Welcome back for the third day of the Virtual Advent Tour!
Over the years, I’ve shared some of the recipes I associate with the holidays. Often, they date back through the generations. Today, I’m going to share one that my mom found this year and that we tried at Thanksgiving. It was so tasty, I expect it to become a modern family classic.
Unroll a sheet of puff pastry onto a cutting board and cut into nine pieces (thirds vertically and horizontally).
Take each piece of puff pastry and tuck it into a mini muffin pan. (I don’t have a mini muffin pan, so will be trying this with a regular muffin pan this weekend.)
Cut the brie into 1″ pieces. (Freezing the brie for 15 minutes beforehand may make this easier, but I can almost guarantee I will never remember to do that.) Put one piece onto each puff pastry rectangle.
Put a spoonful of cranberry sauce onto each piece of brie. We used my mom’s homemade sauce, which has a thick consistency, but the recipe says you can used canned, too. If you want to mix it up, I imagine any thicker jam would work similarly. I bet cherry would be delicious, too.
Repeat with the second sheet of puff pastry.
If you’re using the mini muffin pan, we found we had to pinch the tops of the dough closed in order to get all 18 pieces to not overlap.
Bake for 15 minutes.
Serve as soon as they’ve cooled enough not to burn your mouth or at room temperature. We were able to store them in the fridge overnight and reheat them slightly in the taoster oven the next day.
If you’re enjoying the Virtual Advent Tour, please consider joining us by signing up to post over the next three weeks.
Welcome back to the second day of the 2021 Virtual Advent Tour. Today’s host is Bridget at The Ravell’d Sleave. Head over to her blog sometime today to check out her post!
And do consider signing up to write a post or two this month. We’d love to have you join our merry band of elf bloggers.
Thanks for joining us once again for 2021’s version of the Virtual Advent Tour, a tradition that dates back nearly fifteen years.
Today I want to start us off with a Christmas movie review.
Like many people, my family has a long, well-established love affair with Christmas films. We watch the classics every year, as well as movies that are classics to us, digging out VHS tapes recorded in the 1980s of children saving Santa or his reindeer or PIs searching out long-missing grandchildren to reunite with their feisty millionaire grandma.
Last weekend, while up in Connecticut, we streamed a couple films that I could see making future years’ rotations. The first is A Castle for Christmas, which you can find on Netflix.
Starring Brooke Shields and Carey Elwes, the rom-com focuses on best-selling American novelist Sophie Brown (played by Shields). In the wake of her divorce, Sophie has killed off her protagonist’s love interest in an unpopular move with her fans and followed it up with a meltdown on a talk show. To escape the bad publicity and the loneliness of the holidays, she does what any of us would do and books herself a holiday to the tiny Scottish town where her father grew up, hoping to get started on her next book in peace.
We are immediately introduced to a roguish handyman, played by Elwes, who, it turns out is Miles Dunbar, a duke and the nearly broke owner of the local castle. In addition to the tours they’ve been doing and a dusty gift shop, they’ve been forced to start booking events in the hopes of making ends meet, but he’s struggling to keep the bank at bay.
Sophie immediately falls in love with the castle and puts in an offer to buy it. It’s not fully clear how she knows to do this, but perhaps this is the sort of gossip you pick up in the local pub. Miles is resistant, but eventually agrees, with the caveat that she has to move into the castle for 30 days and will forfeit her deposit if she decides to leave. He tells his valet and BFF that once he chases her off (with the coldest, most dilapidated bedroom and a chilly demeanor), they’ll be able to use that money to stay afloat.
But what if his plans don’t work out quite as expected?
Shields and Elwes have good chemistry on screen and seem to enjoy each other’s company. The cast of mostly Scottish actors in the secondary roles are charismatic and endearing and help to draw attention away from Elwes’ over-the-top accent.
The script is a little light, being too eager to jump past the enemies stage and into the romance. So what could have been legitimate impediments to Sophie’s impetuous decision (how does a New Yorker keep a castle from continuing to crumble into disrepair or care for an entire village, particularly if the current duke/handyman has departed?) are easily brushed aside in favor of roaring fires and horse rides in the snow in pursuit of the perfect Christmas tree. But the characters are all so good-hearted and earnest and there are enough moments of humor sprinkled in that you’re eager to overlook that and get back to enjoying it.
The Scottish scenery cements the deal, with sweeping views of a wooded countryside, a quaint village with a cozy pub, and the titular castle. If you had millions of dollars, you’d relocate there too.
If you’ve got access to Netflix, I’d suggest checking it out.
Stop back tomorrow for Day 2 of the Virtual Advent Tour. If you’d like to join our merry band of posters, please sign up here.
Category: christmas/holiday season. There is/are Comments Off on virtual advent tour 2021: day 1.
Welcome to signups for this year’s Virtual Advent Tour. 2021 marks my seventh year as host of this annual event.
2020 was hard. I mean really hard. And I say that having been extraordinarily lucky. But I think all of us expected this year to be easier. And it … was. But, also, it wasn’t.
And yet, here we are again, less than a month away from Christmas and just over a month until year’s end. Some of us are celebrating with loved ones we couldn’t see last year. Some of us are trying to find ways to navigate through the holidays with holes in our closest circles — and in our hearts. And some built new traditions out of necessity last year and are sticking with them.
However you observe the holidays this year, I’d love for you to share your celebrations with us as part of this year’s Virtual Advent Tour.
As you likely know, a typical Advent calendar is usually a paper-based, time-marking device designed to count down from December 1st until Christmas. Each day, you open a door to unveil a treat of some kind — a hidden scene, piece of chocolate, or some other delight. The Virtual Advent Tour is a bloggers’ take on that. In our version, each morning I’ll point you to a post at someone’s blog in which they share something about their holiday season.
Would you be willing to share a holiday post or two in December? You’d know the date(s) ahead of time (and can request a specific one if you’d like). And you don’t have to decide ahead of time what you want to write about. Your post can be as simple or as complex and in text, video, or audio format.
If you’re looking for inspiration, folks have shared new traditions they’ve adopted, old traditions they keep alive, favorite holiday music, charities, recipes, books, events, memories, and more.
If this sounds fun and you’d like to participate, please leave me a comment on this post telling me what date(s) you’d like. I’ll update this post as people claim days.
A few annual housekeeping notes:
While both the tradition of the Advent calendar and the timing skew Christian, the tour is inclusive and open to anyone who celebrates December holidays of any sort. We love reading about all kinds of celebrations and the traditions you’ve developed around them!
I tend to write my posts shortly after midnight my time (Eastern U.S.) and will schedule them to go live at 6 a.m. If your post is live when I’m writing, I’ll give a little preview and link directly to it. However, if it’s not, no worries. I’ll assume you’ll get it live at some point, and will just embed a song and a link to your blog’s homepage.
I made 2021 Virtual Advent Tour badges in 600px and 400px that you’re welcome to download and use.
If you want to share on social media, I use the hashtag #VirtualAdventTour on Twitter.
Thanks in advance for making this one of my fun December traditions!
My dear acquaintances, I wish you laughter and music in 2021. I wish you time in the company of friends and loved ones. And I wish you confidence that the coming year will be better than the departing one.
Thank you for your companionship on our journey around the sun. You helped make a challenging year easier and I’m grateful for your company.
Postmodern Jukebox songs are always fun, and adding Olivia Kuper Harris and Rayvon Owen on vocals for “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” does justice to the Frank Loesser tune.
Rudi and I are still trying to figure out how to ring in New Year’s Eve this year. Like everything else in 2020, our decade-plus-long-tradition of a movie marathon at the cinema and dinner out with friends is obviously off the table. Cases are on the rise here, as well as everywhere else, so I put a hold on our plan to watch Wonder Woman 1984 with friends sometime this week until the numbers start going down again. We can most certainly watch movies online, which would make the last night of 2020 … just like every other night. I guess what I really want — a bonfire or a physical dumpster fire to go along with the metaphoric one we’ve had this year — isn’t really possible. But I want one anyway. I wonder if the neighboring businesses would mind if I borrowed their trash facilities for the night…?
