Chocolate-Dipped Florentines

December does something to the kitchen. The light goes early, the windows steam up by four o'clock, and there's a quiet pull to make things you wouldn't bother with the rest of the year. Florentines belong to that moment. They're a Christmas biscuit and only a Christmas biscuit, and there's no good reason for that except habit, which is reason enough.

They look like they ought to be difficult. The bakery window kind, all neat circles and combed chocolate, give the impression of something fiddly and professional. They're not. You melt butter and syrup in a pan, stir in some almonds and chopped fruit, and let the oven turn the whole thing into a lace biscuit. The chocolate goes on at the end. It's the sort of recipe that takes longer to read than to make.

The candied peel matters. Buy the good stuff, the proper chunks in syrup from a deli or a decent supermarket, not the gritty plastic tubs of mixed peel that taste of nothing. Same goes for the cherries. You want fruit you'd happily eat on its own. A florentine is mostly the things you put in it, so what you put in it had better be worth tasting.

I make a batch every year, somewhere between the carols and the cards, and pack them into an old tin lined with greaseproof. Half get given away. The other half disappear before Christmas Eve. I wrote it down in the notebook once: almonds, cherries, peel, December. Some things only need that much explanation.