The day before you make a standard Cream Cheese pastry/cookie dough and chill it over night. AND you get a large jar of Cherry preserves, which you promptly scrape into a strainer, to let all the jelly soak thru, leaving only the cherries behind.

On baking day: First roll part of the pastry as thin as your patience will allow, and cut with round cookie cutters. Put a wee bit of cherry on each circle, fold over, and seal. When you’ve put together as many half circles of dough, sealed tightly to keep the cherry inside, grind some pecans or walnuts, and mix with granulated sugar. Separate an egg, and through away the yolk, or save it to use in a less time consuming cookie. Beat the egg white with a fork, with a pastry brush, brush the top of each wee cookie with some beaten egg white, and dip into the nuts/sugar mixture.

Bake on a greased cookie sheet at 350 degrees until just starting to turn golden…you don’t want these to brown.

They don’t keep for more than two or three days, so you can’t make them long in advance. But they never last for more than a day, anyway, so that doesn’t matter. They ARE delicious, but a lot of “fiddling” is required.

Hubby’s family enjoys krumkaka – a Scandinavian equivalent of pizzelle, but made with cardamom instead of anise, and rolled into cones. Burned fingers are inevitable, and as you can only make two at a time in the iron, they take ages to make. (and somehow they’re always the first to disappear, guaranteeing at least 2-3 batches every year).

A staple here in France is the buche de Noel – a cake roll made with gorgeous ingredients (no shortening here – everything’s made with BUTTER)…and iced to look like a log fresh from the forest. Most families buy theirs, but they’re very, very expensive. I made ours this year…and it will be a year before I feel like dealing with another one!