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Blake Shelton & Gwen Stefani’s Christmas Dinner Tradition Is a Carb Lover’s Dream
The Voice Season 26 Coach described the dish as "almost like a lasagna, but it’s baked inside of a dough.”
Step aside, prime rib and baked ham, Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton’s Christmas dinner tradition has entered the chat. Years ago, the couple started making an impressive Italian dish together that would make any carb lover’s mouth water.
Below we break down the delicious baked Italian dish that Shelton and Stefani have made a family holiday tradition, the ingredients, and how it became their “thing” every Christmas.
Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton make a baked Italian dish every Christmas
The Voice Coaches, who’ve been married since 2021, created a new family Christmas tradition when they became a couple. “When Blake came into the picture, I started doing Christmas, and we tried and we did this thing called a timpano dome,” Stefani told KOST 103.5. “It’s basically almost like a lasagna, but it’s baked inside of a dough.”
Stefani told Entertainment Tonight in December 2023 that they’ve been making the dish for years and “now that's the thing” they do together every holiday season.
Shelton has said he and Stefani like to “challenge” themselves with a tricky holiday recipe. “Gwen and I, our tradition has become cooking during Christmas — and not just like your normal, typical [dishes]. But we always challenge ourselves and try to come up with a different, weird, complicated, difficult thing to cook every year,” Shelton told Us Weekly in 2022 at the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting. “It started one year [when] she wanted to do a beef Wellington, which is not easy, by the way.”
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The country singer added that while cooking a complicated dish could get stressful, they just have fun with it. “Singing with Gwen is way harder than cooking with her,” Shelton told Us Weekly. “Cooking is easy for us because neither one of us really know what we’re doing, and all we do is laugh the whole time.”
What is a timpano?
The name timpano comes from the Italian word for drum and that’s exactly what this baked Italian dish looks like. A timpano is essentially a massive round dome of pasta, tomato or ragu sauce, meatballs, cheese, and hard-boiled eggs covered in dough.
For example, Stanley Tucci’s timpano recipe (via The Guardian) calls for a homemade dough, his ragu sauce, very al dente ziti pasta, 12 hard-boiled eggs, salami, meatballs, and sharp provolone and pecorino romano cheeses. A recipe showcased in Pasta Grannies uses a little bit of everything” like freshly made marble-sized meatballs, bucatini, and a tomato meat sauce.
Now that Stefani and Shelton have made timpano as their Christmas feast for several years now, they’ve added their own personal touches to it, specifically for the dough covering. “Probably some Italians might get mad about this, because typically it would be a pasta wrapped around it, but we started doing a pizza dough because it tastes yummy," she told Entertainment Tonight.
Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton documented making timpano on Christmas
For Christmas in 2023, Shelton wore a GoPro on his head to document the family preparing their annual timpano pasta dome. In a video shared on Instagram, you can see them rolling out a homemade dough, stuffing pasta shells with a ricotta cheese mixture, and making a fresh tomato sauce before wrapping it all up into a big drum. They actually made several timpanos that were filled with a variety of pastas that they rolled out on a cart when it was time to serve.
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The results looked scrumptious and the couple’s fans were impressed. “That meal looks SPECTACULAR,” one commented on the video, while another said, “I need that recipe!!” One more asked, “Can I join you next year?”
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Stefani has documented making their Christmas pasta dome every year since 2021 on social media and hopefully the tradition will continue in years to come.
