My mom & I make tins of Christmas cookies for all of our loved ones every year. We have a lot of standbys, namely fluffy snickerdoodles, rich brownies, and an amaaazing white chocolate-cranberry-pistachio bark. Still, we like to experiment with new recipes from time to time, and this one (that my mom originally clipped out of some magazine) is a definite keeper. The cookies are rich & buttery, not overly sweet, with just a hint of espresso flavor. They seem like they’ll keep well (a major plus for gift cookies, obviously), but I wouldn’t know because I don’t think I’ll be able to keep the ones I took for myself beyond tomorrow, at best.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup butter, softened
• 1/3 cup white sugar
• 1/3 cup confectioner’s sugar
• 2 1/4 cups flour
• 2 1/2 Tbsp finely ground espresso beans
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp kosher or coarse sea salt

Steps:

1. Cream butter & sugar together.
2. Add remaining ingredients (flour, espresso, vanilla, salt) and mix well.
3. Roll dough into logs, about 1.5” wide, wrap in parchment paper, and refrigerate for at least an hour.
4. Preheat oven to 325° and line baking sheets with parchment paper.
5. Slice dough into rounds and bake about 20 minutes, until edges are golden brown.

This dough is fairly dry; while I was making it I thought there was no way it was ever going to come together, because it just looked like crumbs. An electric mixer definitely helps here!

Meyer lemons live up to the hype! I’d never had them before, but I grabbed a few at the store because I know everyone ♥s them. When I was looking around for something to do with them, I found this Smitten Kitchen recipe for lemon-yogurt-anything cake. I used fresh cranberries and the resulting cake was lovely: moist, flavorful, tart & sweet.

I had some leftover crêpes so I covered one with peanut butter & sliced bananas, put it under the broiler for a bit, and then added leftover cinnamon-maple whipped cream + toasted pecans.

Yesss.

Next time I would probably heat the bananas another way; the broiler didn’t really touch them before it made the crêpe itself crispy. It would’ve been nice to have them a bit caramelized, but I am not remotely complaining because this was still an excellent, quick Wednesday morning breakfast.