Holiday Cookies, Goodbye 2025

It has been a lazy holiday week around here, with some reading, baking, knitting and tidying, and lots of aimless lounging on the couch while watching TV. On a Christmassy theme, we watched Klaus, the 2019 animated comedy (Netflix), and The Nutcracker (Tubi), a recording of The Royal Ballet of London performing at Covent Garden in 2000.  

2025 cookie box

Detective-priests seemed to be the other theme as I watched the latest Knives Out mystery movie installment Wake Up Dead Man that came out recently on Netflix. It is an entertaining, cinematic movie featuring a Catholic priest, Father Jud, with a dark past, making a fresh start and getting himself involved in a closed-room mystery. Also, I'm rewatching the British drama series Grantchester, set in the 1950s and featuring the young, maverick vicar Sidney Chambers and his detective friend Geordie Keating investigating local murders. I am constantly distracted by the women's clothing in this show- the classy style of the dresses and sweaters. 

To psych myself up for holiday baking, I watched the latest installment of the Great British Baking Show. The standards are absurdly high- baking without recipes in the technical challenge, making showstopper cakes as big as a table....one of the young contestants was participating in the show while sitting for medical school exams! 

This year, my cookie baking was modest with 5 varieties- something with chocolate, something with spice, a shortbread, a decorated cookie, and a fruity cookie. These are all very easy and do-able recipes. 

1. Double chocolate crinkles 
2. Snowballs, also called Mexican wedding cookies and by many other names 
3. Crispy gingersnaps
4. Cranberry almond biscotti
5. Spritz cookies

The 2025 holiday cookie line-up

* * *

The year I learned to decorate cupcakes

It is that time of year when the annual round-ups and best-of lists pop up everywhere. NYT had a fun article covering random favorite things of the year. Here is my own incomplete and idiosyncratic list:

Wine bottle bag

Best new hobby- garment sewing. I haven't had much time to go further than the 3 garments I made from the online class I took, but I'm hoping to go to a fabric store soon and start on my next sewing project, the Elodie dress. 

This week, I did whip up a quick wine bottle bag from this free pattern, to take some wine and cookies to my neighbor's boxing day party. It was a fun little project using some cute seasonal fabric from my stash.

A huge sewing-related surprise this year was that my husband learned to sew. He had some old scientific posters that he wanted to upcycle into tote bags. Back in the day, posters (sheets that are approx. 3 x 4 feet) were always printed on paper and you carried them to conferences in a big unwieldy tube. These days you can get them printed on a synthetic fabric and fold them- much more convenient to carry around and store. Anyway, with a bit of help from me, and some video tutorials, V made a few cute tote bags from his old posters and enjoyed learning a new skill. He has since been mending his own and our son's clothing- sewing is a very useful hobby and even beginners can make minor repairs and extend the lifespan of everyday clothing. 

Best self-care- an evening routine of herbal tea, no screen time, magnesium supplements. I've been dealing with intermittent insomnia (yay, perimenopause) and this has helped quite a bit. 

Best keeper recipe- crispy gingersnaps. It made my day to see my kids enjoying my homemade cookies- not that they don't like the food I make, but they vastly prefer store-bought snacks over anything I make. It is hard to compete with ultraprocessed food. But they are begging me to bake these again.

Best new kitchen purchase- air fryer. We use it several times a day for everything from re-heating food to making quick sandwich melts, roasted veg and non-fried appetizers.  

Best thing I made all year- roasted pistachio ice cream. There's a special joy in nailing a recipe or technique, and making great homemade ice cream (and using my neglected ice cream machine) was a very rewarding endeavor this year. 

Best technique learned- decorating cupcakes. I wish I learned this simple technique decades ago, but better late than never. It is handy to have a standardized, crowd-pleasing recipe for good cupcakes, tasty frosting, and presentable decoration (easy, minimal skill required) that I can make for just about any occasion. Pictured above are some rose-hydrangea decorated cupcakes that I made this summer while my parents were visiting. 

Best new activity- line dancing. This year our youngest is old enough to stay home on occasional evenings with his sister, and we have been going out a little bit more than we used to. Line dancing was a memorable evening with friends. 

Best old activity re-discovered- trivia nights. V and I loved trivia nights in St. Louis and even before then. This year we went to bar trivia a few times, including one very fun evening (our son was away on his first overnight field trip- another milestone) when we won second prize- the theme was "disasters" LOL.

Best author discovered- Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist who is a wonderful science communicator and writes books for the general public on the subjects of quantum physics and its intersection with philosophy. I read two of his books this year- Reality is Not What It Seems (2014) and Helgoland (2021). 

Helgoland is a slim book that packs quite a punch. Rovelli says, "Rather than explaining how to understand quantum mechanics, I explain why it is so difficult to understand" and he goes on to explain it beautifully. It was interesting for me to read this book in the space between 2025 and 2026, as it is exactly 100 years since the discovery of quantum theory, which is thought to have come into existence between 1925 and 1926. Yes, this is no new-fangled theory but the basis of many of the latest technologies that has not been proven wrong in a century of experimentation and close examination. 

I might write a longer summary of this book one of these days, but the premise of the book, as I see it, is this: Classical physics and our own perception leads us to believe that the world is made of things, of objects. Quantum theory (which is not mere conjecture but a solid science) makes us abandon this simple idea. It says that a thing exists only through its interactions. The physical world is a net of relations. Objects are the nodes. The best description of reality that we have found is in terms of events that weave a web of interactions. It shows that the solidity of the physical world melts into thin air. 

The inside book cover jacket of Helgoland says, "Rovelli makes learning about quantum mechanics an almost psychedelic experience", and I find this to be so true. Not just about this particular book, but many of the books I read this year on the subjects of quantum physics, philosophy, and neuroscience (Being You by Anil Seth being another exceptional read.) When I read these sorts of books right before I sleep (my typical reading time), my mind is in a different place and I drift off to sleep with a feeling of awe, turning over ideas in my head, picturing concepts I've just read and trying to make sense of this universe. This is much more pleasant than the usual, decidedly more mundane things that are on my mind when I go to sleep- the next day's schedule and endless to-dos. 

For me, 2025 was an exceptionally good year for books. They gave me solace and enriched my daily life at a time when the news is so bleak. I read for pleasure, any genre I like, as much as I want to. I don't track my reading seriously, don't complete reading challenges, and I don't hesitate to put a book down if it doesn't vibe with me for any reason. 

It was fun to peek at my annual stats generated by Goodreads and see my 2025 books at a glance.  Apparently, I've read 47 books and they are an eclectic mix- memoirs, mysteries, assorted novels, and a whole lot of non-fiction. I loved so many of the books I read this year. 

What are your own favorite things from 2025?

Gingersnaps, Ragi Dosas, Running Water

Gingerbread house

December 21- winter solstice. For the first time in a long time, I have 18 whole days in a row off work, achieved by stringing together six vacation days, six holidays, and six weekend days. And we're not traveling, so I get to be in my own home without any real agenda- a true luxury. 

The usual holiday activities are ongoing. This morning, the kids assembled a gingerbread house. I love this kit from Trader Joe's. It is well-fabricated and dead easy to assemble. What I also love is that it comes with four little creatures- a deer, squirrel, fox, and owl- and we have all four of these living in our backyard! 

How this year has sped by. Ever since the kids finished the last school year in May of this year, it has been a case of one-thing-after-another with barely any time to sit back and breathe. It has been a mix of some very good things, some stressful things, and many good things that were also stressful. 

An example of the third category- my daughter was a dancer in a production of "The Grinch: Musical". What a fantastic production it was, how wonderful for these young performers to get this amazing stage experience, and what a joy to see her in several dances. But getting this child back and forth to the endless rehearsals and performances (4 shows over 3 days) while managing her meals, sleep and school was pretty stressful! 

Another recent dramatic episode started two weeks ago when I came home from work to find no running water in the house- the water company has turned it off due to a massive leak in the main line going from the city supply to our house. An emergency plumber was called, and four days of basically-no-running-water later, a new pipe was put into place. Apparently, this is just one of those things that happen when you live in a 65 year old house with bits of infrastructure reaching the end of their lifetime. 

I had to laugh bitterly at the irony of it all. I'm militant about not wasting water, yelling at my kids to take shorter showers, all of that...and in the space of a few days, unbeknownst to us, we lost a swimming pool's worth of water in the leak, effectively neutralizing my water conservation and then some. Such is life! I never take my life's conveniences for granted, but I am doubly thankful for running water these days. 

* * *

The first try- hockey pucks

I started my cookie-box baking last weekend with what I assumed was a soft start- an easy, well-rated recipe for crispy gingersnaps. 

I did everything correctly, or so I thought, testing that the baking soda was active, even weighing out the flour instead of measuring by the cup, and somehow the cookies did not spread at all, turning out like hockey pucks. I was dismayed. Tasty, though! My only change to the recipe was to add a teaspoon of ground cardamom along with the other spices. I still don't quite know what I did wrong there.

I tried the recipe again this weekend, working even more carefully than before, and the cookies decided to cooperate, with a couple of them even spreading a little bit too much and merging into their neighbors. This time, I rolled them in some crunchy, crystalline turbinado sugar. 

Crispy gingersnaps

These cookies are SO GOOD. In fact, they are a convincing dupe for our family's favorite store-bought cookie, Trader Joe's triple ginger cookies. From the ingredient list, my homemade cookies are a little different from the ones from TJ's. Those contain ground ginger, fresh ginger, and crystallized ginger (hence the triple ginger). The cookies I made contain only ground ginger, and additionally, cinnamon, cloves and cardamom. However, I believe molasses must be carrying the flavor of both these cookies, because they taste pretty much identical. 

If you're a fan of spice cookies and of gingersnaps, I highly recommend this recipe. I can see myself making it regularly to keep around for the kids to snack on, and for myself for chai-dunking purposes. 

* * *

One of the things I will be doing during this winter is deep-cleaning and organizing the pantry, fridge, and freezer. A lot of this involves "eating down" these food stashes- using up bits and bobs and hoarded and forgotten ingredients. 

Among my Indian pantry staples are three flours, including besan (chickpea flour), rice flour, and ragi (millet) flour. They come in clutch for making instant dosas, where you basically mix the flour with water and make some savory pancakes/crepes. 

I've been using up the ragi flour with some instant ragi dosas. I mix ragi flour and rice flour with about a 3:1 ratio. Then I add some yogurt for tang and flavor the batter with minced onion, cilantro, green chili. Some salt and cumin seeds finish it off, along with enough water to make a thin batter. 

It is important that the batter be thin (thinner than you think it should be), because these instant dosas are poured in a different way than regular fermented urad dal dosas. With the latter, you ladle the batter into the center and use the bottom of the ladle to spread the dosa from the inside out. 

With instant dosas, you start pouring around the edge and work your way in. The thin batter forms a thin, lacy dosa. (There are plenty of videos online that demonstrate this method.) Be patient and let it cook and get crispy before flipping to the other side and letting it cook again. It takes a few minutes to make a dosa, but you end up with something crispy and tasty. We ate the dosas with a side of curried lima beans. 

So there you have it- my three tips for instant ragi dosas: make the batter thin enough to pour, pour it from the outside in, and be patient and let it cook and get some good color before flipping it.

* * *

I read a great book recently- The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, published in 2013. I had this text exchange with my friend (we occasionally exchange books and jigsaw puzzles), and she let me borrow her copy. 

It is a hefty book, coming in at 900+ pages for the paperback; however, it is engrossing enough that I breezed through it in a few days. If you are looking for an immersive, richly descriptive story to read over your holiday break or during long winter evenings, I recommend this novel. 

This novel falls into the literary fiction category and won the Pulitzer prize in 2014. It is a bildungsroman (coming of age novel) and has elements of mystery. I won't say much about the plot but there's much I loved about this book, including the setting of NYC (although large parts are set in Vegas and Amsterdam), family dynamics, found family, the world and underworld of art. 

There were parts I didn't care for- like that whole stint in Vegas, holy cow; this isn't a light-hearted book by any means- but there are many sentences in this book that simply took my breath away. I would call this a modern classic, one that centers around a small painting from the 1650s. “You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”

How is this week looking for you? Any breaks/vacations? Any baking? Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it!