Sprinkles Biscotti

I'm somewhat in denial.

My little cousin is a college student. After graduating high school last spring, Carly is now a Freshman at Gonzaga. How did this happen?

I swear she was only recently that little girl who sent ME care packages (with Nonni's help) when I was away at Central. I even still have the paper fall wreath she made me.

Like it or not, it's now her turn to be away for school. So of course I had to send her a care package. Right away I knew I wanted to send her some cookies like my mom used to send me. Obviously the cookies had to have sprinkles in them. This is where my 24/7 Food Network-watching came in handy: one of the network's newer stars is a food blogger and cook named Molly Yeh and she's just as obsessed with sprinkles as Carly is. She even made Sprinkles Biscotti in an episode of her show Girl Meets Farm, something I immediately decided to eventually make for Carly (why not the birthday that followed, I'm not sure). They seem like the kind of cookie that travels well.

Coffee Chocolate Chip Biscotti

I feel like I've given biscotti to almost every family member who I give baked goods to as a gift. OK, so this is an exaggeration: there are still a few to check off the list. Specifically, the one person I hadn't yet made it for is the one I wanted to: Chiara. My September Girl. I felt almost obligated. So I decided that's what I would make for her for her birthday this year.

As for the flavor, I didn't want to do a fall flavor. I didn't want to repeat the ones I'd done before and wasn't sure if she liked maple. There is one other flavor that she loves: coffee. You know all those memes and mugs that say things like "I can't function until I've had at least 2 cups of coffee"? Yeah, that's Chiara.

I wasn't sure if it would be easy to find a coffee-flavored biscotti recipe. After all, it's a cookie that is often eaten with a cup of coffee. Starbucks even has individually wrapped biscotti at their cash registers. Still, I was able to find one on Food.com, a site that posts recipes submitted by readers.

Pumpkin White Chocolate Chip Cookies

Every year the Seattle Passport Agency holds a Passport Day, where the lobby is open on a Saturday for applicants who might not be able to apply for a passport during the week. It's a good opportunity for overtime (one I didn't take advantage of last year) despite being on a weekend. As I've done for previous Saturday overtimes, I decided to bake something to help us get through the somewhat long day (we clock in earlier on these days but also clock out earlier). Because it's officially fall, I decided on something with pumpkin. After a lot of searching (I had eggs to use up, so I was a bit picky this time), I finally chose a pumpkin cookie recipe from Dear Crissy.

Lemon Yogurt Cookies

I've noticed that lemon is a bit of an Italian flavor. So to me it made sense to find a lemon recipe for my Italian family to enjoy while on vacation. I chose a cookie recipe from one of my cookies and bars cookbooks. This one had an ingredient I had never used before: yogurt. Still, I figured it'd be easy to find. Lemon's gotta be a yogurt flavor that all stores have right?

Nope! The only lemon yogurts that Target has are Greek, which I was aware would change the flavor. So to avoid changing it for the worse, I went to Safeway after putting my groceries away at home. They tend to have a lot more flavor options of certain items. Fortunately, yogurt ended up being one of those items. Now all I had left to do was make the cookies.

Blonde Beauties (S'mores Blondies)

Last year I decided to make M&M cookies for Chelan since Nonni wasn't going to be able to make them. I ended up making two other types of cookies as well. Since they were such a hit (I had all three containers empty and clean by Wednesday of our week, if I remember correctly), I figured I'd repeat that this year. Other than the family-favorite M&M cookies, I chose two flavors that I was pretty sure the family would love: s'mores and lemon. After looking through my s'mores recipe book, I picked a s'mores blondie bar.