The 6th Day of Christmas with Linda Hundt of Sweetie-licious Bakery Cafe
Welcome to the 7th annual 12 Days of Christmas Giveaways!!!
12 Days.
12 friends guest posting sharing a Christmas idea, recipe or favorite with you.
12 great giveaways for you to enter along with one GRAND PRIZE for someone who comments to enter all 12 days!!
Please help me welcome Pie Baker Extraordinaire, Linda Hundt, founder of Sweetie-licious Bakery Cafe in DeWitt, Michigan. Although her 3 bakeries are limited to Michigan at this time, her pies are widely acclaimed around the USA. She is the author of the cookbook Sweetie-licious Pies: Eat Pie, Love Life.
{Fun fact: Linda and & used to cheerlead for cross-town schools in high school so I recognized her the first time I went in her shop. Now, we’ve become friends as adults. She even let me use her remodeled farm house for a photo shoot recently for an upcoming, top secret project!}
Linda has been featured in numerous national, state, and local television segments, magazine, and newspapers including Country Living, Midwest Living, and Parade. Linda is a sought-after keynote speaker: speaking on faith, dreams, and love, as well as giving pie baking demonstrations for hundreds of people at a time.
She resides in a century-old farmhouse with her sweet husband. The Hundts have two beautiful daughters. Linda believes that Sweetie-licious Bakery Cafe can change the world one pie at a time through good food, good pies and good deeds and if you eat pie, you will inevitably, love life.
Now, from Linda…..
As long as I can remember I have loved to bake. It was part of my upbringing and I have so many wonderful memories associated with the sights, smells, and tastes of Christmas. Today I am sharing one of my favorite recipes with you. This is a wonderful cookie that my sweet mommy made all the time, as I know they were her favorite too! To make them a little fresher I have added some lemon zest to the original recipe. The secret to these and all cookies really, is to under bake them! I hope you enjoy making Mom’s Lemon Ginger Balls and making your own “sweet” memories this Christmas!
Mom McComb’s Lemon Ginger Balls
1 C. sugar
¾ C. Crisco shortening
1 egg
¼ C. Blackstrap molasses
2 C. flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1 ¼ tsp. cinnamon
1 ¼ tsp ginger
1 tsp. of lemon zest
Pinch of salt
Cream the sugar and shortening together. Add egg, molasses, and lemon zest in sugar and shortening mixture, mix well. Whisk flour, salt, soda, spices together. Add to other ingredients. Mix together well, but do not overbeat. Roll dough into small balls and roll in sugar, raw or granulated. Bake at 350 degree preheated oven for 8 11 minutes.
Connect with Linda at her website or Facebook.
********************
Giveaway: Linda is offering her beautiful cookbook Sweetie-licious Pies: Eat Pie, Love Life to the winner of today’s drawings.
To be entered for a chance to win, simply make a comment under today’s post sharing your “sweet” memories of pie or other favorite sweet holiday treats.
Don’t forget to come back for all 12 days! {And remember, if you comment on all 12 posts, you might win the Grand Prize!}
I never developed a love for baking, or really much of anything having to do with being in the kitchen. But I do remember my mom baking various types of cookies each year when I was young. Later on she would ask each of us kids (there are only 2) what type of cookie we’d like her to make at Christmas time. My favorite requests were cocoa-mocha butterballs ans springerles. Age and arthritis have kept mom from the cookie making the past few years. ???? My daughter likes to bake, though, so I think it may be time to get some recipes and start a new tradition of our own. ????
My husband has started making the pumpkin & pecan pies for the past several years. And he is a great cook!
I love baking pies with my husband! It’s a team effort. My mother hated making pie crust….she would get so mad when it wouldn’t come out right…. One year she was trying to get it to form right, got frustrated, balled up the dough, and threw it down the basement stairs to (at) the dog!!!! I’ll never forget that one! I still tease her about it!
One of my favorite memories and we still do this every year. My dad and I bake banket evey year for christmas
I truly love pie!!! My mom makes all our pies for the holidays, we nominate her even if she doesn’t want to… LOL. I remember years ago when my grandma was alive, my mom’s sisters had talked her into making a banana cream pie for Easter Sunday dinner. Mom did and dropped it off at Grandma’s the night before. Her sisters were spending the night at grandma’s house and got into the pie that night and took a Polaroid picture of them all with their over sized pieces… Needless to say there was only a half a pie come Easter dinner
I love pie, but I don’t make them well enough, I had a crumb top apple made by my friend and it was a recipe over 100 years old. So sweet and yummy! I make a great Christmas fudge however!
My favorite memory is going fruit picking with my grandma and coming home to bake pies!!! It is one of my sweetest memories.
I am not a huge pie fan, but I do enjoy many other desserts. My adult favorite has been Nanaimo Bars. My mother ordered some custard powder straight from Canada (where these bars are popular) and made her first batch for me for Thanksgiving. Heavenly, but the calories are scary!
My favorite pie is pecan….but I love my mom’ smelt away cookies! They are light, airy and melt in your mouth. They are one of those cookies that if you don’t make them exactly how the recipe states…they don’t turn out at all. Pair them up with a cup of coffee, turn on the Christmas music and light up the tree. :)
I love this! Baking has always been something that says “I thought about you”. These days, with all the gluten intolerance and every other kind of problem or just eating choices, in general, I feel like even my Christmas cookie baking is frowned upon. I just appreciate when people are recognized for what seems to be a lost art.
My favorite pie to make is apple pie. It is truly a labor of love. My dad who passed two years ago from cancer used to say my pie was as good as his grandma’s pie. I cherish the memories and joy of lavishing my love on others by baking sweet treats.
I love Pecan Pie!!!!! Thanks!! God Bless-Barb
Hello from warm and sunny Tampa, Florida! It is harder to think abot Christmas being so close in this climate than if I were someplace cold, but I can remember pie. My mother baked pies before she became a health food promoter and macrobiotic vegetarian. Even today, when the grandchildren come for a visit, she will buy pies from her beloved central market in downtown Lancaster, PA. The home baked pies that I remember best are the fruit pies with lattice crust on top, always baked to a wonderfully dark-golden brown. Whe also made amazing pumpkin pie, as well as smooth-topped dough that had decorative slits cut into it. My children and I carry on the pie baking tradition, but I often cut the sugar. Stevia is a sweetenenr that I like to utilize, and I combine sugar and stevia to deal with the aftertaste issue. Last week I baked my first ever sweet potato pie, due to a good crop grown in our garden. I used a pumpkin pie recipe. It was really good!
PIE! We love pie; most any type of pie. My son says he invented pie!!
This brought me to a funny moment with my younget son. He came home from school saying that I absolutely had to use his teacher’s recipe for apple pie. Everything was made from scratch, and it was such a hard labor! Well, he did not even want to try it when I was done! He took a little bite and said nope. WHAT!?!?!?!? But instead, I loved it! Go figure!
Got any recipes using bacon in pies? Just started making this sweet bacon bread that I came up with and my family is ALL over it! Wasn’t much of a bacon lover until recently – even better if you pair it with some sweetness!
ohhh…may we have the bacon bread recipe please….
I love using my Mom’s cookie and pie recipes all year round. Brings back good memories and keeps them alive. I now cook them with my granddaughters. I hope they will carry on the same traditions of food and family.
I love having apple pie filling made up in the freezer so we can have apple pie whenever we want.
Pecan pie the morning after Christmas warmed up with a cup of coffee. Love the piece and quiet.
My granddaddy loved cherry pie . When I was in jr high school homemaking, I learned how to make cherry pie. From then on, it was my job to make a cherry pie for all holiday gatherings, just for my granddaddy. What a precious memory that is! :)
My mom made the best lemon meringue pie in the world! Since I am the only one in my household that likes lemon, I don’t make it often, but sometimes at holiday gatherings I will. It is one of my favorite memories of pie baking!
Any pie is wonderful. Used to have an amazing peanut butter pie years ago where I wirked.
My Christmas baking memories are centered around German Stollen. I remember my Opa kneading the dough as my Oma started the next batch. The heavenly scent filled the house! I make and gift stollen every year using the same recipe, now with help from my 20 year old daughter. So much more than baking!
I have loved my grandma’s apple pie all my life! She was a sweetie pie too!
Your recipe sounds delicious! I like the taste of lemon + ginger in cookies, so I will probably like this combination. ???? As for holiday pies, my favorite has always been pecan. Yum.
Sorry about the question marks in my comment. I didn’t realize my Kindle added those! There’s no question about it, haha.