WE ARE WELL! And now that I have dared to type that, I will spend the rest of the day sanitizing my hands, taking swigs straight from the echinacea bottle, and knocking on every piece of wood within a one-mile radius of my person.

And it’s the holidays! Right! A couple of weeks ago, during a reprieve between viruses, my mother, June, and I managed to bake a double batch of Russian Tea Cakes, a cookie that my mother used to make every year when I was a kid, back when she and our family friend Barbara Fretwell would hole up together in the weeks before Christmas and churn out eight or ten kinds of cookies and candies to pack in decorative tins and distribute to lucky friends around town.

I’ve written before about some of the recipes that my mother and Barbara used, like Chocolate Rads, Espresso-Walnut Toffee, and Fruit-Nut Balls. There were also cranberry-pistachio biscotti, and chocolate-dipped pecan bars with shortbread crust, and a cookie called an Apricot Crescent, with cream cheese-enriched dough and apricot jam inside. They even made mendiants. Opening one of their tins was like looking inside my mother’s jewelry box, rows and piles of color and shine. Maybe next year, I’ll tell you about their Linzer Cookies, the best Linzer specimen I’ve had. But they’re fiddly, and though Mom and I did manage to make some last week, I didn’t take pictures and instead wound up taking a nap. Russian Tea Cakes are easier, even if you’re short on time, energy, and/or holiday spirit, and they’re something that even a two-year-old could help with, sort of, if she doesn’t eat all the dough first.

I imagine you’ve heard of Russian Tea Cakes. They also go by the name Mexican Wedding Cookies, and probably some other names, too. Sometimes, to be frank, when I run across them out in the world, I don’t think Russian Tea Cakes are all that great. Some taste mostly of sugar, or worse, of flour. This makes me cranky. A Russian Tea Cake should be rich, tender, melting almost instantly when you bite into it. As holiday cookie recipes go, this one is plain, bare-bones: just six ingredients, a mixer, maybe 15 minutes to mix up the dough, maybe 15 minutes to roll the cookies, maybe 10 minutes to roll them in powdered sugar. But the return on investment is impressive: these things are so delicate, so buttery, so nutty, that people get grabby in their presence. They’re nothing new, no, but there’s a good reason why we still make them.

The recipe my mother uses was given to her by someone named Nettie Maxwell, the wife of a physician who was once in practice with my dad, and I have a xerox of it, written in Nettie’s looping old-lady script. While I would like to think that Nettie’s version is unique, there are tons of recipes out there for Russian Tea Cakes, and most are very similar to hers. I don’t think any of us can take credit. Nettie used pecans, so Mom and I do, too; it feels like the Oklahoma thing to do. But you could try any other nut: hazelnuts, walnuts, even macadamias.

Happy holidays to you and yours! 2014 marked the tenth year of this site, and I’ve had more fun here, and felt more fired up, than I had in a long time. I hope you felt it, too. I’m looking forward to 2015. In the meantime, we’re closing Delancey and Essex for two weeks to give ourselves and our staff a good, solid vacation. I’m hoping to do some writing and brainstorming, though I may just, I don’t know, take a vacation. Maybe. In any case, thank you for another year! I’ll see you soon.