Christmas sweets. Discover our favourite recipes!

Can you imagine Christmas without home baked goods? Christmas cakes introduce a unique and magical atmosphere, filling the whole house with amazing scents. At this time, our tables are dominated mainly by gingerbread cakes, poppy seeds cakes, fruit cakes, cheesecakes and crispy cookies. The wafting aroma of spices, chocolate, honey and nuts during baking will immerse everyone into a festive and blissful mood.

Christmas is a magical, wonderful time spent in the company of people close to us, so it is worth making sure that the sweets we bake are equally magical and delightful not only with their taste, but also with them being festive and magnificent in appearance. The easiest way to make a cake look beautiful on the table is to have it decorated. It's nothing hard in particular if we have accessories for baking and decorating sweets... to help us decorate Christmas sweets. What's more, festive forms and moulds can come in handy, making baked goods look more attractive. What cakes to prepare for Christmas? Check out our proposals of delicious, yet beautiful, Christmas delicacies.

Cake...

without which most of us can't imagine Christmas, is a poppy-seed cake - moist, long lasting in its freshness, just delicious! The secret of a delicious taste of the poppy-seed cake lies in the poppy-seed mixture, which is worth preparing on your own, using high quality ingredients.

The ingredients for the cake:

• 3 glasses of wheat flour
• 50 g of yeast
• ¾ glass of lukewarm milk
• 1/3 glass of sugar
• 0.5 teaspoon of salt
• 6 yolks
• 150 g of melted and cooled butter
• vanialla beans hollowed from 1 vanilla stick

Ingredients for the poppy-seed mixture:

• 500 g of poppy seeds
• ¾ glass of brown sugar
• 4 tablespoons of honey
• 1 tbsp of soft butter
• 100 g of raisins
• 50 s of walnuts
• 30 g of candied orange peel
• 1 tablespoon of almond flavouring
• 1 teaspoonful of cinnamon
• 6 egg whites

Preparation:

• Prepare the dough first. Crumble the yeast into a bowl, add 1 tbsp of sugar, 1 tbsp of flour and milk. Mix it, then cover with a cloth and set aside in a warm place for about 15 minutes for the yeast to start working.
• Pour the flour into a bowl, add the leavning yeast, sugar, salt, yolks, vanilla beans and butter. Make a smooth and elastic dough. Form a ball, put it into a bowl sprinkled with flour, cover with a cloth and set aside in a warm place to rise, for about 1.5 hours.
• Prepare the poppy-seed mixture. Pour boiling water over the poppy seeds and let it cool down. Drain off the excess water, then grind the seeds twice in the mincer.
• Add sugar, honey, butter, raisins, walnuts, orange peel, almond extract drops and cinnamon to the poppy seed mixture. Mix it all together.
• Whisk the egg whites stiff and gently mix them into the poppy-seed mixture.
• Divide the risen dough into 3 parts and roll it with a rolling pin into rectangular cakes measurings of 30 x 35 cm. Use a measuring table for this. Put the poppy-seed mixture to each cake, keeping about 2 cm free. Roll it up into a roulade, stack the edges together and put each poppy seed cake on a baking paper. Wrap each poppy-seed roulade twice in baking paper greased with oil, leaving about 1.5 cm of free space between the dough and the paper. Place the poppy-seed cakes on a baking tray and set aside for 15 minutes in a warm place.
• Place the cakes in the oven preheated to 190 degrees Celsius and bake for about 35 minutes until golden, slightly brown.
• Glaze the ready, still warm poppy seeds cakes and sprinkle with dry poppy seeds.

The fruit cake is a great-smelling sponge cake with lots of dried and candied fruit and nuts. Delicious and expressive in taste, and extremely easy to prepare. For baking this cake the oblong form will be perfect, which, in the end, is commonly referred as a fruit cake form. How to prepare this Christmas cake?

Ingredients:

• 1 ¾ glass of wheat flour
• 1 tbsp of baking powder
• 5 eggs
• 250 g of butter
• 1 glass of sugar
• 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
• 350 g of dried fruit, e.g. raisins, dried cranberries, dates, nuts, candied fruit

Preparation:

• Separate the egg whites from the yolks.
• Mix butter with sugar into a light, fluffy consistency. While mixing, gradually add yolks.
• Add sifted flour with baking powder and vanilla extract. Mix it.
• Whisk the egg whites stiffly and gently pour it into the dough.
• Cut the nuts into smaller pieces, coat them in flour, then add to the dough and mix it.
• Put the dough into an oblong, a metal or a silicone baking tin.
• Place the dough tin in an oven preheated to 180 degrees Celsius and bake for about 50 minutes.

Traditional gingerbread is a delicious cake which is a symbol of Christmas. The amazing aroma wafting in the house during its baking is due to the large amount of spices, such as: cinnamon, ginger, cardamon, cloves, nutmeg or aniseed. Gingerbread, like a fruit cake, can be prepared in a rectangular or a loaf tin, but to bake this cake you can successfully use one of our proposed 3D dough forms, e.g. in the shape of a Christmas tree, a gingerbread house or an Advent wreath. Gingerbread prepared this way will delight your guests not only with its delicious taste, but also with its beautiful, original appearance.

The ingredients:

• 125 g of butter
• 1 glass of sugar
• 2 spoonfuls of honey
• 2 spoons of plum jam
• 3 spoons of gingerbread spice
• 1.5 teaspoons of cinnamon
• 2 tablespoons of cocoa
• 2 teaspoons of baking soda
• 1 glass of milk
• 2 eggs
• 2 glasses of flour

Preparation:

• In a pot, melt butter, add sugar, honey, plum jam, gingerbread spices, cinnamon and cocoa. Stirr it all the time, heat the mixture at the lowest burner power and be careful not to boil it. Set the pot off the stove and add baking soda, milk and whisked eggs to it. Quickly mix all ingredients together with a spoon. While mixing, add sifted flour.
• Pour the mixture into baking trays previously greased with butter and sprinkled with flour.
• Place the dough in an oven preheated to 180 degrees Celsius and bake for about 40-45 minutes.
• You can decorate the finished cake with a chocolate icing.

Gingerbread cookies are inseparably associated with Christmas. Cut with Christmas tree molds, baubles or reindeers will be a beautiful, edible decoration of your home. It is worth involving the youngest members of the household to cut and decorate the cookies. Preparing gingerbread cookies together will certainly bring them a lot of fun and joy. Check out our tried and tested recipe for gingerbread cookies and find out how simple and pleasant it is to bake them!

Ingredients for gingerbread cookies:

• 2 glasses of flour
• 50 g of soft butter
• 50 g of icing sugar
• 150 ml of honey
• 1 teaspoon of baking powder
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla sugar
• 1 spoonful of gingerbread spice

Ingredients for gingerbread icing:

• 1 glass of icing sugar
• 3 spoons of boiling water

Preparation:

• Mix butter with flour, icing sugar and honey. Add baking powder, egg, vanilla sugar and gingerbread spice. Knead the dough, form a ball, wrap it in a food wrap and put into the fridge for about 30 minutes.
• Take the dough out of the fridge and roll it out with a rolling pin to about 0.5 cm thin. Cut out the gingerbread cookies using the Christmas cake forms.
• Put the gingerbreads on a baking tray lined with baking paper and bake at 180 degrees Celsius for about 12 minutes.
• Put the icing with sugar and boiling water. If it is too thin, add a bit of icing sugar, if it is too thick, add boiling water.
• Gingerbread cookies are ready to be decorated with icing.

Amazingly crispy and buttery cookies which are easy and quick to prepare will be beautifully decorated as an additional decoration of a festive, cherished table.

Ingredients:

• 180 g of butter
• 350 g of flour
• 200 g of icing sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 yolk
• A pinch of salt

Preparation:

• Chop butter with flour, add icing sugar, egg, yolk and a pinch of salt. Briefly mix it. Form a ball, wrap the dough in a food wrap and refrigerate for about 30 minutes.
• After taking it out of the fridge, tear off dough pieces and roll them out to a thickness of 3 mm. Cut out any shape.
• Put the cookies on a baking tray lined with baking paper, put them in the oven preheated to 180 degrees Celsius and bake for 12 minutes.
• Garnish finished cookies using some icing tools, e.g. coloured icing and sugar beads.

Decorative cupcakes in the shape of Christmas trees are a sweet proposition for the Christmas table that will delight everyone, both in taste and appearance.

Ingredients for cupcakes:

• 200 g of butter
• 200 g of bitter chocolate
• 200 g of brown sugar
• 4 small eggs
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
• 120 g of flour

Ingredients for green pudding cream:

• 1.5 glasses of milk
• ¾ glass of sugar
• 3 yolks
• 1.5 teaspoons of vanilla sugar
• 2 tablespoons of potato flour
• 350 g of soft butter
• 1 teaspoon of green dye in gel

Preparation:

• Prepare cupcakes. Melt the butter, add chopped chocolate and set aside for 2 minutes. Mix and leave to cool down a little.
• Pour the eggs into a bowl, add sugar and vanilla extract, mix it. Add butter with chocolate and flour. Combine all the ingredients together.
• Put baking paper cups into the muffin moulds, leaving 1 cm of free space from the edge.
• Place the mould in an oven preheated to 170 degrees Celsius and bake for 20 minutes. Leave the muffins to cool down.
• Prepare the pudding cream. Boil a glass of milk with the sugar. Mix the remaining milk with yolks, vanilla sugar and flour. Then add it to the boiling milk and cook the whole time while stirring for about 2 minutes until the pudding thickens. Leave the pudding to cool down.
• Whisk the soft butter into a fluffy mass and, while stirring, gradually add a cold pudding. Finally, add the green food colouring, mix it. Place the cream in the fridge for about 30 minutes.
• Decorate the cupcakes with cream by squeezing it with a confectioner's sleeve. You can also decorate them with colourful sprinkles, e.g. in the shape of stars.

As you can see, preparing Christmas baked goods is not as difficult and time-consuming as you might think! All you need is a little bit of willingness, a few simple ingredients, Christmas baking tins and accessories to decorate your sweets to come up with delicious and phenomenal cupcakes, cookies and cakes for Christmas.