After completely overdoing it with the holiday biscotti, cookies, brownies, pie, cupcakes, and other assorted desserts, I declared that I wouldn't bake any more desserts from January 2 until February 1. It took me ten days to break that rule.

I had some friends over for dinner, and I just had to make a birthday dessert for one of them. Good enough excuse, no?

I made this &lt;a href="http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&amp;recipe_id=1673138"&gt;Bourbon-Pecan Tart&lt;/a&gt; entirely with ingredients I had in my pantry (yes, I even had some Trader Joe's prefab pie crust in the freezer -- left over from the holidays). It took about 15 minutes to prep plus baking, cooling, chocolate-drizzling and more cooling time. Easy peasy. And it impressed the heck out of my lady friends.