FOR ONE EDITOR’S FAMILY, HOLIDAY
BAKING UNITES THE GENERATIONS.
MY PARENTS’ KITCHEN IN CHICAGO ALWAYS SMELLS LIKE CHOCOLATE. THAT’S WHERE MY MOM
can usually be found, wearing ripped jeans and a T-shirt piled with turquoise snake neck-
laces, caramelizing sugar or shaping dough as cookies bake in the oven.
My mom’s love of cookies developed early. She grew up making mandel bread, an Eastern
European cookie that’s like a softer, sweeter, Jewish version of biscotti, with her grandmother.
Eventually she taught me how to make it, too, studded with chocolate and sprinkled with
cinnamon (recipe p. 128). She taught me how to make florentines and financiers, macaroons
and macarons, stroopwafels and whoopie pies.
When I was 5, we learned that my youngest brother, Matthew, had an anaphylactic allergy
to wheat. It was the late ’90s, and gluten-free offerings at grocery stores consisted of sandy
bread and rock-hard muffins. So my mom developed her own gluten-free versions of my
family’s favorite sweets—everything from Thin Mints to Oreo cookies. We loved the giant
chocolate meringues from Charlie Trotter’s takeaway spot, Trotter’s To Go. Although they
were gluten-free, the kitchen was full of cross-contamination. My mom begged the pastry