Millionaire Bars - basically homemade Twix.
Just a note - most holiday cookies freeze really well, so if you are reluctant to halve the recipe for any reason, just wrap 'em well and chuck 'em in the freezer for later.
Interesting thought! I make these in the spring sometimes. They’re quite fussy but absolutely delicious (I usually leave the chocolate drizzle off, that’s just gilding the lily). I should try making different shapes.
Normally I make a zillion cookies, because we traditionally give plates of mixed cookies to neighbors/friends/family gatherings/coworkers/everybody. This year I made a single batch of sugar cookies, cut into simple diamonds, ‘ornamented’ only with sugar sprinkles.
This might be one of the saddest changed of 2020. 
Hey, I’m a Jewish mother. You have no idea how much I’m dying to feed other people.
Followed the link and found these.
I was thinking about Tagalongs a few weeks ago, so even though I do not have chocolate bark, I’m making these after Christmas.
And I’ve got poppy seeds crying to go somewhere.
I made cookies for my inlaws for Thanksgiving - oatmeal raisin, oatmeal pecan, and molasses - but I’m not doing Christmas cookies. Spousal unit and I absolutely do not need all that sugar. Plus my mom bakes tons of cookies and we always get a big platter from her.
My daughter is going to attempt to make painted sugar cookies with her toddler - we’ll see how they turn out.
I make hamantashen with yeast dough. Hardly anyone else I know does that, but mine are really good, I think. Every year three or four people ask me for the recipe, but then, when I say it’s a yeast dough, most of them back away.
It’s a dough you can use for other things, though, which is why I can make crescent-shaped pastries with it other times of the year. My grandmother used to make nut logs with it, using walnuts and pecans, brown sugar and honey. She brushed the top with egg. I could never get the crust to come out right until recently, when a tried some with 1/4 tsp soy lecithin, and 1 tsp barley malt powder.
I use the barley malt to get the right texture on bagels, and the lecithin to keep bread crusts from being too thick-- a little goes a very long way. I’m pretty sure my grandmother didn’t use either of these in her nut logs, so how she made them is still a mystery to me. But the ones I have are turning out really well now.
Looks like we’re going to attempt to make some traditional German Christmas cookies that are mostly nut based. My wife’s BIL is from Germany and they always celebrated Christmas together so she wants to adopt the tradition now that we can’t celebrate together this year.
Peanut Butter Fudge Cups
½ cup butter, softened
½ cup creamy peanut butter
½ cup white sugar
½ cup brown sugar
1 egg
½ tsp vanilla extract
1¼ cups all-purpose flour
¾ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
Fudge filling:
1 cup milk chocolate chips
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 (14 oz) can sweetened condensed milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Spray a mini-muffin pan liberally with cooking spray.
Cream butter, peanut butter, and sugars. Mix in egg and vanilla. Add flour, baking soda, and salt, stirring until combined.
Put 1 tbsp dough in each muffin tin cup. Bake 14-16 minutes or until lightly browned.
Remove from oven and immediately make wells in the center of each using a melon
baller, shot glass, handle of a wooden spoon,etc. Cool in pan for 8-10 minutes, then carefully remove to wire racks. Cool an additional 10-15 minutes.
While the cookies are cooling, make the fudge filling. Combine chocolate chips and sweetened condensed milk in a microwave-safe bowl. Mix lightly and microwave on high 1-2 minutes, stirring once or twice. Add vanilla and stir until smooth. Pipe the fudge into the cookie cups. The fudge sets up fast, so you can overfill your cookies. If the fudge becomes too hard to pipe, microwave for 10-15 seconds.
Today, I made Poor Man’s Cake to hand to my neighbors. I use my grandmother’s recipe from way back when. There’s lots of recipes on the interwebs for it but some just don’t make sense to me. Like using white sugar instead of brown sugar. This was a recipe used by poor folks. Poor folks used molasses and brown sugar, because white sugar was more expensive. Fascinating what time has done to us.
I am considering making spritz cookies but I’m afraid that I would eat them all. That might cause a heart attack. But yum, what a way to go.
Just look at some of the recipes for meatloaf on the web. They use really good cuts of pure beef, ground, and use very few fillers. The whole point of meatloaf used to be to stretch meat during times of either rationing, or economic hardship. You used just enough meat to justify calling it "meat"loaf, and they could be anything-- in fact, often were mixed cuts of different kinds of meat, and were an excuse to use up bread that was too stale to use on its own. Then, you tossed in other things, like leftover noodles, potatoes, or vegetables that were either too old to serve on their own, or there wasn’t enough of for everyone-- but you weren’t throwing them away-- no food got thrown away. A lot of people had hand-cranked meat grinders at home, and just put everything through it, with a egg or two to make it stick, and a chopped onion, salt, and a few seasonings for flavor. Bake, and dinner.