Saving The Holidays, one macaroon at a time

Long ago, when Seattlest was growing up, our most eagerly anticipated holiday gift came not from Santa, but from one of our neighbors. It was the size of a baseball and twice as heavy, rolled in nuts, wrapped in festive red cellophane, and meant to be spread on crackers. It was a homemade cheese ball. The fun, however, was not in its consumption, but rather its destruction. Each year, with our mother’s blessing, we held the cheese ball high in the air, still wrapped securely in its shiny packaging, and with a spirited leap and an airborne split, we gleefully sent the thing plunging to the floor.

This is why Seattlest thinks twice about giving edible holiday gifts. When they’re good, they’re very good, and when they’re bad, they’re horrid. This sad fact puts us in a bind, because aside from expensive electronics, sparkly things, and all-expenses-paid vacations, some of our favorite presents are the ones we can eat. Faced with this gloomy situation, we have two options: sit back and resign ourselves to a future of cheese balls, or take up arms, knives, and spatulas and counter with something not only edible, but enjoyable.

Because we love you, Seattle, and because we love making things, gosh darn it, we’re making it our mission to, over the next three weeks, bring you three certifiably delicious ideas for edible holiday gifts. Sure, you could in join the hustle and bustle and hop from store to store, buying this and that for him or her, but Seattlest humbly suggests that you join us in the kitchen instead, where parking is easy and Kenny G’s new Christmas album is blissfully hard to come by.

This year, we’re starting with a little hometown pride and a large batch of macaroons à la Dahlia Bakery. We’ve long haunted the modest, pretty storefront on 4th Avenue, and we never mind standing in line for a few of those all-too-fleeting coconut confections, but when we want our macaroons by the dozen, we turn to Tom’s Big Dinners and, with it, the recipe. For the holidays, we get our macaroons in-house, and without taking off our slippers. Toasty, chewy, and very coconutty, the Tom Douglas macaroon is literally lighter than air, with a thin, crispy crust that gives way to an astoundingly fluffy interior. And their resemblance to dirty—but delectable!—snowballs makes them a shoo-in for the season, not to mention much tastier for pitching to the neighbors.