Marzipan & Sea Salt Mandel Bread

With advent calendars being opened every morning, a scarf wrapped round my neck every single day, and the evenings getting more and more depressingly dark, it's high time to embrace the holiday festivities. Whether this means Champagne and party dresses, mulled wine and mince pies, or bobble hats and blankets is up to you... But to me, it means an imminent trip home, hiding inside with a glass of wine every evening, and an endless supply of biscuits. Or cookies. Depending on what side of the ocean you're on. And Molly Yeh's mandel bread is just the ticket.

This biscotti-style treat is filled with chunks of marzipan and dark chocolate, sprinkled with sea salt, and cooked until crisp, with the slightest hint of softness in the center. Obviously brightly colored sprinkles are optional, unless you're me. And as an extra incentive to get in the kitchen, these sweet treats would make the best gift, whether it's for your host, your sister, or a little thank you to yourself. Let's get baking!

You can find the recipe here. And if you haven't got Molly Yeh's book yet, add it to your Christmas list now.

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Molly Yeh's Funfetti Cake

Molly Yeh's new book has been born. I've been dreaming of this book for years, long before Molly even started writing it, and it lives up to every hope, dream, and expectation. It's an honest, funny, beautiful, whimsical, lifestyle-jealousy-inducing, totally inspiring creation, and the best new addition to my ever-expanding cookbook shelves. Since I got the book in my hands last Tuesday, I've read it from cover to cover in every free batch of non-occupied five minutes I managed to sneak into a hectic week. It didn't take much deliberation to figure out where to start: at the end, with the three-layer, buttercream-coated, crazily colorful, funfetti cake.

As per every recipe of Molly's that I've ever made, the cake is perfect. An unbelievable amount of work, experimentation, creativity, and trialling, has gone into creating this cake recipe, and the result is a sweet, bright white cake, dotted with the most stunningly artificial colors. Each layer is strong enough to support the next one, but not so strong that it's a dense and heavy sponge. Instead, it's fluffy, super sugary, packed full of rainbow happiness, and layered up with the fluffiest, airiest buttercream.

If you grew up in a household were funfetti cake was an annual birthday tradition, I'm certain this cake will bring back wonderfully nostalgic memories. I grew up in an organic-obsessed home, so no boxed funfetti cake ever appeared at our birthday parties. But I'm definitely not complaining: instead we had homemade chocolate sponge cakes (shaped into rabbits or whatever the current obsession happened to be), a baked alaska that was transformed into the millennium dome (I was a demanding child), and a cake topped with the three handmade marzipan bears, for my (you guessed it) third birthday. So yes, I was spoiled rotten with my birthday cakes, but funfetti wasn't a feature. However I have now made up for anything I feel I may have missed out on by eating at least half of this cake in just three days: Any absence of dyed sprinkles in my childhood has been compensated for in one brief weekend. 

You can find Molly Yeh's Funfetti Cake recipe on this beautiful blog over here.

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