What Is Your Favourite Holiday Dessert?

thanksgiving-memesI wanted to talk about something lighthearted today. With Thanksgiving peeking around the corner, dessert is on my mind.

While I’m not a big fan of sweet potatoes with marshmallows baked on top of them, turkey, or stuffing, I’ve never met a pie that I didn’t like.

The nice thing about Thanksgiving is that there’s normally at least one pie at the end of your meal.

My family usually had pumpkin and/or ground cherry pie for dessert on big holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Most people haven’t heard of ground cherries before, so I’ll try to describe what they taste like to you. They are tart like cranberries, sweet like pineapple, and have a texture that is something like a soft tomato.

People seem to either love them or hate them. I wasn’t a big fan of this dessert the first few times I tried it, but now I really like it.

My grandmother made “pumpkin” pie with what I believe was butternut squash instead of an actual pumpkin. It has a firmer and more flavourful texture that thursday-blog-post-picture-2works really well for this pie, although this did mean that I was slightly disappointed when I tasted real pumpkin pie later on in life. The differences between them are subtle but important.
These days I like to have lemon meringue pie on special occasions. The slight tartness of the lemon filling reminds me just a little of ground cherries. That filling is balanced out nicely with the lightly sweet meringue and flaky crust.

What kinds of desserts do you like to eat during the holidays? Whatever they are, I hope you get to have a slice if you’re celebrating Thanksgiving this weekend!

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3 Responses to What Is Your Favourite Holiday Dessert?

  1. Sarah B.

    I love dessert, especially if there is pie! 🙂 Pie is kind of my thing when it comes to desserts, so I’m usually in charge of making the pies (with a crust made from scratch) for family get togethers.

    Around Thanksgiving my favorite is sweet potato pie. It is kind of like pumpkin pie, but the taste and texture is slightly different. I decided to make it several years ago because we grew sweet potatoes in the garden and there was an abundance of them. I have to say I think I prefer sweet potato pie over pumpkin pie now. However pumpkin pie is still pretty high on my list of pies. 🙂

    I also make a carmel apple pie using a recipe from Pioneer Woman that is pretty darn delicious. I also make pretty good sugar cream pies and mince meat pies more toward Christmas. Those are my dad’s favorites.

    I have actually heard of ground cherries. I was touring a historical site and they had small samples of a pie they made. I liked it, but haven’t been able to find any ground cherries to make my own.

    The butternut squash pie you mentioned sounds really interesting. I might have to hunt up a recipe for that!

    • I didn’t know that pie was your speciality! Do you have any advice for how to avoid burning the rim of a crust when you’re baking a pie? I’ve had trouble with that before.

      Sweet potato pie is something I’ve been hoping to try in the near future. I’ve heard it’s absolutely delicious.

      How would you describe the taste of ground cherries? I had the toughest time thinking of comparisons for it. It’s such a unique fruit.

      If you have a farmer’s market nearby, you might be able to find them there. I occasionally see them at my farmer’s market, but I’ve never seen a bag of them at a grocery store. (Hopefully this changes as more people get into heirloom and locally grown food, though).

      And I hope you do try butternut squash pie. It’s really good!

      • Sarah B.

        Describing ground cherries is pretty tough, especially since I only had them the one time, and that was a couple years ago. I would agree they are sweet and tart, maybe like gooseberries? Have you ever had gooseberries? (I have a good pie recipe for those as well 🙂 )

        On not burning pie crusts, you can put some foil around the edge of the pie and then remove it around midway through the baking time. I think they actually make resusable covers for pie crusts as well.

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