It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

The Vanillahoernchen are traditional in our house - shortbread with ground almonds, rolled in icing sugar once they're baked. The speculaas are my first attempt at using the mould I bought in Alsace in 1986 or so - they are very crispy but nicely spiced, and great dunked into coffee.

As for the Stollen - Thomas made a double recipe, knowing that we would quickly eat one of the loaves - delicious! We managed to get the rising time right, and the lemon glaze adds a little sharpness to the raisiny egginess of the dough.

With all this comes memories of my mother's annual christmas-cookie bakeathons, filling container after container - cookies baked at the start of December and eaten well into the new year. Cocos-makaronen, schwarz-weiss gebaeck, pfeffernusse, lebkuchen (ah the lebkuchen!), spritzgebaeck, anisplatzchen - and of course the ones made with cookie cutters and decorated with coloured glaze and sprinkles...

The star shapes and the hearts were the favourites.