This banana bread is simple, moist, deeply flavored, delicious…and made in one bowl! It’s a recipe I have memorized because we make it once a week. We eat one loaf for snack and the other for breakfast the next day.
Below is the brown sugar riff — a recent favorite — but there are loads of ways to vary the texture and flavor working with inspiration and what you have on hand. There’s a guide in the notes section to help with that.
Here’s a cookie chock full of chunky texture. They aren’t much to look at, but yeesh they are addictive. The soft oatmeal cookie base barely holds together an abundance of shredded coconut, pecans, and butterscotch and chocolate chips. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, these make a lovely dessert, but an even better breakfast! Bake them soon, eat them by the dozens.
An elegant classic, this tart features a buttery shortbread crust and deeply flavorful salted caramel filling. You probably won’t believe me when I say it’s simple to make, but believe me, it is. It’s a quick fridge-and-pantry-staples raid, I-need-a-dessert-to-bring-to-dinner type dessert that’s just a tad more upscale than a pan of brownies.
These cookies are meant to be pressed into a mold, but I don’t have one. I opt to roll and cut them out like sugar cookies (actually, I always make these with my kids the same day as those). These are a humble cookie, but if you love spice cookies like I do (I often laugh at how many variations of spice cookies I have in my yearly list), these will find a spot in your own holiday baking, not only for their warm, comforting flavor, but also for their being a cinch to make!
A few years ago, I started baking several different cookies leading up to Christmas, freezing them as I went. The goal was to have a stockpile of beautiful cookies to pull out on Christmas, give to friends, bring to gatherings, and enjoy throughout the Twelve Days of Christmas. Each year, I try to rein in the near absurd amount of cookies I plan to make, but the list of keepers continues to grow…
A while back, I shared a recipe for Raspberry Oat Bars that were quickly becoming a favorite breakfast/snack bar in our home. In fact, they’re made so frequently that the recipe has become lazier — ahem! — modified over time into something far more streamlined, just as tasty and worthy to be shared.
A creamy lightly-spiced cauliflower soup with robust flavor from toasted almonds, slight heat from harissa-infused browned butter and a bright earthiness from a sprinkling of dill as garnish. I think you’ll love this warm earthy soup in the winter months!
These easy-to-make bars come together quickly and are a favorite grab n’ go snack around here. There’s something about the simple combination of peanut butter, butter, honey and oats, studded with dried cranberries and topped with a drizzle of chocolate and a sprinkling of flaky sea salt that is just so satisfying.
These chocolate cherry almond biscotti were good enough to pull me out of sluggish apathy this morning and finally revive a blog wallowing in abandonment for over a year. Well, abandoned by us as bloggers, but not as bakers. We continue to reference this blog for our favorite shared recipes on a weekly, if not daily, basis. And it looks like many of you reading this do the same! We thank you all for continuing to follow along for the past year, even when new content was scarce. After a long break I think we’re ready to start posting regularly again…just in time for the holidays!
Backstory: In high school, we spent just over a month living in Trastevere for my dad’s work, and there was this bakery where we would get cakes. One of these cakes, I still fantasize about today. It was a mysterious creamy cake studded with chocolate chips.
As much as I love Ottolenghi’s savory recipes for their dynamic flavor profiles, so much do I love his sweet recipes for their subtlety and finesse. Just like his Oat Cranberry Almond Cookies, these Peanut Sandies have flavor without being in your face. They perfectly balance butter with peanut, sweet with salty, not one element outshining the other. The texture is delicate and crumbles away in your mouth. They are, in a word, a delight.
This recipe is a very humble one, but much beloved. We all look forward to zucchini season so that we can make this! Delicious as a side to a cookout (or other meal), it also makes for a good meatless main course served on its own with a large salad and maybe a watermelon.
For some reason, whenever we use ricotta around here, it always seems we have a little leftover. Rarely is the whole container is completely used up. But, happily, this phenomenon led me to this recipe which is so tasty, I buy ricotta now just to bake it up.
This month brings yet another installment of The Well-Stocked Kitchen, a series of posts in which we take a virtual tour through our kitchens and name off the items we reach for day after day, those gadgets and doodads that make cooking and baking that much easier, and enjoyable.
I’ve shared before my love for galette. It is so elegant and pretty without demanding too much work. It is a blank canvas for any creative cooking inspiration. It is hardly ever a dud, thanks to the nearly fail-proof flaky, rich crust that ties it all together. This ham, potato, and cheese variation was intended to be a crowd pleaser (with children particularly in mind), a departure from my usual veggie laden galettes. A classic flavor combo, it was a big hit, no surprise.
This is kind of a crossover between two cookie classics—Keebler’s Magic Middles and Hershey’s Secret Kiss cookies.
Before you ask me, “Why another white sandwich bread recipe?”, let me ask you: do you ever have leftover mashed potatoes going bad in your fridge because no one wants to eat them? Or do you ever have that last bit of buttermilk that you can’t find a use for? And if you said no to both of those, then how about this: Why NOT another white sandwich bread recipe? Especially when it is a supremely soft, voluminous loaf, with a little more chew than your standard white and a bit more flavor profile from the buttermilk, This is a glorious loaf of bread. If you have enough restraint to let it cool completely before slicing, it makes for wonderful sandwiches and even better toast.
I love these cookies. They are the perfect snack cookies that are sweet enough to satisfy a craving, but not sweet enough to make you think you’re over doing it on any regular old day. And they are so yummy! And satisfying! To be honest, I’m finding myself baking these up every other week or so.
My husband eats chips and salsa like I eat popcorn: after the children have gone to sleep, in peace and quiet, as a way to unwind and relax. I churn out a batch of my simple salsa about once a week, but sometimes I’ll go off road a bit and do a salsa verde or a roasted red salsa or add something fun like black beans or corn or whatever. Usually it is a function of whatever I have in my kitchen. This salsa was something I threw together because of a couple poblanos getting a little soft in my fridge. Since the elements are broiled and charred, it has a much deeper flavor than my usual, which is quite bright and acidic. The product is delicious, but the method is dead simple and lends itself to any amount of variation. Look through your fridge and be creative!
Have you had bok choy? I never did until we started growing vegetables for a living. It is well received at market, so it has become a spring staple. It is a Chinese cabbage that is delightfully crunchy, crisp at the bottom (sort of like celery) with dark, tasty leaves on top. It has the slightest hint of the spice you get from a turnip, a touch of bitter earthiness like kale, and the tender smoothness you get from spinach. It is also tastiest on the smaller side. Then it is much more tender and can be eaten raw, sliced into a salad or on its own. As it gets bigger and more mature, the bottom becomes much tougher and the flavor less delicate.
A rich vanilla buttermilk layer cake glazed with an amaretto syrup, filled with raspberry jam and topped with a lightly almond-flavored swiss meringue buttercream.
I love this cake, so much. It’s rich, and yet delicate. Sweet, but not too sweet. The flavors come together into a soft balance—just a touch of almond and a kiss of raspberry.
Wow, it’s been a while! Like, a whole year since we first began running this series. But we’re back at it again!
Maybe it’s all the extra time we’ve been spending in our kitchens lately as we social distance or maybe it’s just that time of year (weddings, showers) when kitchen supplies are on the mind. Either way, we’re picking up with part 4 of the well-stocked kitchen, a series in which we take a walk through our kitchens and name off what we consider some of our favorite and essential items for cooking and baking.
“We are a cinnamon roll people.”
Out of the mouths of babes. That was the proclamation of my four-year-old daughter mid-morning after recently making, and consuming, a large number of these indulgent cinnamon rolls.
For some time I have been wondering about putting this recipe up on the blog, since we already have a recipe for buttermilk potato cinnamon rolls and another one for pumpkin cinnamon rolls. But if you’re part of a “cinnamon roll people,” clearly you can’t have too many.
This recipe is great in so many ways. It uses up very ripe bananas (a nice switch up from banana bread), requires few ingredients that are almost always on hand, and is delicious.
A bakery cookie can come as a revelation, or it can be a dud.
I once got a chocolate chip cookie at a local bakery that, when I went to split with my 3yo daughter, shattered into a hundred dry and crumbly pieces. That was a dud.
Two years ago I wrote about our quick 2-day trip down to the Florida Keys, where I had my first and only Matheessen’s cookie. It was the size of my outstretched hand, big and soft and full of peanut butter flavor, topped with a slather of dense and chewy chocolate fudge. The man behind the counter explained how they used to top their peanut butter cookies with chocolate frosting, which proved a bit of a mess. The cookies stacked for display would stick together and the frosting would smear. Then one day the owner was inspired to take their housemade fudge and slather a bit on top just before it set. The resulting cookie was a revelation.
This cake is what dreams of springtime are made of. The cake is light and airy like angel food cake, but a bit sturdier, richer, and moister from the vegetable oil and egg yolks. Together with a light whipped cream frosting and sweet tart strawberries, each bite of this cake is a delight. It makes a really large cake that would be perfect for a gathering, but it also keeps really, which is how my family of six enjoyed it for a full three days. A cake like this is really adaptable: add zest to the cake to give it a citrus flavor, brush the cake with a flavored syrup or jam, use different fruits or no fruits at all! But in my opinion, nothing gets more classic than strawberries and cream and the textures suit the flavor profile perfectly.
If you’re into food novelties, these are for you.
Also, if you like convenient party food, these are for you.
This was a recipe I definitely did not mind testing. But though I tested (with LOTS of tasting), there’s still just a lot of wiggle room in the recipe. When you have a treat like chocolate peanut butter, it might as well be just to your taste. So please don’t be annoyed by my loosey-goosey ingredients list. Feel free to follow it to the letter the first time, but fiddle with it as you please! I really just want to empower you to just try making it, that’s all. And anyway, chocolate and peanuts? You can’t really mess it up.
Linzertorte is a traditional Austrian dessert sandwiching fruit preserves (typically raspberry) between a nut-based pastry and a beautiful lattice top. These raspberry oat bars are the happy result of a search for a linzertorte-like dessert without so much of the hassle, and without the nuts.
Oftentimes you’ll find a peanut butter pie with an Oreo crust…and believe me, you’d be hard pressed to find bigger fans of chocolate and peanut butter than we are! (See this chocolate peanut butter pie.) But for this concoction, I really wanted to let the peanut flavor shine. For that reason, a graham cracker crust is the best choice here. Its golden toasty notes are in harmony with the peanut butter. The heaviness of straight peanut butter is brightened by beating in cream cheese and lightened by folding in whipped cream. Topped with more whipped cream, and a sprinkling of chopped peanuts and shaved chocolate for just the slightest textural and flavorful contrast, if not a symphony of flavors, this creamy peanut butter pie is pretty darn delicious and easy to whip up.