dreaming@echonyc.com

first up, cranberry pecan tassies. it's a cream cheese dough mashed down into mini muffin cups, filled with brown sugar, egg, pecans, chopped fresh cranberries, and orange extract.

yum.

every year i wish i'd made more of them, so this year i doubled the recipe. it might be the most labor intensive cookie i make, more so even than the linzers, which pack a greater visual punch. with one thing and another, this ended up being a two-day batch. so please eat them slowly.

(last night i was packing up cookie tins to take to the nice ladies who ran the preemie playgroup. paul helpfully brought in the cookies from the freezer, "but not," he said, "the tassies or the pretzels." "why not?" i asked. "because more for me." i told him i'd give the ladies my portion, not his. he grudgingly agreed: "okay. but then i fully intend to put a sign on the tray saying, NONE FOR JULIE.")

we also have these funky chocolate/mint bars. i shouldn't say this in front of people who might eventually be eating them, but this is the only batch so far that's been a disappointment. year before last i got these nice andes mint chips — andes candies cut into tiny bits for baking. because my grocery store doesn't carry them, i tried to replicate them by chopping the regular mints into flinders. but they were still too big for this recipe, which calls for mini chocolate chips, so the dough tore in spots, revealing the filling.

speaking of the filling, it's a white chocolate concoction flavored with mint extract. the recipe called for two to three drops of food coloring "to tint it a faint pastel green." since i am no fool, i added one drop, which turned the whole batch this unfortunate neon color.

look, they taste good, i promise. just close your eyes and pretend they're lovely.