Around the World in Holiday Sweets

These light and sweet treats are easily recognized by their characteristic shape and texture — they're solid like a pancake but light and fluffy like a popover. Be careful, this combination makes it easier to down several in one sitting. They're typically served with glogg (mulled wine) during the Christmas season, a tradition you might find delicious to adopt into your own holiday celebrations.

Hint: If you want to make them at home, you'll need a special pan.

This pastry is ubiquitous with Christmas season in Hungary and traditionally comes with one of two decadent fillings — sweet, dense poppy seed paste or hearty minced walnuts. Like the chocolate chip cookie, you can walk into any bakery to pick up a roll in wintertime, but every family has their traditional take on the holiday dessert. If you're up for the challenge, try several versions and find your favorite.

Hint: Inventive Hungarians have been experimenting with new fillings like Chestnut puree and thick Nutella, so don't feel bound to tradition.

If you're short on patience, you should find a store that carries packaged versions of this Swedish spice cookie. The dough is rolled until transparent to yield buttery thin cookies that will snap at the tap of a knuckle. If you manage to snap your cookie into a perfect three pieces you get a wish, but only if you eat the cookie without saying a word.

Hint: The heart-shaped cookies are the easiest to break into thirds. Bon chance!

In Eastern Orthodox countries like Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, Christmas season is a time of devout piety and lenten eating (their Christmas also falls in January). The Christmas dinner is the last lenten meal of the season and features 12 dishes, including this sweet grain pudding. Decadent ingredients like sugar and butter are verboten, so this mixture of wheat berries, poppy seeds, and walnuts gets it sweetness from a generous drizzle of honey.

Fun Fact: Traditionally this dish is eaten first at the Christmas supper, so don't feel bad about digging into dessert first this year.

Don't mistake these Greek sweets for run-of-the-mill cookies; between their sticky-sweet honey glaze and dusting of walnut pieces, these treats will have you licking your fingers like no cookie you've ever eaten before. An oil base means their texture are closer to cake than cookie and they're flavored with bright, seasonal splashes of orange and brandy.

Hint: A cinnamon stick and a couple whole cloves thrown into the finishing syrup brings home the holidays in this recipe.

This francophone version of Christmas cake looks, as its name suggests, remarkably like a log. In fact, they're decorated that way with special techniques to make the icing look like bark, sugar look like a dusting of snow, and the entire scene look like a log taken from the forest. Some of them are astonishingly beautiful, ornate creations — but that shouldn't stop you from digging in. The classic combination of yellow cake with decadent chocolate buttercream filling tastes just as good as the cake looks.

Hint: If you're making it at home, be patient with the cake as you roll; cracks are inevitable, but icing covers everything.

Spend the holiday season in Colombia and you'll get more than your fair share of this sweet custard dessert. In the spirit of the season of giving, natilla is made by families throughout the country to be enjoyed at home and with friends and neighbors so everyone ends up thoroughly satisfying their sweet tooth.

Hint: Latin groceries sell ready-made natilla mix to speed up the process.

Soft, fluffy, and rich with seasonal flavor, these Germanic gingerbreads are synonymous with the holiday season. Unlike our gingerbread, they're usually glazed or covered in chocolate — a tradition we all might find quite easy to adopt. They also come in a harder version called lebkuchen hearts, which are inscribed with icing.

Fun Fact: The closest thing Germany has to the gingerbread man is the Honigkuchenpferd, a honey cake horse.

Beautiful, flaky, and filled with molten prune jam, the holidays simply aren't complete in the Nordic north without these pinwheel-shaped cookies. An airy dusting of powdered sugar completes the seasonal feel of these sweets that are best consumed piping hot.

Hint: If you're planning on making them at home, find a good diagram online so the folding doesn't get too confusing.

Although you'll usually find this sweet bread gracing tables throughout Macedonia, Albania, and Bulgaria during Easter, it's prepared for most major holidays in Romania. Although the dough is the same all over the country, versions vary widely among regions. The bread can be filled, studded with bright lemon zest, topped with poppy seeds, or spiked with vanilla or rum flavor. All variations sound equally delicious.

Hint: It's not unheard of to spike the filling with rum, so doubling up on the dough and filling is perfectly acceptable.

Christmas puddings are common throughout a lot of northern European countries, but they take on a special twist in countries like Sweden and Iceland. This rice pudding has a whole almond hidden somewhere. The lucky supper guest who eats the almond is said to have good luck in the upcoming year.

Hint: Even if rice pudding isn't your thing, adopt the almond tradition for a sweet and sentimental touch in this year's celebration.

Traditional fruit cake wishes it could be like Chile's spiced pan de pascua. Candied fruits are scattered throughout the sponge cake-like batter, along with walnuts, raisins, and ginger, for a toothsome cake that captures the warm flavors of the season. Originally introduced by German immigrants, this cake has been absorbed into the Chilean tradition.

Hint: This cake falls somewhere between the German stollen and the Italian panettone, so you can doctor either of these recipes with extra ingredients for a Chilean-fusion in your Christmas cake.

If you're in the market for a sweet and seasonal breakfast or dessert, take a note from the Belgians. Their sweet Christmas bread, shaped like a baby Jesus, is studded with raisins and traditionally paired with a mug of hot chocolate.

Hint: If you're having an afternoon holiday party, serving hot chocolate and delicious bread is a great way to warm up your guests as they come in from the cold.

You'll find these sweets at many Latin American Christmas celebrations. They come with a variety of sweet and savory fillings as well as glazes, but in the Dominican Republic they're syrupy sweet. Flavored with anise, fried, and covered in a cinnamon sugar syrup, they get an exotic touch from coconut water used in place of water in the finishing glaze.

Fun Fact: In nearby countries they're covered in honey or caramel, so pick your favorite and dip away!