If dessert is a dilemma, pair a treat with coffee or sweet wine. Share your suggestions.

If dessert is a dilemma, pair a treat with coffee or sweet wine.

The aperitif hour enables us to review the day and anticipate dinner. But the sweet treat at the end of a meal - a biscuit or wafer with a sweeter-style wine - seems a vanishing pleasure.

I recall the children's poem, "Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse," but then memory fails me but for "visions of sugarplums danced" somewhere. Sugarplums sound luscious and exciting - when I found a US recipe (in an old issue of Saveur magazine), I had to try them. They need no cooking at all and are a perfect way to combine dried fruit with almonds.

From Spain come borrachuelos, feather-light, orange-scented fried wafers - dust them with icing sugar and cinnamon or pile them on a platter to crunch with a creamy dessert
In Florence, pastry shops carry a bewildering array of small, baked biscotti, each distinctively flavoured, some round, some cut as fingers, some in rings, some sweet and some savoury, some twice-cooked. The most famous biscotti of all - from the town of Prato, not far from Florence - are sold packaged in a rich, cobalt-blue paper bag and tied with blue string.

My recipe, from an Italian friend's mother, produces delectable biscotti. If you cannot face a dessert, have a small glass of vin santo ("holy wine") and a plate of biscotti di Prato for dunking.

Vin santo is made from grapes that are hung to dry for months, then crushed to yield a small amount of astonishingly intense juice that is aged in barrels before blending and bottling. Look for it at good local wine stores.