Belladonnastrap

With an extra shot of espresso to get you through the rest of 2020.

Lilith has been obsessed with making hot chocolate bombs for weeks. She lost the instructions, but she was determined to make them anyway. We don’t have a double boiler, so she made a makeshift one. Lilith got impatient and decided to microwave the chocolate chips, and then she got distracted and wandered off.

It’s a total disaster, but the house smells great.

Because it’s amazing.

A spicy Sicilian lemon-frosted cookie filled with Calimyrna figs, dried dates, orange peel, dark rum, and almond paste.

An extra-sweet vanilla peppermint for an extra-sour year.

Ho ho ho: black leather, gingerbread, clove, and tobacco.

Pulled from a stack of recipes I keep in a folder called “Things I Will Never Be Skilled Enough to Bake.”

Soft poofs of chilled marshmallow.

Red mandarin dusted with frost.

With brown sugar, nutmeg, and walnuts.

Plumes of olibanum, cassia chips, benzoin, storax, and myrrh smoke swirling around a stained-glass pane of red pomegranate, purple currant, and golden amber.

Erupting with pomegranate jelly with a touch of cranberry and red currant.

Cherrywood, frankincense, amber, red berries, cherries, white rose petals, and myrrh.

Morning rising in mourning grey: tobacco flower, white oud, lavender bud, and ambergris accord.

A radiant inferno of blood orange, sheer amber, tangerine, clove husk, red cedarwood, and red myrrh bursting against jagged peaks of black pine, fir needle, and snow-white musk.

Bulgarian lavender, white tea, and pine smoke in a haze of snowfall.

Indigo musk, blackened lilac, wild plum rind, opium tar, tobacco flower, and snow.

Hay, white peach, opalescent musk, orris root, pink carnation, osmanthus, and rooibos.

Mountains of ice jutting through an iridescent pool of peach musk, fir needle, immortelle, white moss, crystalline turquoise musk, juniper sap, apricot rind, fleur de sel, white rose, misty orris root, and white amber.

Roman chamomile, golden ti leaf, and crystallized amber illuminating blackened vetiver and smoky oud.

Blue lilac, winter narcissus, snowdrop petals, ambergris accord, white musk, ambrette seed, and wisteria.

A bundle of roasted chestnut, oak bark, sawdust, balsam, and warm brown musk against a backdrop of white sandalwood, orris butter, and juniper.

Vivid red musk streaked with sleet, hearthsmoke, a glimmer of lemon rind and yellow amber, and oak-aged whiskey.

Crumbling marble under a blanket of snow, echoes of incense smoke, and crushed frankincense tears.

Icy water cascading over smooth, mossy stones and a trickle of hearth smoke in the distance.