posting meme: favorite thing to bake or cook

musesfool prompted: what's your favorite thing to bake or cook?

That's a hard question. I don't actually do either as a hobby, really, and since I live alone most of my cooking is utilitarian, like stews that reheat without fuss, so I can cook once and eat it several days, without doing complicated meal planning for optimal ingredient utilization. I'm not bad at it, and I can cook more complicated things (vegetarian ones at least) but I usually don't bother.

It's more fun when somebody else also eats the food, but I have no practice at complicated timing for elaborate menus and that gets stressful fast, so I have no real interest in hosting dinner parties.

So I guess I'm going with Christmas bakery. I usually bake a fair amount of classic Christmas cookies that are well received by family and friends, and most years I also make stollen. My personal favorite are probably Elisenlebkuchen. I just use the recipe that came with my food processor. I posted a translated recipe some years ago, it's the first of the two in this post, though recently I've mostly made them chocolate covered rather than lemon glazed.

(If you want to prompt me there are still open days.)