Yes, I know you are waiting for the new Christmas cookies. 😊 This year, I have just the right cookies, the quintessential Christmas cookies, the gingerbread cookies! They were missing from this blog!

Gingerbread cookies are a typical and traditional Christmas recipe that is as typical and traditional as it can be, but so far I had never felt inspired to make them, perhaps precisely because of their typicality. I have already told you on other occasions (for example here, and here) that I consider traditional recipes a double-edged sword because negative criticism is always lurking, even when you do everything right. And although I have already tried to replicate other international recipes, I had some apprehension towards gingerbread.

Rightly so, considering that my first gingerbread men are not exactly up to the real American ones, I still need some practice with the decorations! 😃 However, they are delicious cookies, perfectly spiced and nice and crunchy, so I recommend them, I am sure you will like them.

Here they are, what do you think? 😃

Why did I finally decide to try making the famous gingerbread cookies? A little nudge came from a romantic Christmas movie and the number one expert in romantic movies: Lucius Etruscus.

You remember the romantic movies, right? The ones with which I and Lucius (I told you all about him here! 😊) tried to keep you company a few months ago in August. Well, the collection of recipes from those movies is now enriched with a Christmas episode. We were tempted by a selection of spiced Christmas sweets we saw in a film with the unmistakable title The Sweetest Christmas. And we couldn’t miss a film full of sweets like this!

Those who followed us in previous episodes already know that these culinary-themed romantic movies always (or almost always) follow a very specific narrative pattern, and this one is no exception. But I recommend checking it out because beyond the plot, predictable as it may be, it offers us a mountain of very interesting sweets.

TODAY’S MOVIE: The Sweetest Christmas

Unlike previous times, today I will not provide a meticulous review, nor will I talk about the obvious acting talents (ahem… a bit challenging to call them talents 😅) of the protagonists. Also because, as always, for all the cinematic details you can rely on Lucius and his article published in parallel with mine.

I will only say of this Christmas film that: 1. the location, as usual, is a small town, 2. there’s a him and a her, him a struggling family bakery owner, her a famous pastry chef and writer, 3. she, creative and resourceful, will obviously help him, the insecure one, revive the bakery’s fortunes, devising fabulous marketing strategies he hadn’t thought of at all. Among them, the incredible realization of Christmas-themed recipes.

The theme is The 12 Delights of Christmas, twelve sweets inspired by the original family gingerbread recipe from the bakery, to be offered to customers in an advent calendar mode, one surprise recipe per day for 12 consecutive days.

These romantic movies always give us some useful insights into the American lifestyle, and those with a culinary theme interest me a lot because they provide, between the lines, a lot of information about American eating habits and recipes, which in this film are really many. So many that today I decided to direct my usual meticulousness not on the plot or the film’s space-time errors, which we always smile at, but on the recipes.

Some recipes, unfortunately, are only mentioned, but by researching online and analyzing the stills, I was able to identify almost all of them. I list them below, accompanied by a brief description.

It wasn’t easy for me to match the sequence of desserts actually shown in the film with the names of the recipes that appear written on the blackboard. Here it is, this is the blackboard with the recipe names:

Not all the recipes match, and some I couldn’t quite recognize, but I didn’t give up and managed to place (almost) all of them as in a puzzle. I know you’re thinking it’s a useless job 😂 but trust me… just like nothing can stop a mom from dusting (a quote I can’t reveal but it’s true!) nothing can stop a passionate detective until she reaches the last page and the case is solved! Help, what an absurd comparison, well, okay, I tried! 😅

In my following list, you will find, more or less, the same recipes mentioned by Lucius in his article. They are described by him with the translation used in the film dialogues, while I focused on capturing the strictly culinary details of each recipe. I hope it will be useful for those who want to try replicating the recipes (and some I will surely try myself!).

Let’s get started!

RECIPES PRESENT IN THE MOVIE

The recipe lineup begins with Gingerbread macarons. These are macarons (the famous meringue cookies) flavored with ginger and filled with a cream that I imagine is a ginger-flavored buttercream.

Day 2: Gingerbread vanilla fudge. First of all: what is fudge? Fudge, a typical American recipe, is a chocolate fondant, a sort of soft brittle, obtained from a caramelized mixture with the addition of butter, sugar, milk (or cream), and chocolate. A delight for chocolate lovers (and who isn’t? 😃) enriched with vanilla and spices.

On the third day, the recipe sequence gets complicated, the recipe indicated on the blackboard does not match what the film shows. In fact, on the third day, we are shown, prominently, so I can’t be wrong, donuts (ring-shaped pastries) made with a brown-colored batter typical of gingerbread cake and generously covered with icing and red and green candied fruits. Instead, Mini gingerbread mousse cups are scheduled on the blackboard, which are cups of spiced mousse. While the donuts are indicated on day 8. They must have made some editing changes!

The fourth day brings Foam art gingerbread lattes, a spiced cappuccino with artistic foam (hahaha artistic foam!!), which I struggled to recognize because it is served in huge cups that I never would have thought could contain a cappuccino (or latte). Whoever manages to finish that big cup remains full for a week! 😅

Day 5: Cheesecake gingerbread squares. Spiced cheesecake squares. They don’t look like cheesecake, more like large pastries in three layers, practically a single-serving cheesecake but with a thin creamy layer, not like the cheesecakes we have here. Moreover, searching online I found out these squares are also called bars besides squares.

Day 6: Gingerbread cupcakes, or gingerbread cupcakes. For the few who don’t know, cupcakes are (to put it very simply) muffins topped with a big dollop of cream or frosting. It’s a very popular dessert, which frankly I don’t like much because I don’t enjoy all that frosting (but I’m sure I’m in the minority!).

Day 7: Gingerbread cake-pops. They are small balls, like truffles, surely made of gingerbread dough, covered with (presumably) white chocolate and a red decoration, and skewered on the end of a stick. A sweet, the cake-pop, always very popular with children.

Day 8: It is unclear what is expected for this day, the blackboard says it’s the day of the donuts (which aired on the third day) while according to the protagonist it should be the day of crème brûlée (which, however, is scheduled on the blackboard for the next day). Hmm 🤔 what if we pretend it’s the day of the mousse? That is those Mini gingerbread mousse cups with local maple syrup, which I already mentioned on day 3, which are basically cups (or rather glasses) of spiced mousse with the addition of local maple syrup. Well, that’s how I placed them and that’s the end of it! 😄

The film at this point quickly skips a couple of days, the ninth and the tenth, without giving us precise indications, but according to the blackboard we have:

On day 9, Gingerbread crème brûlée tarts. Spiced crème brûlée tartlets. A recipe not seen in the film, but I found online. It is a French-origin recipe, very beautiful and refined (and maybe that’s why it’s not in the film! 😅). They are shortcrust tarts filled with cream, obviously in this case flavored with ginger instead of vanilla, and brûléed (burnt) with a blowtorch after cooling. A delight!

And on day 10, Gingerbread cinnamon buns with cream cheese frosting. Cinnamon and ginger buns with cream cheese frosting. I couldn’t spot these in the film, I might have mistaken them for the cupcakes since both are decorated with a cream cheese frosting, but what matters is that cinnamon buns are known to be delicious (for me better without frosting) and it’s one of those recipes I will write sooner or later!

Day 11: Gingerbread pudding with sticky miso caramel sauce. Spiced pudding with sticky miso caramel sauce. After necessary research to understand what exactly sticky miso is (literal translation sticky miso, which I found in several recipes) I concluded that the sticky miso caramel sauce is a variant of salted caramel (i.e., with added miso). As for translating pudding as budino, the standard logical translation, a small clarification is needed, as our pudding – what comes to mind instinctively when we use the word pudding – is not quite the same as pudding. Pudding is usually a bread (or breadcrumbs) and dried fruit pudding, but it is well known that there are multiple recipe variations, making it impossible to imagine how they envisaged them in the film.

The last day is the day of Gingerbread cookie sandwiches, the cookie sandwiches, i.e., big and thick gingerbread cookies paired and filled with a spreadable cream cheese and, I guess, fruit or jam. Watching them (yes, they are in the film and they were shown quite well, although frankly not very aesthetically pleasing), I wondered how children can manage to bite into such large and heavily filled cookies… ahhh what big mouths you have!!

But you know, in fairy tales, and especially in romantic movies, anything can happen! 😃

Meanwhile here, in the real life of myself, it can happen that in defiance of the most common food blogging rules that demand a certain introductory brevity to avoid boring the reader 😁 I decide to further lengthen this ginger-scented discussion by adding to the already long list one more, additional, recipe. I told you the film is full of recipes! Why deprive ourselves of them? 💪 Moreover, this recipe is a real gem. Have I piqued your interest?

It is an “out-of-competition” recipe, meaning it does not appear on the blackboard nor belongs to the 12 sweets in 12 days with passion lineup, but it absolutely deserves a mention: the Gingerbread coffeecake, literally translated as gingerbread coffee cake.

There is a little mystery about this cake that I will now reveal to you.

In the film, exactly half an hour in, the protagonists decide what sweets to prepare and among them, they get excited about a “spiced tea cake” to be served with a cup of tea.

Error!!

Yes, a dubbing error. Actually two. The Italian translation – right after making her say the unlikely “spices with crème brûlée” (I don’t believe it, it’s impossible that the original dialogue is spices with crème brûlée, she must have said spiced crème brûlée! which means spiced crème brûlée) – makes him say “tea cake” while he actually pronounces coffee cake in the clearly visible lip reading.

Now.

Why do I dwell on this detail which may seem insignificant? Because the coffee cake I searched for, and I found it, and I confirm that it exists (both as coffeecake all together but especially as coffee cake, separated). And it also exists in the gingerbread version, the Gingerbread coffee cake.

And it is a dipping cake that is usually eaten for breakfast. It is a typical American recipe of German or Scandinavian origin, I have seen it replicated in many English-speaking blogs, as well as Italian ones.

The nice thing about this cake is that it has an extraordinary feature: it is called coffee cake but it is not a “coffee cake”. It contains no coffee! Great Scott!

I mean, did you get that? The coffeecake derives its name from the simple reason that it is eaten for breakfast, typically along with a cup of coffee, a nice big cup of American coffee. And here’s where the originality attributed by the film to the two imaginative bakers comes in: in proposing to serve this cake (I suppose for snack time at tea time, instead of breakfast) along with a cup of tea even though it is a coffee cake. Do you get the subtlety?

It may seem trivial to us, but I think for a true, genuine American who doesn’t drink tea regularly, and who has the coffee cake in his DNA as a breakfast cake, it’s not a trivial detail.

That’s what I like about these romantic movies, that at first glance seem trivial but are not, actually, often hiding real-life details, unfortunately downgraded by low-budget productions. And then sometimes trivialized by equally cheap dubbing.

Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know your thoughts!

And now, after this long list of sweets, do you feel like eating some gingerbread cookies?

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