally, but then I discovered the secret ingredient to getting that doughnut-ty taste: mace. Who doesn’t want a cake that tastes even better than a doughnut?

Mace is made from the covering of nutmeg and has a similar fragrant aroma. Don’t use nutmeg as a sub for mace, though! Only mace gives you the cakey, doughnutty quality we’re after.

Use the same recipe above, but instead of cocoa powder and hot cocoa mix, include 1 ¼ tablespoon of mace. Prep using the same six steps! Super easy, huh?

Making Glazes

Glazes are an easy way to beautifully elevate any dessert you’re making, plus they’re delish...and shiny. Most of the time, all you need to make a glaze is:

2 cups confectioners’ sugar
¼ cup whole milk (at room temperature)
½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Then, customizing the flavor is super straightforward.

For hot cocoa flavor, use 2 cups of cocoa mix instead of confectioner’s sugar. For pumpkin spice, add in ½ teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice. (Orange food coloring is extra fun!)

Making a Marshmallow Fluff glaze? Use—you guessed it—2 cups of Fluff instead of confectioner’s sugar.

Rinse and repeat with your favorite flavor combos and colors.

Now you’ve got a few recipes for holiday-flavored cakes that you can customize and make your own. The most important thing to remember when you’re inventing a sweet holiday tradition? Put your own unique spin on whatever you’re baking.

You might want to play with classic pie flavors like pecan and sweet potato. You might be inspired by Northeastern apple cider doughnuts (my fave!). You might take the beloved concept of Caribbean rum cake and apply it to mini cupcakes. The holiday baking potential is limitless.

Some years, the holidays can be bittersweet. When you can’t be there alongside your family and friends, send them love in a different way: with cupcakes!

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