Our top 5 grocery list items are usually milk, pasta, eggs, bananas and yogurt.

This time of year, I buy a lot of butter because I like to bake holiday cookies, especially when my son is home to help eat them.

A few years ago we were gifted a large jug of real maple syrup from a friend’s farm in Vermont and I discovered a great maple cookie recipe on sallysbakingaddiction.com (a wonderful website for free baking recipes). These maple brown sugar cookies are delicious and moist. (I’m allergic to tree nuts, so I make them without the pecans and they’re still delicious.) The icing is reminiscent of maple sugar candy. If you grew up in New England, you probably remember begging your parents for a maple leaf like this from a tourist gift shop in New Hampshire, Vermont or upstate NY:

The dough needs to be chilled for a few hours before baking and highly recommend the parchment paper method she describes, including banging the cookie sheet when first out of the oven to get these nice crinkles. 

The only catch is that the recipe calls for maple extract (in addition to vanilla extract), which is not available in most grocery stores. I had to order some from Amazon. I’ve never made these cookies without the maple extract. I think it may be a key ingredient. The other key ingredient is, of course, real maple syrup. It’s in both the cookie dough and the icing – a third of a cup in each.