Festive Food!

So many of our festive traditions for various holidays revolve around the food! We are looking forward to our usual Christmas morning menu around here:

• Scotch eggs (breakfast sausage wrapped around hard-boiled eggs, rolled in bread crumbs, and, um, fried--although we bake ours because I don't feel like cleaning up that kind of mess on Christmas morning)
• Scones
• fruit

We have zero plans, so far, for any kind of Christmas lunch/dinner. We'll be en route to see family by then, so we'll see what's on tap at our destination. We DO have plans for yet another cake. Each year, I've been trying to come up with a good "Happy Birthday Jesus" cake that we can have each year as part of our tradition. So far, the tradition is that Mommy experiments by making a totally new cake every year. I guess that's still a tradition! They've all been good... just not quite what I want/need for a yearly thing. This year's candidate? A lemon-raspberry layer cake that is actually fairly simple looking (mwha-ha-ha-ha.... maniacal laughter ensuing). Isn't that sort of a holiday Murphy's law? If a recipe is supposed to be easy, but you're making it for any sort of occasion, something WILL go wrong?

But, just for the record, growing up we had Chocolate Icebox Cake every year and it really is awesome. ("Why doesn't she make that?" someone is no doubt asking themselves. "Because she's not in the mood to make that, and it's hard to find the ladyfinger," she responds. "Can't she make ladyfingers?" "Why yes, yes she can. Her trusty Joy of Cooking does indeed have a recipe for those. But this is about enjoying her family and not biting off more than she can chew....")