We love buying holiday gifts for our favorite foodies. Food is the most fun thing to shop for, whether we’re scoring some of Ina Garten’s favorite ingredients on Amazon, or buying a fun Food Network-themed gift for our Barefoot Contessa-obsessed friends. So, when Garten herself mentions the holiday gift she’s obsessed with, you know we can’t resist.
Now, one of the things we know and love about Garten is the fact that she loves simple things that are made with the utmost care and the best ingredients. It doesn’t have to be fancy or elaborate to be good, something Garten makes evident in her own recipes both on television and in her cookbooks. So, we weren’t too surprised to learn that her idea of a perfect holiday gift is a bag of simple shortbread cookies from the famous French bakery Poilâne.
The cookies, called Les Punitions, or “little punishments,” are anything *but* punishing. In fact, they sound downright pleasurable, a blend of wheat flour, butter, sugar, and eggs, baked until golden and crisp.
The bakery sells several varieties of the shortbread cookies, including spoon-shaped biscuits that are the perfect accompaniment to coffee, cocoa, and tea, and Christmas ornament cookies that you can actually string into a garland.
But for Garten, their ultimate offering is the cookie tin, which comes stuffed with 900 grams (almost 2 pounds) of buttery punitions cookies.
Garten may love the cookies, but she also points out that the “beautiful hand-painted tin” can be used as decoration or for storage even after you’ve finished your “punishment.”
Now, if $56 feels a little steep to you for a present of cookies, you can opt for a smaller package, albeit one that comes without a cookie tin. A 300 gram (about 2/3 of a pound) bag of Les Punitions is just $11.87.
Of course, you could also just try your hand at baking Garten’s own shortbread cookie recipe. Her cookies are dipped in chocolate for an extra-fancy flair.
Either way, I think we can all agree that when it comes to holiday cookies, Ina Garten knows what’s up.
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