61 Brunch Recipes To Make Your New Year's Day Party A Smash

New Year's Day is a tricky holiday to celebrate. If you're planning to throw a party, it's safe to assume that a number of guests were up celebrating into the wee hours the night before, so they may not be in the mood for another evening bash. You could do a big midday meal a la Christmas or Thanksgiving, but this may be more suited to an intimate family gathering. If your intent is to launch into the new year surrounded by all your nearest and dearest, and maybe even a casual acquaintance or two, then a holiday brunch may be your best bet. You could even time it to coincide with the Tournament of Roses Rose Parade –- unless you live on the West Coast, that is, since such an early party start may be pushing things a bit.

So what should you serve at a New Year's brunch? You'll want a selection of foods that are festive, yet not fussy, so you don't have to spend too much time prepping for the party. Our list includes a selection of both sweet and savory dishes to cover all the bases. While you'll probably want to have plenty of coffee, tea, juice, and sparkling cider on hand for those who overdid things the night before, as well as designated drivers and anyone participating in Dry January, we've also included a few cocktail recipes for those guests who still want a boozy brunch.

One sure-fire hit for breakfast or brunch is a basic coffee cake –- not one made with coffee, but one meant to accompany the beverage whose name it bears. For a festive occasion, however, why not take that standard coffee cake recipe and dress it up with a colorful addition like sprinkles? This Funfetti-like creation not only has little bursts of color throughout the cake, but the sprinkles are also stirred into the brown sugar streusel topping. Each of these cakes makes 9 slices, but you can easily stir up more.

Recipe: Classic Coffee Cake Recipe

While asparagus is typically not in season in January, you may be able to find fresh asparagus imported from warmer climates that will allow you to make this salad. As this is a salad and not a cooked asparagus dish, it wouldn't be advisable to make it with frozen asparagus. The crispy fresh texture, after all, is crucial to concocting a successful salad. In fact, the delicate taste of raw asparagus, paired with fresh lemon juice, champagne vinegar, and goat cheese, may even appeal to people who aren't normally fans.

Recipe: Shaved Asparagus Salad Recipe

Nachos for breakfast? Sure, why not? After all, if breakfast burritos are a thing, is it really so much of a stretch to give another Mexican favorite a morning makeover? Instead of tortilla chips, these nachos are built on a base of sturdy waffle fries (frozen ones, for convenience sake). They are then topped with scrambled eggs as well as some typical nacho ingredients: black beans, shredded cheese, guacamole, and salsa. To make these nachos extra-breakfast-y, they're also sprinkled with crumbled bacon.

Recipe: Easy Breakfast Nachos Recipe

If you've invited guests whose idea of the best brunch tipple is a pint of stout or a strong cup of tea, then you'll want to serve up some classic British pub snacks like Scotch eggs, something that can also double as an entrée for a decidedly un-fancy "high tea." This 3-ingredient recipe couldn't be much simpler, particularly as it's actually a 2-ingredient recipe if you don't count the water.

Recipe: 3-Ingredient Scotch Eggs Recipe

One often-neglected method of egg preparation is poaching. We all know how to scramble an egg, and it's not even that hard to whip up a decent omelet. Frying eggs is also fairly easy, as is boiling them in their shells. Poaching, them, though, always seems super-tricky. Luckily, the Instant Pot is here to assist. This wonder appliance uses steam to cook the eggs, poaching them in just one minute. Best of all, Instant Pot-poached eggs come out looking symmetrical and pretty.

Recipe: Instant Pot Poached Eggs Recipe

If you or any of your guests have egg allergies, there's no need to miss out on all the delightful things that can be done with a simple crepe. This crepe recipe doesn't call for any eggs whatsoever, although it does require both milk and butter. You can fill these crepes with melted Brie as we do in this recipe, but you can also substitute any other kind of cheese and/or meat or even a sweet filling, such as jelly. Ces crêpes sont très magnifiques!

Recipe: Savory Eggless Crepes Recipe

Avocado toast makes for a pretty good brunch dish. It's healthy, it's easy, it's tasty, what's not to like? Plus, this particular version brings avocado toast into the current decade by making it with the uber-popular sourdough bread. Oh, and if you think poaching eggs is a real pain, it needn't be. You can either follow the fairly simple directions given here or else you can scroll up to see how to poach the eggs the easy way using your Instant Pot.

Recipe: Simple Poached Egg And Avocado Toast Recipe

If McDonald's has just one dish that's worth copying, it's the McGriddle. An egg, cheese, and sausage breakfast sandwich on a maple-flavored pancake, what's not to love? Plus, made-from-scratch Mickey D's is practically party-worthy. Our recipe makes things easy by using pancake mix and frozen sausage patties for a dish you can throw together in less time than it takes to go through the drive-thru.

Recipe: Copycat McDonald's Sausage, Egg & Cheese McGriddles Recipe

If you're planning to have guests over for brunch and you'd prefer to spend time with them rather than be cooped up in the kitchen, your best bet is to find recipes that can be prepared well in advance. If you want a hot, eggy main dish, you can always whip up on overnight breakfast casserole the evening before. Not only is this type of dish a time saver, but it can be a money saver, too, since the bulk of the dish is made up with bread.

Recipe: Overnight Breakfast Casserole With Bacon Recipe

Picnic food for breakfast? Go ahead, be a little devilish and serve your guests these delicious deviled eggs. They're great for parties because it's easy to make up a big batch of them and they don't need to be kept warm. This deviled egg recipe is a classic one where the filling is made with mayo and yellow mustard, but it adds just a dab of sour cream for some extra richness. Garnish these eggs with snipped chives as we do here, or go old-school with paprika or spicy with a sprinkling of cayenne.

Recipe: Deviled Eggs Recipe

There are some pretty decent items on Burger King's menu and one of them is the breakfast sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit. And, the thing about such a dish it, if you make it yourself from scratch, is that it is worthy of serving to company. In fact, your brunch guests may never even guess that this copycat BK breakfast biscuit was inspired by fast food.

Recipe: Copycat Burger King Double Sausage, Egg, & Cheese Biscuit Recipe

While Joanna Gaines is a home rehabber by trade, her Magnolia empire includes several successful restaurants and cooking shows. One of her recipes is for a crunchy French toast where the crunch comes from cornflakes. We took this recipe and embellished it to make it even more festive by giving it a tasty Nutella filling. Not such a Nutella fan? You could fill yours with peanut butter instead, or maybe jelly.

Recipe: Joanna Gaines' French Toast Crunch With A Nutella Twist

While Gordon Ramsay may hurl the word "donut" around as an unflattering epithet frequently accompanied by an expletive or two, he has no issues with the actual food. In fact, he makes a delightful version of homemade donuts filled with chocolate ganache. This version, however, simplifies things quite a bit by allowing you to use Nutella or a similar store-bought chocolate spread in place of the ganache.

Recipe: Gordon Ramsay's Donut Recipe

Perhaps you are familiar with le croque monsieur, non? Well, what you may not know is that this tasty, toasty, French take on the ham and cheese has a counterpart called the croque madam. The madam, like the monsieur, is made with ham and cheese, but it isn't dipped in egg batter, french toast-style. Instead, the ham and cheese sandwich itself is prepared in more of a straight up grilled cheese syle, then topped with additional cheese and béchamel sauce.

Recipe: Croque Madam Sandwich Recipe

Brunch tables tend to be heavy on two things: Sweet carbs of the muffin/donut/coffee cake variety and eggy dishes like breakfast casseroles. Brunch is supposed to be a combination of breakfast and lunch, however, so a few lunch-type dishes wouldn't come amiss if you want to be well-balanced. This mango-quinoa salad is light, refreshing, healthy, and can at the very least make for a great palate cleanser between the aforementioned heavier dishes.

Recipe: Mango Quinoa Salad Recipe

While pumpkins will forever be associated with the autumnal season and are often considered to have passed their sell-by date once Thanksgiving is behind us, it's quite possible you still have a can or two of pumpkin left over from all your fall baking. No need to save it until next September rolls around. For one thing, your pumpkin might be past it's "use-by" date by then. For another, that's far too long to wait to try this delicious pumpkin coffee cake.

Recipe: Best Pumpkin Coffee Cake Recipe

Dunkin' Donut' healthy "Power Breakfast" sandwich is something well worth duplicating, as health-conscious brunch guests will appreciate the low fat egg white omelet and turkey sausage, the iron-rich sautéed spinach, and the high fiber multigrain bread. This recipe makes 4 servings, but it shouldn't take too much time to whip up as many extra batches as your heart desires.

Recipe: Copycat Dunkin' Donuts Power Breakfast Sandwich Recipe

Skillets are just so stretchable, which is what makes them great for a brunch party! Our recipe calls for using bacon, sausage, and ham for a triple-meaty breakfast treat, but you can easily customize a skillet to suit your guests (and your budget) with your own choice of meats, cheeses, and/or veggies.

Recipe: Bacon Sausage Ham Breakfast Skillet Recipe

A frittata sounds like a fancy Italian dish, and it does, in fact, have it roots in la bella Italia. Fancy, however... not so much. Basically, it's yet another way to use up the about-to-wilt contents of your produce bin by repurposing them via the magic of eggs. Plus cheese, of course, since cheese makes everything better. In this frittata recipe, we're even using a little cooked ham for extra flavor. The best part, though, is that the whole dish, eggs and veggies and all, can be cooked in the microwave!

Recipe: 15-Minute Frittata Recipe

Zucchini is a vegetable that can be characterized as inoffensive at best. In it's favor, though, it is very easy to grow. What's more, the fact that zucchini doesn't have a strong taste of its own makes it extremely versatile. In this instance, zucchini is used to bulk out an easy, crust-free quiche. Here the zucchini's mild flavor stands it in good stead as it doesn't overwhelm the cheddar and parmesan cheeses that give this breakfast dish its flavor.

Recipe: Crustless Zucchini Quiche Recipe

The one meat that everyone wants piled on their plate at breakfast is bacon. The one thing that might make this most perfect of pork products even better is to gild the lily with a sweet glaze. The brown sugar used in this recipe not only gives the bacon some extra flavor, but it also adds a little crunch, as well. The best thing about this brown sugar bacon, however, is how insanely easy it is to make!

Recipe: Crispy Brown Sugar Bacon Recipe

Quiche is a classic brunch dish, and ham and cheese is a perfect flavor combo. While quiches themselves aren't too hard to throw together in a hurry, the crust can present a problem, particularly if you feel you need to make everything from scratch. Crustless quiche, however, simplifies the process considerably. This recipe goes even farther, improving upon matters even by using a muffin pan to bake mini quiches.

Recipe: Crustless Ham And Cheese Quiche Muffins Recipe

Of all the different types of quiches out there, the most celebrated –- and justifiably so -– is the quiche Lorraine. It is made with eggs (of course), milk, and cream, and gets its flavor from gruyère cheese, bacon, and a sprinkling of snipped chives. Quiche Lorraine is typically baked in a crust, but it's ok to start with a store-bought one to save a little time. Be aware, though, that this quiche will need to be prepared in advance as it has to cool for several hours before you serve it.

Recipe: Quiche Lorraine Recipe

Remember those dear old days of college keggers where the all-beer menu was occasionally supplemented by a watermelon spiked with booze? If you're able to source a watermelon in January, your guests will surely get a kick out of this recipe's boozy blast from the past. If you can't find this summertime fruit where you live, though, you could always go for a tropical twist by using the same technique to fill a pineapple with rum.

Recipe: Easy Vodka Spiked Watermelon Recipe

While apple harvest time really kicks off in late summer and fall, apples and apple-flavored dishes really aren't considered to be season-specific so they're as well-suited to January as they are to any other time of year. If you're looking for an apple-flavored brunch dish, one of the easiest, yet most impressive, is this show-stopping puffy German pancake. Unlike a standard pancake, this German apple one is sweet enough to enjoy on its own, so there's no need for syrup.

Recipe: German Apple Pancake Recipe

Since brunch is supposed to be breakfast, plus lunch, it's perfectly appropriate to include a dessert, right? Well, at least something dessert-like, which, for many of us, means chocolate. These miniature chocolate chip muffins are actually a perfect compromise between breakfast (since muffin) and dessert (since chocolate). Their small size means they are great for a buffet-type situation.

Recipe: Chocolate Chip Mini Muffin Recipe

We have no idea what makes these scones French per se, since the ginger and lemon you'll be using comes from wherever ginger and lemons are grown (probably not France) and the recipe itself was developed for us right here in the U.S. of A. Still, these scones are just as fancy as the descriptor "French" typically implies, and they are also as delicious as you'd expect from a flavor combo that includes both tangy lemon zest and spicy-sweet candied ginger.

Recipe: French Ginger And Lemon Scone Recipe

While brunch is supposed to combine the best parts of both breakfast and lunch, sometimes the latter is neglected. Many brunch tables tend to look more like breakfast on steroids, with egg dish after egg dish supplemented by mountains of pastries, waffles, and/or pancakes. Enough. Let's put the "unch" back in brunch, and let's start by doing it with a classic French salad. If you're unfamiliar with the Niçoise, it's kind of a spin on chef salad, one that makes use of boiled potatoes and eggs along with tuna.

Recipe: Classic Niçoise Salad Recipe

If you're having people over for brunch, you've got to have bacon. If you want to beef up your bacon to the point where it's practically an entrée, however, you really need to try this recipe for chicken-fried bacon. As the name implies, the bacon is dipped in eggs and flour before being fried in oil. Helpful hint: use the thick-cut kind of bacon so it can stand up to the coating.

Recipe: The Game-Changing Bacon Recipe You're Not Making

If you're brunching up north, out west, or anywhere in flyover territory, you may not have thought to include this particular type of cooked cereal. If you've been binge-watching "The Magnolia Table" and are charmed by the idea of a Southern-themed brunch, though, then you've simply got to have grits. Don't make the faux pas of serving up instant grits to your guests, though! Instead, try these easy, cheesy, super-creamy from-scratch grits. While the recipe given here makes four servings, it can easily be doubled to feed a larger gathering.

Recipe: Easy Creamy Grits Recipe