Walnut-Oat Caramel Shortbread

My convenient, digital kitchen scale rarely gets to play in the world of grams, so why start now? For this recipe, I dug out my mom's old-school kitchen scale. (The kind that has to be at eye-level in order to get an accurate read on the thin, wobbly needle.)

Pretzel & Butterscotch Chocolate Chip Cookies

Everyone has a favourite chocolate chip cookie recipe, right? After extensive research on the matter (and by research, I mean eating), my top pick is The Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie from Cook's Illustrated. Nipping at its crumbs, in close second, is the infamous Jacques Torres incarnation.

All's fair in love & cookies. And since I've made the Cook's Illustrated and Jacques Torres recipes more than once (I won't give out actual number), I thought I should also revisit the 3rd runner up, Alton Brown's The Chewy...with tango of salty pretzels + sweet butterscotch chips.

Chocolate Mocha Cake with Raspberry Cream Filling

As some of you may know, since I blurt it out at random like an obsessed parrot, I love citrus. For New Years Eve, I was convinced that I was going to make some incarnation of a perky-tart lemon pistachio layer cake...until I saw This, on Country Living.

I am not a chocoholic. (Every time I say that, it feels as though I'm confessing to a crime.) And after my sister requested a chocolate on chocolate cake for her birthday last March, I didn't want to look at chocolate again. Ever. But this recipe has something spectacular, something that brought me back to the valley of chocolate cakedome, something called raspberry cream filling.

Kids' Thumbprints

Happy New Year! I hope the first few days of January have been kind. Even though I never make any resolutions, a new year feels like a crisp, fresh sheet of paper sitting beside a typewriter at a desk in a sunlit room. There's a calm, clarity of thought that allows us to write a new story without the burden of a year's worth of worries.