Today, I baked up a batch of the most wonderful cookies. These cookies aren’t just regular chocolate chip cookies. The cookies are infused with the zest of an entire Cara Cara orange and turned out refreshingly chocolatey. To be honest, I love any baked treat infused with zest from citrus. Other than orange zest, I equally love infusing lemon zest into baked goods. Winter Storm Gia has continued to pile on tons of snow today. When I woke up in the morning, I peeked out the window to check the road conditions.

Today marks the first official full week of work for me since the holidays. I recently changed my work schedule and will need to wake up earlier to go to work. While I don’t typically drink coffee too often, I did pick up some instant coffee to bring with me to work in case I needed it. Over the weekend, I was craving a chocolate treat and wanted to incorporate some of the instant coffee I had at home into the treat.

While I was visiting family in Brooklyn this week, I woke up one morning and decided to bake some rainbow cereal cupcakes using some leftover Fruity Pebbles cereal sitting on my parents’ dining room table. The idea to combine cereal into a dessert came about after I visited Milk Bar for some ice cream and crunchy cereal topping with friends earlier in the week and ate a rainbow bagel from The Original Bagel Store after my older brother brought half a dozen over later during the week. Eating both of these items made me want to incorporate cereal into some sort of dessert.

A couple Christmases ago, my family and I started a tradition of building gingerbread houses on Christmas morning. The tradition started as a way to engage a few of us in a fun, approachable activity on Christmas morning while my parents were preparing food for the rest of the family. This was back in 2015, the year my younger brother, Yu, met his girlfriend, Audrey. Audrey was my sister-in-law, Steph’s cousin. Steph had wanted to bring Audrey over to celebrate Christmas with our family. We didn’t know Audrey too well, so we wanted to pick an approachable activity for everyone to partake in on Christmas morning.

Earlier this week, one of my colleagues brought in some white chocolate and pretzel bark to share with our office for the holidays. She packed a couple pieces in festive holiday bags and distributed them to people in our office. I was one of the lucky recipients of her white chocolate and pretzel bark. When I opened up the festive holiday bag and took a bite out of the bark, I could not stop myself from eating more. The bark had a perfect combination of crunchiness, creaminess, sweetness, and saltiness.