Holiday Baking

Food

Gingerbread With Rosewater Cream Cheese Glaze

This is an adult gingerbread! Cocoa powder and spices make for a dark and flavorful dough that isn’t overly sweet. The cream cheese glaze is a perfect counterpoint, but it will soften the cookies slightly. Glaze the cookies the day before you plan to serve them.

Food

Honey Madeleines

These pretty mini cakes are a perfect way to wow your guests. Use flavorful wildflower honey, if possible, and dust with icing sugar right before serving, if desired. It’s best to have two pans so you don’t need to clean and re-grease pans while making a single batch.

Food

Earl Grey Shorties

These delicate and delicious shortbread sandwich cookies are lightly flavored with Earl Grey tea leaves. Use a highly flavored tea for the best results. If you have a silicone baking mat with a textured surface, roll your dough out on the mat to “stamp” a simple design on top of…

Food

Toffee Pecan Dark Chocolate Shortbread

This shortbread is very buttery and is baked in a mould. Roselle uses round silicone moulds that are about 6.5 cm wide and 1.5 cm deep. If you have a similar mould, you can make individual round shortbreads using lightly flattened 2.5 cm balls of dough (bake for 12 to…

Food

Hazelnut Amaretti

This is a delicious and satisfying cookie that’s very simple to make! If you want to keep the sugar content down, don’t roll the cookies in icing sugar. Decorate instead by pressing a whole almond into the center of each cookie before baking.

Food

Frollini Cannella

These crisp and lightly spiced cookies are studded with sliced almonds. Cut them into rectangles or into whatever shape you desire. It’s essential to make sure your dough is the same thickness throughout, or your cookies will bake at different rates. Let this cookie get deeply golden for the best…

Food

Speculaas

Speculaas are crisp Dutch spice cookies often embossed with a windmill design. Blackbird Baking Co. makes its version as small rounds and etches them with a windmill-like pattern, but you can use the tines of a fork to make a simpler design. If you can’t find small…

Food

Kick-Start Your Fall Baking With The New Cookbook, Tartine, A Classic Revised

From one of the world’s most acclaimed bakery restaurants, this revised edition — by Tartine founders Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson — includes 68 fresh recipes, like melt-in-your-mouth Savory Scones stuffed with bacon, chives and Gruyère cheese and gooey Pecan Diamonds that are equally sweet and salty. It’s a…

Food

Pecan Diamonds

Try this Pecan Diamonds recipe from the cookbook Tartine: A Classic Revised. With a slightly salty caramel filling on a pastry base, these nutty bites are completely addictive. Cooking the filling in a pot first and then finishing it in the oven creates a foolproof confection, yielding many for…

Food

Grandma Julie’s Date & Walnut Maamouls

“I remember my grandma Julie at her kitchen table filling the hand-carved maamoul molds from Lebanon. A lot of maamoul recipes call for orange blossom water or rose water but I don’t like either of those flavors, so I leave them out. Dates and walnuts are two…

Food

Raspberry Cream Cheese Pastries

The rich, flaky and slightly tangy pastry of these crescents works perfectly with the brightness of the raspberry jam.

Food

Butter Tart Squares

These squares have all the delicious flavor of a true butter tart but require half the effort, as the crust and filling are simply layered in the a baking pan. For added holiday color, try swapping out the raisins for chopped maraschino cherries.

Food

Pineapple Squares

This old-fashioned dessert made frequent appearances in community cook books of the 1950s. Its moist cake and crunchy topping are just as delicious today.

Food

Mint Sails

These one-bite brownies deliver deep chocolate flavor with a surprising minty hit!…

Food

Glazed Pumpkin Cookies

Sweet and spicy pumpkin cookies are perfect for enjoying with a coffee on a chilly, winter afternoon.