Have yourself a crabby little Christmas

Everywhere you look during the holidays, someone is making gorgeous treats. Adorable gingerbread houses, twee cookie trays, impeccable and realistic Bûche de Noël. But what’s available for the crabby among us who aren’t into traditional Christmas cheer? For the bah humbug Scrooges and Grinches, may I suggest Krampus Bread?

If you aren’t familiar with this yuletide character, Krampus “is the stick to Santa’s carrot, a feral Alpine monster known for swatting unruly children with birch twigs or, in severe cases, kidnapping and eating them,” or in other words, the “scared straight” version of Santa Claus. In an interesting twist on braided bread, this technique utilizes corkscrew twists meant to resemble the mythical beast. However, it is difficult to make bread look sinister so they end up much cuter than the scary costumes you might see in a German Christmas market.

Sadly, the EYB Library doesn’t have any Krampus loaves so I can’t share a photo, but I did find the Krampus & The Grinch ginger cookies pictured above. There are also a couple of Grinch punch recipes. I think you could repurpose Halloween ghost cookie cutters and say that they represent the ghosts in A Christmas Carol, and perhaps you could make a chain link bread to bring in another element from that story. My last idea is that a creative baker could take a reindeer-face shaped cookie (using an upside-down gingerbread man cookie like this), add some corkscrew horns and a sharp jawline and voila! Krampus cookies.