Hi, happy holidays. I am Marie Guaragna with MGB events in Arlington, Virginia. Today, I am showing you how to make some wonderful quick and easy holiday appetizers for your next party. Right now, I am going to show you how to make an incredible baked dill delight and the ingredients that we are going to need today are some fresh dill, little bit of flour, little bit of butter, one egg yolk and a store bought big and buttery crescent roll dough and some regular wonderful cream cheese.

The tools we will need are cutting board or a flat surface that you can roll out dough on, a kitchen scissors, a brush, a lined cookie sheet but I like to use tin foil and then we are going to top it all off with a wonderful, beautiful holiday platter and a nice serrated serving utensil to go with it. Now, let s get started. First of all, I am going to take my lined cookie sheet with tin foil. I like to line it because it s so much easier for clean up. I am going to take just a little bit of wax paper just so I don t get my fingers all dirty or greasy from the butter and I am just going to go ahead and gently just grease my tin foil. Now, you could use a non sticking pan also and it would probably okay but I am just all about quick and easy and the easier to clean up the better for me, let me tell you.

I went ahead and I pre-heated oven to 350 by the way. Alright, get all the little spots, we could put this aside. Then I am going to take just a little bit of flour and I am going to put it on my, roll it on my cutting board here so that the crescent roll dough doesn t stick. Now, this is a little tricky. Crescent roll dough, mine anyways has the perforated edges because they are crescent rolls and normally when you use this it s individual crescent rolls but today, we are going to put this all together. Now, I suppose you could use another type of dough. I don t know if you make your own or whatever but I really like the flavor of this big and buttery crescent roll dough. I am just going to very gently try to roll it out so we are just going to spread them out. Now, what we are going to do is we are going to go ahead and gently press the edges together. Just want it to hold together and you know if it comes apart at the end of the process we can always pinch it too but for now, we are going to get it started. I have got all of my edges pressed together and you can see we just gently pull it up. It s not sticking because of the flour, good and like I said, if it comes apart, if any of the edges come apart we can always put it back together once we fold it over. Now, we are going to take our wonderful whole cream cheese. I don t skim don t use fat free, I don t use one third less. You got to use the real thing. What we are going to do is we are going to go ahead and put this dill right on to the cream cheese. Now, I don t really likes stems in my, when I am cooking. I cut off all my parsley stems, I cut off all the stems I can. So and very easily you can do this with your hands or we can take kitchen shears right and just do like that. We are going to be really liberal with the dill. I love dill, it s a wonderful lemony touch flavored herb. Now, I suppose you could use dried but you know nowadays, you can go anywhere, your local grocery store, any one of them anytime now and you can always get fresh herbs. So, if you can get fresh why use dry? We don t have to. Getting all the sides and we are just going to gently press in. We don t want to get that stem. Now, that I have got that side let me go ahead and flip it over because I want to make sure that this dill is on all sides. We are just going to repeat the process. Just get it on what used to be at the bottom is now the top and then again just cut it off, so easy so simple and boy, does it smell good. Press it in. You could probably put anything you want to in here. You could put all kinds of herbs, you could make in rosemary, you can put some thyme in here but for our tense and purposes and even we are sticking with our holiday theme because I think this looks sort of like pine. So, it s going to be nice and festive for the holidays.

Now, that we have that in we are going to go ahead just gently fold it over. See, we got a seam there which is fine. No problem, stick it back together and it doesn t matter because we are going to go right over here like that. Alright, get that off of there. Now, press it down, make sure all that dill gets in there and we are going to get all the dough to stick together. I like to press down on the side, all four corners here just press it down. There we go, that s okay.

Alright now, there s a lot of excess dough as you can see from here. We really don t need it. So, what I am going to do is just take a serrated knife and just cut it evenly across like this. I am just going to discard that you really can t do very much with that. Now, let me turn this and I am just going to take a fork. I like to call this an old fashioned candy style. Just going to take my fork and just press the edges like that and anybody if you are as old as I am you will all know what an old fashioned candy is. So, we are just going to go ahead and see how that just fans out real nice just like that. On both sides just get rid of that and we can gently turn that and repeat it on the other side.

See where I am going with this? Isn t that looking nice? That s it for that. Now, we are going to take our egg yolk and we are going to give it an egg wash because we want to have it all nice and shiny and get it nice, golden brown. So, it is going to look gorgeous. Just taking my little brush and I am going to just brush it all over the entire dill delight. Get it in the grooves, just brush it along. See how easy that is?

Now, I said, we had our oven at 350. This really doesn t take very long to cook, 15 to 18 minutes depending on your oven. So, you definitely want to watch, make sure you don t over do it. Just give it another little brushing.

Now, we are going to transfer this to our buttered cookie sheet with our tin foil for easy clean up. Do that other way. We are just going to gently take it and look at that. It goes right on our cookie sheet and we are going to go in that for about; we must start with 15 minutes. Always go on a lower end. You can always cook it more but you can t take away from the cooking time. We are just going to gently pop in hot oven and 15 minutes from now we are going to have a beautiful baked dill delight. Come right back. I wish you could smell this. This is our beautiful baked dill delight. You can see from the egg wash it's a nice golden brown, it actually grew the dough had it come out. It looks beautiful. So, now all we are going to do is just transfer it from our cookie sheet and we are going to put it on to a lovely serving bowl, serving platter. Be careful, it's hot. Oh, look at that. Let s get this out of here, like this and look at that isn t that just gorgeous? Now, just like I did with the artichokes we are going to go ahead and we are going to garnish it just with a little bit of dill so that your guests know exactly what's inside of your beautiful baked dill delight. We have a serrated holiday cheese server and we are going to serve it along with that. Let me tell you, your guests are going to be so pleased with this. So, you enjoy your holiday party. Happy holidays.