My Italian grandma used to make the best desserts for Easter and Christmas. Grandmothers just have a way of cooking that no one can duplicate. She made fantastic pizza, so simple and yet no one can reproduce it. She made anise cookies and honey cartellate (“cart wheels”) for Christmas:
Those cookies are good with anything! I need to make some soon. I can’t imagine some people not liking anise flavoring, but I know there are those who just don’t like it. Kind of like black licorice or molasses. I love both, some people can’t stand either.
I know! What is wrong with them?! (The people that don’t like licorice, not your grandparents, lol.) Oh well, more for us!
I am actually making my husband a box of anise cookies for Valentine’s Day.
I’d say it’s about a 6 on the pain-in-the-butt scale. Not too bad. The worst part is you have to separate each paper-thin phyllo sheet and brush butter on every other one. It’s a lot of buttering and the sheets are very fragile. But it’s not as time consuming as the delicious fig-filled cookies I made at Christmas.
Yumm-eee! Those remind me of baked leftover pie crust. You ever bake the fragments of pie crust left over from your pie, then put honey on them? Mmmm. You can scarf on those while you wait for the pie to come out of the oven.
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