I like to have some sort of special, sweet carb at breakfast on Christmas Day. Ideally cinnamon buns, but those are finicky to make yourself. I did it last year and they turned out OK but not great. Also I did not like the part where I had to get up early for them to do the second rise. (In our very cold kitchen, where they did not rise until I tried to turn our microwave into a proofing box.)

This year, I had picked out a Deb recipe that does the second rise in the fridge and tried to set my expectation that I would enjoy a bun with my second cup of coffee. But I decided to switch to waffles at the last minute, because I wanted to relax instead of doing all the cooking past me had decided I would do on Christmas Eve and Day. We don’t make waffles often — maybe once or twice a year — so they feel a bit special.

I don’t have a recipe I’m in love with, so I decided to see if Deb had something that used ingredients I already had on hand. I settled on the Essential Raised Waffles on the Smitten Kitchen blog. Technically they aren’t a Deb recipe but since this project really doesn’t have any rules it doesn’t matter.

What I liked about this was that most of the work is done the day before, and it’s nothing particularly complicated. I was also very interested in something that would have a little more flavor than your typical waffle batter that you mix right before you make them. I opted to let ours rise in the fridge instead of the counter and was very happy with the flavor. I’m not sure the volume increased that much but I made a half batch so it’s hard to tell. Christmas morning, I was able to finish the batter while the waffle iron heated up.

Because these are so light they cooked up really fast. I have an older, non-ceramic version of the Presto FlipSide Belgian waffle maker. I got 2 and 3/4 waffles out of a half recipe, but I could have put a little more batter in the two full waffles. They were pretty much perfect at 4 minutes. We enjoyed them with a little bit of butter, some frozen blueberries I warmed up, and syrup.