Joyful Family, Thoughtful Gifts & Tasty Food | Easy Christmas Bites

It’s here… Christmas Eve! This is the evening my family and I always celebrate Christmas. We celebrate by just getting together, opening presents and having some very delicious food. Since the days around Christmas are always very busy, I have been thinking about some easy bites to make. I ended up with three and in this post I explain how you can make and enjoy them as well.

❆ Strawberry Santa Claus ❆

What you’ll need | Strawberries, vanilla frosting and dark chocolate (inspired by this recipe).

How to | Clean your strawberries and cut off the leaves, you won’t need these. Also cut the tip off the strawberries but save these because the tips will make the hats. It’s frosting time! My frosting looks really sloppy because I didn’t leave my strawberries on a tissue long enough. So make sure to let the juice of the strawberry really soak into a tissue before adding the frosting. Now add the tip of the strawberry to the body again. Don’t forget to add a tiny bit of frosting on top of the hat. Lastly, melt a small piece of dark chocolate and add two dots to the icing to create the eyes of you Santa. And voilà!

❆ Christmas Chocolate Dipped Stroopwafels ❆

What you’ll need | Mini stroopwafels, chocolate of your choice (white, milk or dark) and Christmas (green, white and red) M&M’s.

How to | Melt the chocolate you’ve chosen to use for this Christmas snack. I just put the pieces of dark chocolate in a bowl and let it melt in the microwave. Check the chocolate every 10 to 15 seconds and stir a little so you don’t have any lumps. When your chocolate is completely melted, dip half of the stroopwafels in the chocolate. The chocolate dries pretty quickly so add the M&M’s in time and then lay the stroopwafel on a plate to let it dry. Since I only wanted to use the green and red M&M’s, I did have to sort them out like a crazy person. After finishing all of them, I left them in the refrigerator for 15 minutes to let the chocolate harden. When the chocolate is solid, your Christmas chocolate dipped stroopwafels are done!

❆ Christmas Apple Rose ❆

What you’ll need | Two red apples, puff pastry, lemon juice, rosehip jam, cinnamon, water and powered sugar (inspired by this recipe).

How to | First get your puff pastry pieces out of freezer, otherwise you won’t be able to use them just yet. Clean your apples, and then prepare a bowl filled with water and add the lemon juice to that. I added about two squeezes so add whatever you like. Cut the apples in half and get rid of the core. When you’ve done that, slice the apples in really thin slices, paper thin. Put all of the slices in the bowl with water and lemon juice and put this in the microwave for about three minutes. This will make the slices soft and easy to use when you are making the roses.

Now put the rosehip jam and a little bit of water in a bowl. Put this in the microwave as well. This time not as long, maybe 15 seconds. Layout your puff pastry, roll it out a little bit and cut pieces of about 5 x 15-20 cm. Add the rosehip jam out of your bowl to the puff pastry and add the apple slices. The round part of the slices needs to be on top of the puff pastry. You can see this clearly in the recipe I’ve linked. Start rolling the puff pastry and your rose will reveal itself. Put the rose in a cupcake tin and put them in a preheated oven (180 ºC) for about 40 minutes (if they start to burn a little bit, put a piece of tin foil over your cupcake tin). A pretty and delicious bite to even serve with some ice cream as a desert!

How tasty do these bites look! I am so happy with how they all turned out because I wasn’t sure if I was going to like all of them. Let me tell you, I definitely did. The apple roses are definitely my favorite. Everyone was really impressed with them and it didn’t even take me a lot of time to make. Perfect for today or tomorrow. There is only one thing left to say: Merry Christmas Eve or Happy Holidays! ?? What’s your favorite out of these three? How are you celebrating Christmas?

Love,

Neeltje