The Christmas season is an exciting time for mail. Instead of the usual bills and solicitations (though there are plenty of those), each day’s post brings cards from friends, and my guilty pleasure — Christmas catalogs. I love poring over each one, looking at the Christmas decorations and the Christmas food. Oh the food. I [...]
Entries Tagged as 'cookies'
Christmas Cheer – Peppermint Pretzel Bark
December 22nd, 2010 · 3 Comments · Baked Goods and Desserts, Holiday, Quick, Recipes, Winter
Santa Baby, Just Slip a Sablé Under the Tree
December 16th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Baked Goods and Desserts, Recipes
It’s Christmas time, and I’ve been baking cookies like a madwoman. There has to be something to leave out for Santa, after all. Yet despite all the baking, we don’t have any cookies in our house. Some have been trotted out to parties, some shared with coworkers, some sent to nurses. And some don’t have such, um, legitimate reasons for disappearing.
Like these sablés, which is a Frenchie word for shortbread, and which I used because I couldn’t resist the pun. Shortbread is nice, of course — what’s not to like about butter and sugar? But this is particularly wonderful shortbread — Christmas shortbread if you will. You still have butter and sugar, but this time it’s flavored with rosemary, which gives the cookies the faint aroma of a Christmas tree, pine nuts, which have that whiff of luxurious meatiness which makes so many holiday confections special, and orange zest, which always reminds me of Christmas, maybe because I grew up in California, and got an orange in my stocking every year.
Candy Cane Faux-Jo’s
December 10th, 2010 · 7 Comments · Baked Goods and Desserts, Holiday, Recipes, Winter
If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you may have gathered that when it comes to Christmas food, I’m a traditionalist. We’ve had the same meal for Christmas dinner every year of my life (even the year I spent Christmas in Florence, Italy), and the same meal for Christmas morning breakfast every year but one (hard to find turkey gravy in Italy). My Christmas baking tends towards either classic Americana, like ;Sugar Cookies or Bourbon Balls, or classic English Christmas, in the form of Christmas Cake or Mince Pies. And I feel very strongly about the necessity of waking up on Sunday morning and baking Christmas cookies, still in your pajamas.
But sometimes I encounter a newfangled holiday treat that’s so tempting (or addictive) that it becomes a new holiday tradition. If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time you may have realized that I have a deep and abiding love for Trader Joe’s, and never more than at holiday time, when the crack, er, Candy Cane JoJo’s are available. If you’ve never had a Candy Cane Jo Jo, it’s basically an oreo with crushed up candy canes in the filling. Sounds basic, right? But the sum is so much more than it’s parts. The bits of candy cane stay crunchy in an entirely different way than the cookies stay crunchy. And the whole thing just begs to be dipped in a glass of milk and eaten. In vast quantities.
