Tis the season and the Glühwein is flowing with kimchi and mung bean threads!

For our holiday cake hour we feature a genuine German Glühwein - the hot mulled wine that you find all over the Christmas markets of Europe, Germany in particular.  In fact, if you are wondering through one of the markets and suddenly come upon a crowd of people it invariably means that a Glühwein stand is nearby.

Nice spread for cake hour!

The wine is ready to go!

 To go with the wine we usually have traditional Christmas baked good like Stollen and cookies.  Today we featured several kind of cookies including a gluten free item.  These were chocolate plantain pseudo-cookies. The were shaped like cookies but were a little mushy and soft and since they were gluten free they really aren't cookies. So we are going to refer to them as choco-plantain patties.  There's a bit more alliteration in that anyway.

Choco-plantain patties or pseudo-cookies! Gluten free!  Yay!

Please note that the rest of the selections were gluten full or fortified.  We had some chocolate cookies that our baker cooked to long or so she thought. The final result was that they got real hard. They tasted good, were perfect for dunking in the wine and were certainly not as hopelessly overdone as they were made out to be.

Soft marshmallow creation on the left and jawbreaking chocolate cookies on the right!

Another treat were some Italian Christmas cookies festively decorated in red and green frosting.  Also homemade by one of our colleagues who likes to dabble in the kitchen.  These were the simple buttery kind that are not too sweet and a little soft.  A lot of times they are glazed with a sugar frosting but our chef opted to top some of them with frosting and the others naked. These also went very well with the wine!

Nice buttery Italian Christmas Cookies

We also included some classic oatmeal chocolate chip cookies which is one of my holiday staples. And lastly we had some marshmallow type confection made by one of former colleagues who did some awesome baking over the years.

Oatmeal and chocolate chips make a classic!

Our gluten free advocate pushed for a determination as to which cookie was the best, but we were not going to take that kind of position. So we just concocted a bunch of categories that made sure each of the cookies won its category that way everyone was a winner.

Thrilled with his Glühwein!

These ladies are glowing for sure!

He needs some Glühwein to wash down that pattie!

Down the hatch!

A few more satisfied customers!

We dressed for the festive occasion!

And now to get skiing!

A few gifts were presented and the theme for them was mung bean and kimchi!  Figure that out!

Look what I made and then packaged to look like it's from Korea!

The kinchi mung bean buyers!

Learning that kinchi pots are stolen like lobster traps!