Holiday Dessert Guide

💜 Peeps - Welcome to Snackable Bakes! 💜

Here you’ll find easy-peasy sweet and savory (thanks to my new cookbook Salty, Cheesy, Herby, Crispy Snackable Bakes) snackable bakes! These are recipes with pantry-friendly ingredients and short instructions, that can be assembled in 20 minutes or less, with nothing more than a bowl, a whisk and a spatula.

In short, this newsletter (delivered every other week) is always filled with easy-peasy delicious treats that anyone can make.

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Now let’s get snackable.

Hello hello! It is December - in case you had not noticed - and I for one am pretty excited about it. Even though the stress of planning Christmas - buying presents, organizing meals and baking, begging my teenage boys to grace us with their presence (preferably for several consecutive days) - is not nothing, I am thankfully already in a festive mood and am looking forward to putting work aside and embracing vacation-mode, despite the fact I am not going anywhere. And the recipes I am sharing today are all very “December” - though they all actually work at any time of the year, with a few tweaks, which I share below. So without further ado . . .

First up is my Chocolate Peppermint Bark Skillet Cookie. Think chocolate sugar cookie, but with the addition of chopped up peppermint bark and white chocolate chips. The cookie dough is a one-bowl situation, calling for melted butter and Dutch process cocoa powder (my fave) and is absolutely fantastic without the peppermint bark and white chocolate chips - if a straight up chocolate sugar cookie is what you are craving. The skillet cookie is the ultimate high/low dessert (or so I learned from Christina Tosi when she was recently on my baking podcast to discuss them with me - you can listen to our chat here).

This is because a skillet cookie is, well, just a cookie on the one hand, but also the most perfect dinner party dessert on the other. Christina also shared a tip for skillet cookie-making, which is to warm the skillet in the oven while you preheat it. When you add the dough to the hot skillet, the edges get extra crispy and that crispiness combined with the slightly underdone center, is basically cookie perfection (in case you did not know). The recipe is here. Oh, and if you are not a skillet person, you can 100% use this dough to make regular old cookies - just scoop away, my peeps.

Next up are my Peppermint Swirl Brownies - yes there is a chocolate-peppermint theme here, but if the combo is not your thing, omit the swirl, and enjoy a delicious one-bowl brownie situation, instead. The swirl has a bit of cream cheese in it and a tiny amount of food coloring and the resulting minty pink swirl, is pretty fun to make (and easy: don’t worry) and equally fun to eat. The recipe is here.

And finally, my Holiday Rice Krispies Treats. If you’ve been hanging out with me for any length of time longer than about 5 minutes, then you know I have a special place in my heart for Rice Krispies treats (aka RKTs) - I adore them and have been making them for so many years, that I now do so with a secret ingredient that I discovered a while back: I add sweetened condensed milk to them to keep them extra chewy, to give them a longer shelf life and to make them a little extra creamy and almost caramelized in flavor. For the holidays, I add red and green candy - but please leave it out if you’d like to enjoy these straight up! They will not disappoint (I promise). The recipe is here.

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On this week’s episode of She’s My Cherry Pie . . .

I had the pleasure of speaking to Dominique Ansel of cronut fame! Okay, so I’m lying, he wasn’t actually the guest on the pod this past week, BUT I forgot to tell you when he was on the pod (back in October) so I am making up for lost time, and telling you now. Dominique has a new book out, Life’s Sweetest Moments, and he came on the pod to discuss it and WOW: did I ever love talking to him. I’ll admit it: I was a little intimidated and anxious - I mean the guy’s a big deal in the pastry world. But he could not have been kinder, more humble, funnier and easier to talk to, etc. We just had the best time. You can listen to our convo here.

Have you watched?

Alright, so I am still chipping away at the six seasons (23 episodes a season - I know I am insane) of The Good Wife, but I have a few names on my must-watch list, one of which is Rivals. Have you watched it? Thoughts? As I understand the show, or rather, what I learned from looking on the internet, it is about the social elite of 1980s England (and the friend who recommended it IS British) and specifically the ruthless world of independent television in 1986 (and it is also described as being full of sex and wit, which works marvelously for me). More on this after I finish The Good Wife (probably in 2026 or 2027 - 😭).

Have you read?

So, I finished James, which I told you about in my last letter, and it turned out to be every bit as good as I’d expected and now I am reading The God of the Woods and it is FANTASTIC. The same friend who suggested I watch Rivals also suggested I read God in the Woods, and she is not wrong . . . the book is about a young woman/girl who disappears from summer camp in the Adirondack woods in the summer of 1975 - and that is all I’ll say for fear of giving anything away!

Have you listened?

I have still not found a pod that I am super excited to share with you, BUT I did recently start listening to Dateline’s True Crime pod and I am not not into it . . . I know that is not necessarily a ringing endorsement, but it kind of sums up how I feel about it. I listen to podcasts when I drive and I am in my car a lot (sadly) and they really help pass the time - even when they are not great. Are you listening to anything I might like? I’m even open to those that are not True Crime related (though those are my fave . . . ).

Alrighty, see you in two weeks and I think the closing sentiment in my last letter, still stands; so without further ado: “happy holidays.”

P.S. Speaking of easy-peasy bakes…

❤️ Meet my new cookbook Salty, Cheesy, Herby, Crispy Snackable Bakes

It’s filled with easy-peasy crackers, quick breads, hand-pies, brunch, lunch and dinner items and my viral magic melted pie dough.

Order on: Amazon | Oblong Books | Kitchen Arts & Letters | Bookshop

And if you have already ordered a copy, thank you!!! I would be so terrifically grateful if you would leave a review on Amazon, here. Even if you did not buy the book on Amazon, you can still leave a review and it really helps the book get into lots of people’s hands.