Nothing says "Christmas" like butter, sugar, salt and chocolate.

They are indeed the 4 most important food groups of the holiday season and my yearly, festive baking brings them all together in the form of my chocolate dipped shortbread Christmas trees and chocolate dipped pretzels.

SHORTBREAD

The shortbread recipe is courtesy of me ma; who's been making it every Christmas as long as I can remember:

Ingredients:

1 Cup Butter, softened
1 ½ cups unbleached flour and ½ cup rice flour
½ cup icing sugar
¼ tsp. salt
1 tsp vanilla

Method:

Mix dry ingredients into the softened butter
Add the vanilla
Form the dough into a ball, flatten it to about 1” and wrap in plastic wrap
Chill ½ hour
Roll out, cut into shapes and decorate. (As you can see, I make mine into trees and use green sprinkles liberally)
Bake at 350 until only slightly golden on the bottom, about 10 minutes (depending on the size of the cookie, of course!)
CHOCOLATE TIME (this is my addition to the recipe): Once the cookies are cool I like to dip the bottoms of the trees into dark/milk chocolate for the "tree trunks" and then after that sets, dip the tops into white chocolate for snow covered tips, I also add additional sprinkles to the white tips to make them sparkly :)

Notes from my mom:

You may need to add ¼ - ½ cup more flour in order to make a stiff batter
This recipe is adapted from my (her) go-to cookbook, The Joy of Cooking
The changes I (she) made were:
- I add vanilla and sometimes I use some rice flour
- Instead of cooking it as a slab with fork marks I roll it out and use cut outs.

PRETZELS

It's not rocket science; you melt chocolate in a double boiler, dip in the pretzels, let them set on some parchment paper, done!

This year I had some extra white chocolate from the trees so I made a "piping bag" out of a plastic bag and did some striping with the white chocolate over the milk/dark chocolate and even added some sprinkles to some them to give them that extra pop of special-ness :)