I’ve always thought of Valentine’s Day as a particularly elegant holiday, less about cards and candy hearts and red ribbon and more about stylish, graceful desserts served on your best china with a cup of tea. This recipe satisfies that desire and takes advantage of peak season for an underappreciated fruit.

Pears are considered a late-fall, early-winter fruit, which means pear season is…right now! Although there are many varieties of pear, for our Pear and Honey Ricotta Tart with Walnuts, we like easy-to-find Bartlett pears, known for their sweet, juicy flesh and delicate pear flavor.

I’ll be honest, I’m only recently learning to work with puff pastry, but I’m finding it quite a pleasure. If you’re unfamiliar with it, buy it frozen and thaw a single sheet overnight in the refrigerator. When you’re ready, place the sheet of pastry on a pastry cloth or board and cut it in half lengthwise so that each piece measures 10” x 5”.  The pastry pieces may require a bit of shaping with a rolling pin to extend them to the desired size. With that done, the scoring process is simply marking a half-inch border around each piece of puff pastry.

It’s December, and therefore the season of shopping, wrapping, decorating, mailing and hurrying is upon me. I barely have time for my “need-to-do” list just as my “want-to-do” and “nice-to-do” lists sprout wings!

I did find a solution for a favorite “want-to-do” — baking pretty Christmas cookies. I fell in love with Martha Stewart’s Lace Cookies at first sight for these reasons:

1. They look simple yet elegant and the warm caramel color and enticing aroma evoke sweet memories.
2. There are only five ingredients. You read correctly, just honey, butter, light brown sugar, flour and a pinch of salt.  All available right now on my pantry shelf, so no shopping! 
3. I mixed and baked a batch in less than 20 minutes.
4. The clean-up is easy because the recipe only asks for one small pan to melt the butter, brown sugar and honey, a bowl to stir in the flour and salt, and two parchment-lined baking sheets.

Of course, I especially appreciate the flavor because with Buzz Savories single-source, artisanal honey, I can taste the flowers of summer as I smell the sweetness of the honey in the warm cookie. It’s the kind of cookie that makes holiday entertaining easy.

So, just a bit of advice extra from me: acquire a local honey to experience the full opulence of these cookies. And buy your honey here.

Few things in life return such delight for their simplicity than fresh-from-the-oven Baking Powder Biscuits and Buzz Savories artisanal Nebraska wildflower honey.

Honey is one of those things that has a terroir — that is, the taste of the product is influenced by the environment in which it is produced. In our case, the terroir reflects the unique nectars produced by the flowers in a one-and-a-half-mile radius of the colony.  Buzz Savories’ bees sip nectar from wild plum blossoms, chokecherry, elderberry, clover, alfalfa, golden rod, and the tiny flowers of blue stem grasses in the Platte River Valley, to create its unique taste.

Did you know that big honey producers blend honey from hives across the country? While this lends consistency to their finished product, the unique tastes of Nebraska or any other specific region is lost.

Why not make a batch of our Baking Powder Biscuits and try them with our all-natural, artisanal, single-hive, wildflower Buzz Savories Honey for brunch or afternoon tea or a late-evening snack? It’s hard-to-beat goodness made easy.