on the twelfth day of Christmas...

©2010, Monika Roe

...my true love gave to me: twelve Drummers Drumming! Merry Christmas everybody!!!

on the eleventh day of Christmas...

©2010, Monika Roe

...my true love gave to me: eleven Pipers Piping! Have a wonderful Christmas Eve everyone!

on the tenth day of Christmas...

©2010, Monika Roe

...my true love gave to me: ten Lords-a-Leaping!

Christmas Eve deliciousness

©2010, Monika Roe

Every Christmas Eve in Denmark Risalamande (or some version of it) is served for dessert. It's a sweet, rich rice pudding with whipped cream folded into it. A blanched almond is mixed in and then the pudding is dished out with fruit sauce poured over the top. In my family the fruit sauce is always strawberry, but you might find it with cherry or raspberry sauce (both of those just sound so WRONG to me!)

The person who finds the almond in their bowl wins a prize. The prize could be a marzipan pig or another sweet like a chocolate bar. My grandfather would always act like he accidentally swallowed the almond to win the prize, but somehow one of us kids always found the almond. Imagine that!

My grandmother made this every year and after she passed away the tradition fell into my hands. I haven't found her recipe for it, I suspect she didn't need a recipe because she was an amazing cook and worked from memory a lot. I reconstructed it using a recipe from Sunset magazine as a loose guide for the rice pudding, and my intuition for the sauce. It's spot on.

See my illustrated recipe for Risalamande on They Draw and Cook's website!

on the ninth day of Christmas...

©2010, Monika Roe

...my true love gave to me: nine Ladies Dancing! Something a little different for this traditional carol!

speaking of nesting dolls

When I was in St. Petersburg last year one of our guides said that you always want to open ALL the nesting dolls in a set that you are buying, especially from that street vendor who is giving you an unbelievably good price. Sometimes people get home and find the doll forms inside are all blank! So that good deal isn't so great after all!

on the eighth day of Christmas...

©2010, Monika Roe

...my true love gave to me: eight Maids-a-Milking! As we get up to the large numbers of people in this song, the challenge is how to draw that many people and still have a clean design! For today, I chose to have a concept of Russian nesting dolls. So we have the maid-a-milking shown on the smallest interior doll, and 7 shells surrounding it representing the rest of the nesting dolls.