Iced cookies. Every child’s dream—according to the rate at which my kids put back every frosted cookie they’ve ever seen. I don’t make iced cookies very often. Usually, we like our cookies just shy of indulgent; you can justify eating more of them that way (yes?). Come the holidays, though, all bets are off. What’s a cookie box without a little frosting?

I didn’t grow up with snickerdoodles. My mom was a chocolate chip purist, with crispy iced sugar cookies in perfect shapes thrown in for holidays—-but a good snickerdoodle reminds me so much of the chew of my grandmother’s soft sugar cookies, which she kept in a red-ear-tipped kitty cookie jar on her kitchen counter (which now sits on mine).

By definition, a snickerdoodle’s “flourish” is it’s cinnamon sugar coating, so there’s little need for more. Snickerdoodles tend to loose their luster on holiday spreads, though; they’re a bit, brown, ya know? Why not frost them? And then add more cinnamon sugar? After all, many of us have elves to feed.

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Last month, we took our kiddos up the mountain to fish and shoot bows. It was a sparkling fall day, crunchy leaves and just enough breeze to make it feel like legitimate sweater weather. Matyas caught a fish. Greta got a bullseye. I got my feet wet. As in, really wet. In all the excitement of trying to help Matyas reel in his first ever fish (read: BIG excitement!), I walked right into the pond.

We had planned to go out for cider donuts afterward, but wet feet foiled our after-party. We detoured straight for home, everyone’s sweet tooth still kicked into high gear. There were words. Some boys (and grown men) don’t deal well with disappointment.

You shouldn’t feel too bad for them—we’ve had our fair share of excellent apple cider donuts this season. But when I ran into a Bourbon Bundt Cake recipe that looked wildly tender, it struck me as an easy remake: cider donut vibes, but with tender chunks of apple baked in. Good news—it worked (!), maybe a little too well. We ate the whole cake in one sitting.

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I’m a bundt girl. Like, if my twenties were three-layer sponge cakes with silky butter creams and fresh cascading flowers, the following decade has been more bundt—still beautiful, but wildly unfussy—the kind of cake that turns heads with its smarts, as well as its style.

There have been plenty of layer cake holidays in my years— and years for epic bouche de noels with lovingly crafted meringue mushrooms— but this year I’m craving something a bit fairy tale, like Christmas in Brugge or a small German village. A cake that’s more Hansel and Gretel than Marie Antoinette.

Enter this all-butter-bundt, flecked with chocolate and spiked with whiskey. It’s tender and moist, but with enough structure that it can be wrapped and gifted to neighbors and friends in the days ahead. A brown-paper-package tied up with string, with the heady aroma of chocolate—that, to me, is Christmas.

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