During winter break, my family makes a point to take many sweet walks in the snow with pups, bake French meat pies every Christmas Eve, and make Italian Christmas cookies that need lots of rolling, scooping, and baking for friends and neighbors.
Some of our favorite holiday traditions include going to Stanley Park in Vancouver, B.C. to see the amazing lights put on by volunteer firefighters raising money for charity. Then we eat delicious steamed dumplings, go ice skating and enjoy macarons from Ladurée pastry shop.
But another one of my very favorite traditions is to make blackberries and biscuits on Christmas morning. I eat them with a hot cup of coffee while watching my children, Lucy and Wyatt, unwrap their gifts. This brings great delight to my heart and to my taste buds. I adopted this tradition before I had kids and continued it into their early adulthood. For one, it is an easy recipe that can be prepared ahead of time and simply baked the morning of. It’s so warm and pretty, almost jewel-like, contrasting in color and texture with the warm, flaky biscuits. We freeze our blackberries in August, while they are in season, wild and ripe, growing everywhere around here. In the middle of winter, it’s a treat to smell summer’s blackberries, and even better to taste them on just-baked biscuits.
BLACKBERRY SAUCE
Add 20 oz. of frozen but thawed blackberries
1½ cups organic cane sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cinnamon stick
Zest of one lemon
Zest of one orange
¼ teaspoon vanilla extract or extracts of one vanilla bean
¼ cup butter
DIRECTIONS
•Add all ingredients to a cast iron skillet except the butter, and simmer to reduce the water into a syrupy stream. As blackberry syrup thickens, take off of heat.
•Add butter and stir.
BISCUITS
2 Cups flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
4 tablespoons butter
1 cup chilled buttermilk
DIRECTIONS
•Combine all dry ingredients in a bowl and whisk.
•Cut in butter with your fingertips until pea size, working quickly to prevent fat from warming.
•Make a well in the center and pour in buttermilk. Gradually fold in to the center. When dough comes together, turn out on a floured surface and roll out and cut into circles with biscuit cutters.
•Bake at 450 degrees for 15–20 minutes.
•Open a warm biscuit, add a pat of salted butter and ladle blackberry sauce over biscuits. Add whipped cream, grab a fork and enjoy!
I hope you enjoy this recipe as much as my family does,whatever winter holidays and traditions you enjoy!
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