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!}
My sweet memories are of singing and laughing alongside my girls in the kitchen as we spent the day baking all sorts of treats for Christmas!
My sister’s rhubarb pie is my absolute favorite!
My MIL’s chocolate pie. I absolutely love her recipe!!
Oh my Goodness!!! I want to try to make those lemon balls!! Her pies look amazing! Would love the book!
My favorite baked goods are probably pecan pie and pound cake. My mom always bakes me a pecan pie at thanksgiving. My dad always loved pund cake, so not only do they taste delicious, they have warm memories for me.
I love all pies. Just not vinegar pie.
My mother was always working in the kitchen, so I have wonderful memories of cookies and breads and pies baking. I enjoy doing all those same things, but a favorite holiday treat that has more recently moved to the forefront of our Christmas celebration is Sticky Toffee Pudding. I found the recipe from Food Network (Ann Burrell) and it is to die for. Very rich and not a diet friendly offering…but once a year it is a real treat. I cover it with custard sauce, just to add insult to injury.
When I was young we would go to a rustic cabin timeshare resort my grandparents were a part of. Not far outside the resort was a small diner that had amazing homemade pies. Though my granddaddy was diabetic and didn’t eat them he would travel out to get several delicious flavors for all of us. He is now deceased but those pies are a sweet memory of my granddaddy and how he loved to make us happy with pie!
I love cherry pie, fruit cake, plum pudding and baklava!
My Mom made the best pies ever…Favorite Christmas memories was helping her making them on Christmas eve….
My SWEET memory is my Gramma-La’s Cherry pie. She put up her own cherries to have them year-round. Her Cherry pie was a slice of heaven! Thankfully we still have the recipe to carry on her memory. These posts have been such a blessing this Christmas season. I hope everyone is being blessed greatly as I have felt. Merry Christmas.
My mom used to make delicious pies (she’s in a retirement community now and doesn’t bake much anymore), and thankfully I have carried on her pie-making and am always trying to improve my skills in that area. My husband and daughter are pie freaks, so I always have willing taste-testers!!! :)
My grandmother’s pecan pie!
I really like all butter mince pies at Christmas-time. I’ve never made them, but buy them from the supermarket and warm them in the oven.
I love making all kinds of pies, crust and all! My best memories of pie making, however, are attached to my children and grandchildren. My oldest was helping me make apple pies at 2 years old (he loved cutting out the shapes to edge the pie crust to make it fancy). Now, his oldest is 4yo and loves to help me make pies, as well. Somehow, the pies always taste better when they’ve been made with someone else!!
My favorite holiday pie is apple pie. The pie I make take a bit of time to do but is so worth it.
The best memories I have of Christmas are the desserts my mom used to make for Christmas. There was a date ball rolled in coconut that was absolutely delicious! I still can’t find that recipe… But we had so many desserts, it was unbelievable! We would eat them after reading the Bible story in Luke and while we were opening our presents. Wonderful times!
This recipe sounds amazing!! I have always loved making cookies at Christmas :) My favorite memories involve sugar cookies, various colored icings and LOTS of sprinkles!! Thank you for sharing your sweet mama’s cookie recipe with us!!
Having my husbands mothers apple pie at Christmas (or any time of the year) was always a treat. You could feel the love inside every bite.
I have sweet memories of a chocolate pie my mom used to make and the time I tried to make it and I added 2 cups of flour instead of the 2 tbs that the recipe called for! Yikes!!
Growing up, it was my mom’s butter cookies that were my favorite, although I do love pie!
Growing up Thanksgiving and Christmas were a time to look forward to really good food. We pretty much did a repeat of Thanksgiving at Christmastime. Turkey, cornbread stuffing, giblet gravy, cheesy potatoes. Dessert was no exception. My favorites that we only got at these two times of year were Lemon Icebox Pie, Chocolate Cream Pie & Apple Pie. Yummm.
The sweet I remember most at Christmas is mom’s “snowball cookies.” That’s what I always called them (and still call them that). It’s still the first thing I search for in her tins of goodies when we go home for Christmas.
My mom taught me to bake pies on Thanksgiving morning, crust and all, when I was too young to know it was “hard.” I love making all sorts of pie, but this Texas-grown girl loves pecan the most.
Apple pie is my favorite. I enjoy sitting around after Christmas dinner and talking while enjoying pie.