The Festive Spice Blend Molly Yeh Adds To Snack Mix

With the holidays coming, many at-home chiefs want to break out their best recipes to impress family and friends with dishes like British Christmas pudding, roast duck, oyster stew, peppermint bark, or your favorite spiced hot chocolate. But, sometimes, the same old same old can get a bit boring and you need to find new-and-improved dishes and spice mixes to really kick your holiday cuisine into high gear. Luckily, if you're looking for some fantastic holiday snacks and a festive flavor blend, Molly Yeh has the answer.

For those of you who don't know the fabulously talented Molly Yeh, she is the hostess of Food Network's series "Girl Meets Farm" and author of her cookbook "Molly On The Range: Recipes and Stories,” which won the International Association of Culinary Professionals' Judge's Award. She is a multi-talented woman, having graduated from Juilliard and performed off-Broadway in orchestras and the theater world, as well as being accomplished in the kitchen. 

And for the winter Yeh suggests whipping up her favorite snack mix with a spiced, seasonal twist.

On her Food Network program "Girl Meets Farm," Molly Yeh shows how to make her favorite gingerbread snack mix (via YouTube). The Food Network star makes her snack mix by first preparing a chocolate-flavored coating, heating half a stick of butter in a saucepan before adding chocolate chips, a pinch of salt, and tahini. (Yeh says that if you don't have tahini or have difficulty finding it at your local grocery store, almond or peanut butter could work as well). After melting everything together, she stirs in a little vanilla extract and some gingerbread spice.

While you don't have to follow Yeh's recipe exactly (feel free to use your own family favorite and just add a little gingerbread spice to the mix), the cookbook author reminds us to be sure to use fresh spices, as stale spices are often less flavorful than you would like. If you're having trouble locating gingerbread spice at the store or are concerned you won't use it often enough to buy the blend, Liv for Cake shares you can make it at home yourself by combining equal parts cinnamon, allspice, and ginger with some ground cloves, ground nutmeg, and a dash of black pepper.