These gingerbread llamas and alpacas make great gifts, and are fun to make. A quick search of the internet will turn up lots of llama cookie cutters, or you can also make a cardboard template and use it to cut out your cookies with a knife.

Holiday Gingerbread Llama Recipe
How to Make Gingerbread Houses
More Food Gifts from the South American Kitchen

Enjoy more original, delicious holiday cookie recipes from the food guides at About.com!

Syrie Wongkaew, guide to Australian Food, suggests these Chocolate Melting Moments, which are filled with a creamy vanilla icing and then sandwiched together. They literally melt-in-your-mouth!

Diana Rattray, guide to Southern Food, offers Mom's Date Drop Cookies. The delicious date filling makes these easy drop cookies extra-special, and they make a great addition to your Chirstmas cookie list. She also suggests Raspberry-Filled Almond Cookies, which are made with a cream cheese cookie dough rolled in coarsely ground almonds, and filled with a dab of seedless raspberry jam. Feel free to substitute candied cherry halves for the filling in these cookies.

Teri Gruss, guide to Gluten Free Cooking, has this recipe for Gluten-Free Gingerbread Men, which is adapted from a recipe by Jacqueline Mallorca, "Rice Flour Gingerbread Cows", featured in her fabulous cookbook, "The Wheat-Free Cook".

More About Holiday Cookies

When we lived in South America, my daughter attended a little neighborhood nursery school. There was a doorman who sat outside the front door, making sure the kids did not bolt across the street to the ice cream man who was always waiting when school let out. At Christmastime, the children would bring the doorman a panettone Christmas bread, until by the last day of school before the holidays, he would have a huge pile of colorful panettone boxes stacked taller than his chair. He did not have a car, so I have no idea how he got those hundreds of panettones home, or what he did with all of them!

Panettone is an Italian Christmas bread, traditionally baked in beautiful gold paper molds. Panettone is a delicious, sweet yeast bread with fruits and nuts folded into the dough, and usually prepared with the Italian flavoring called "fiori de sicila" (flowers of Sicily) that has distinctive citrus and jasmine flavors.

Panettones are popular Christmas gifts, but I doubt they are regifted as often as the heavy, bourbon-laden Southern fruitcakes that were passed around when I was a child in Tennessee - because panettones are actually quite good! It's customary to enjoy a slice of panettone at midnight on Christmas eve, with hot chocolate.

More About Panettone
Recipe for Panettone
Chocolate Panettone
Homemade Paper Panettone Molds

More recipes from the very merry food guides at About.com!

Stephanie Gallagher, guide to Cooking for Kids, has an excellent recipe for sugar cookies, which of course kids love to help decorate (and eat!). Says Stephanie: "These sugar cookies are a classic for Christmas. Soft, tender and buttery, but not too sweet, these sugar cookies are perfect for decorating."

From Fiona Haynes, guide to Low Fat Cooking, a couple of helpfully lighter recipes: "It's hard to believe these five-star chocolate chip cookies are low fat. By using half the normal amount of butter, and substituting an egg white for a whole egg, these make a wonderful and relatively guilt-free indulgence. The chocolate flavor is enhanced by using cocoa powder as well as a sprinkling of miniature chocolate chips. If you're looking for an even lighter cookie option for the holidays, then these fat free Chocolate Peppermint Meringue Cookies will surely fit the bill. Crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside, they make a tasty sweet and minty morsel."

Recipes...

Stephanie's Sugar Cookies
Fiona's Five-Star Low Fat Chocolate Chip Cookies
Fiona's Chocolate Peppermint Meringue Cookies

Buñuelos are little round savory "doughnuts" made with cheese. Natilla is a delicious cross between pudding and candy, with cinnamon and raisins. Natilla reminds me of arroz con leche, but with coconut instead of rice.
Bunuelos and natilla are popular Christmas treats in Colombia, often served together with hot chocolate on Christmas eve.

Erika at My Colombian Recipes (an excellent food blog about Colombian food) just posted a recipe for hojuelas, fried strips of dough that are also enjoyed at Christmastime in Colombia, as well as her grandmother's recipe for natilla, which is made with condensed milk rather than dark brown panela sugar.

Recipes...

Natilla
Buñuelos
Panettone - Holiday Fruitcake

It's time for a second posting of holiday cookie recipes from the About.com food guides...

Carroll Pellegrinelli, out guide to Baking, suggests these Butter Spritz Cookies, which are small delicate cookies made with a cookie press. (Cookie presses typically come with several disks to make various shaped cookies like Christmas trees, hearts, flowers and so on).

Jessica Harlan, guide to Cooking Equipment, has a recipe for spritz cookies as well - delicate and rich, thanks to the addition of cream cheese in the dough. Use a cookie press to turn the dough into beautiful shapes that can be decorated with sugars and sprinkles. (Check here for more about using a cookie press).

Elizabeth LaBau, About.com's guide to candy, suggests Gingerbread Truffles - soft, fragrant truffle balls that taste just like gingerbread cookie dough! These delicious candies feature gingersnaps, spices, toasted nuts, and white chocolate, for an easy, decadent holiday treat.

This Chilean corn and beef casserole is a perfect winter comfort food dish, a South American version of shepherd's pie with a layer of creamed corn in place of the mashed potatoes. Pastel de choclo pleases adults and children alike - at our house, people eat the leftovers straight from the refrigerator the next day.

Recipe for Pastel de Choclo
More About Choclo Corn

To kick off this important season of holiday baking, the About.com food guides are having a Virtual Cookie Exchange. Each week we will post links to cookie recipes from different food sites on About.com. Today I am featuring two cookie recipes from Barbara Rolek, guide to Eastern European Food:
Kolaczki exist in most Eastern European cuisines and are spelled variously as kolaci, kolache, kolacky, kolachky, among others. Fillings run the gamut of apricot to raspberry to prune to cheese, and some truly untraditional flavors like pineapple are sneaking into the mix. This recipe starts with a flaky cream cheese dough.

Czech Bar Cookies or cukrovi are a delightful blend of nuts, almond paste and strawberry filling. Best of all, they're easy to make and keep well.

Chile peppers are important in South American cooking, which is why I find myself constantly reaching for the jarred aji chile pepper pastes in my refrigerator. I add them to sautéed onions and garlic, to grilled hamburgers, to soups - to just about anything really. They add a burst of flavor and a touch of heat - depending on how much you use, of course.

You can buy commercially prepared chile pepper pastes at Latin markets (I usually buy aji amarillo and aji panca pastes), or you can make your own from any chile peppers.

More About Aji Amarillo
More About Aji Panca
Spicy Aji Hamburger
Aji de Gallina - Peruvian Spicy Creamed Chicken Artichokes with Creamy Aji Sauce

My husband came home with some ice cream the other night. He told our son to close his eyes and guess the flavor. "Lucúma!" my son exclaimed, so excited. It's his favorite flavor of all time and very difficult to find in the US. I don't like lucúma fruit myself, because it has a very pasty texture. I did enjoy the commercially prepared lucuma ice cream available in South America - it was made with more artificial "essence of lucuma" than real (pasty) fruit. But true lucúma fanatics love both the exotic flavor and grainy texture of the fruit.

I decided to try the ice cream my husband brought home anyway, and was surprised to find it was very creamy, with a perfume-like flavor. It didn't taste quite like the lucúma ice cream I remembered from Peru, although similar. On closer inspection, the container said "Mamey Sapote-Lucuma." I looked up mamey sapote, and discovered that it's a Mexican relative of the South American lucúma, which mostly grows in Peru and Chile. Mamey has a smooth, avocado-like texture and a more delicate flavor - better than lucúma in my opinion!

Loco for Lucuma
More about Mamey
Lucuma Ice Cream Recipe