Not a Lot of Baking

When I was a kid, my mom used to bake about eight different varieties of cookies at Christmastime. She doesn't have a particularly sweet tooth, so cookies tended to only show up during the holidays. The dearth of cookies throughout the year made them extaordinarly special. I'd look forward to mountains of cookies, dusted in sugar and layered between wax paper in Mom's painted Christmas tins.

I still enjoy my mom's baking -- so much so, that I don't bother to do much of it myself. And, when my husband cited this statistic: 300 extra calories a day (translation: two cookies) over the holidays meant that most people's jeans will be uncomfortably snug in January, I felt justified in leaving most of the baking to the expert. This year, I decided to bake one kind of cookie. Very little discussion went into deciding which kind, because Anna Olson's Chocolate Almond Toffee Bars have been a hands-down favourite of ours since I discovered them four years ago. The only downside to them is that you have to let them cool in the refrigerator overnight. Well, okay, there's another downside: if you have an eight-year-old early riser in the house, your squares just might not make it to your pretty painted Christmas tins.