Baking

This is a perfect example of using the exalted Sugar Cookie as a launching pad. Once you’ve fussed around with it enough, you begin to understand its dormant qualities. What if you asked your brain what would happen if you had the foresight to roll a butter-taste-based batter around in a cinnamon-sugar mixture before baking? If your brain, schooled in the ways of the Sugar Cookie, answered that you’d get a wonderfully wrinkly explosion of the Snickerdoodle variety, you and your brain are well on your way to total cookie enlightenment.

This recipe is the foundation of a lifetime’s worth of holiday merriment, a blank but delicious canvas for you and your kids to customize until your hearts explode with happiness. By way of texture, I aimed for something traditionally crisp, playing up the flakiness and butter-tinged richness. Just roll out the dough; they’re a cinch. In general, just about any flourish you can imagine to add to the top—sprinkles? Gummi bears? frosting?!—will complement this cookie with a little density. There’s a photograph on page 46, so you know what you’re working with.

For the longest time, I might have been the only person in the tristate area completely oblivious to the beautiful oversize black-and-white cookies found in every bodega from Brooklyn to the Bronx. Have you had one? Me, I was never allowed because of my food sensitivities, of course. So when I went to the kitchen and started brainstorming ideas for iconic cookies, this was one of the first ones I tackled. Prepare to be bathed in the sweet comfort of vanilla-chocolate overload.

I’m a lady who unabashedly prefers her cookies thin, chewy, and intoxicatingly buttery. If I want a hunk of cake, I go for the cake section. This isn’t to say, however, that the preeminent cookie of my youth was not the mighty and comparatively meaty Chips Ahoy! And not those late-issue, M&M–flecked monstrosities, either. I’m talking the real-deal original flavor, in all their dry and crumbly wonder. This is my version of that wonderfully named cookie.

I’m Catholic by birth. Winter to us means Lent, which, to be honest, is about all I remember beyond the school uniforms. Anytime winter/Lent rolled around, the only thing we could count on was the house-wide hostility that would mount as we spent several weeks avoiding sweets and desserts in all their overindulgent forms. The colder months, you might recall, make up Girl Scout cookie season. In a unique show of torture, rather than simply not placing an order with the Scouts, our family bought a bunch, tossed them into the freezer, and stored them until Easter—about two months later. This recipe is for all you lifetime gluten-free folks who have never been able to enjoy a winter of Girl Scout Thin Mints—and for all you weak-willed kids who can’t help but break the Lenten period of atonement. Bless your hearts!

Not everyone has time to sit down to a plate of waffles or crepes made from scratch every morning. Before you ask who would even want to do such a thing, I will go ahead and say that I would, actually. But I hear what you’re saying. Granola is a wonderful alternative to a proper sit-down breakfast—a naturally light and easy choice that is as satisfying as any other baked breakfast item. When traveling, I pack this in a little baggie so I don’t starve to death when the flight attendants clink down the aisles offering sodium-soaked chips or dried-up cookies.

So you went and invited everyone over for brunch one fateful Sunday morning. Sunday! The day you ordinarily sleep until eleven, don’t bother to wash your hair or change out of your pajamas, and end up watching TV upside down on the couch with newspapers and gossip mags strewn all over the floor. Tsk-tsk—it doesn’t sound to me like you’re quite ready for that hostess habit you picked up somewhere along the way. And yet here we are! Thank God there is this brunch-ready recipe you can prep the night before without even the most obnoxious of your foodie friends being any the wiser. Just get your dough and vegetables all set up and let them chill in the refrigerator overnight. Come morning, simply follow the quick baking instructions. If sweet potatoes sound too mushy for you, swap them out for 3/4 cup sautéed mushrooms.

I know, I know: Honey is on the “absolutely not, you jerk” list for most vegans. And that’s fair enough. But what to do in such situations? Naturally I turn to agave nectar, my not-at-all secret weapon. EZ-PZ! The Honey Buns recipe is essentially a meddled-with Wonder Bun recipe that has been given the honey concoction and spruced up with vegan sugar for added texture. The extra sweetness we pick up from the honey-agave makes for a perfect day-starter for when you’re not feeling at all like paying attention to your alarm clock.

The slightest whiff of cinnamon and melted sugar is likely to send any lady into a nostalgic reverie for the food court of her youth. Today this recipe commands center stage at the bakery whenever we fire up a batch—no small feat considering the competition of fragrant apple muffins, nutty cornbread, and dozens of other aromatic samplings. You’ll find that BabyCakes NYC’s Wonder Buns have everything you’ve been missing for so long: that subtly sticky chewiness, the spicy pockets intermixed with the sweet streaks of joy, a dense but layered texture that is the stuff of dreams.

This cake does not take long to bake, yet it looks as if you have gone to a lot of trouble, an impression I like to give. Purchased blackberry jam makes short work of the filling.

Rice pudding is an old-fashioned dessert and some might consider it dated. I find it a modern comfort. I adore the way chopped dates flavor the creamy sweetened vanilla-infused rice. A drizzle of lemon sauce over the top updates this old-time favorite.

This sweet fig and aniseed pudding is like a clafoutis. The custard bakes to a flan-like consistency and is heavenly served still slightly warm from the oven.

I’m keen on freestone peaches. I’m also keen on this shortcake, which comes together quickly. The simple recipe is a great showcase for just about any summer fruits and the little zip of ginger adds a nice dimension.

When you round the curve on Black Hawk Road in hilly Carroll County, you will see it on the left. In four-foot letters the name “Cox” is spelled out in boxwoods. About twenty years ago Mr. Cox started cutting his hedges into all manner of fanciful shapes. He has had a life-size cowboy wearing a Stetson and riding a horse, an alligator, a bird in a cage, and an elephant two times life-size. One of my favorites is a rabbit eating a carrot. Mr. Cox kind of has the temperament of Mr. McGregor in The Tale of Peter Rabbit. He has even snipped a self-portrait out of his hedgerow. It looks just like him, with a long beard and a farmer’s straw hat perched on his head. I love to go out and visit with him. He is a spirited old gent and he lets you know pretty quickly if he is in the mood for company or not. If I bring him a carrot cake, he seems more amiable.

Born in 1915 in Shaw, Mississippi, David “Honeyboy” Edwards won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. He is perhaps the last of the true Delta Bluesmen. Despite his age he keeps on the road touring the world and flirting with the ladies, crooning his hit “Who May Your Regular Be?” This dense chocolate cake covered with bittersweet honey ganache could be just the thing to win over a loved one’s heart or to cure the blues of a broken heart.

There is a plum tree on Interstate Highway 35 in Austin, Texas. My uncle Jon keeps an eye on this poor little tree growing in the median. After its showy blooms fade he watches for the red plums. When they look ripe he pulls over with his hazards blinking and picks every last plum and brings them home to make jelly.

I try to keep my carbon footprint in check and buy local and all, but every now and then I throw caution to the wind and buy a fresh pineapple from a long way away. Recently I was talking to some fourth-grade kids in the town closest to the farm. Not one out of the fifteen or so kids had ever seen a fresh pineapple other than the one SpongeBob lives in; they just knew they came from a long way away or in a can.

Spice and fruit and caramel cakes all rolled into one. This cake brings in a lot of money at a bake sale.

Miss Moina Michael was born in 1869 in Good Hope, Georgia. She was educated at Lucy Cobb Institute, Georgia State Teachers College, and Columbia University in New York City, quite an accomplishment for a woman of her times. She went on to work as a professor at the University of Georgia. When World War One broke out she left her teaching position to volunteer in the war effort. When the war was over Miss Moina returned to the University of Georgia, where she taught continuing education classes for disabled servicemen. She conceived a fundraising idea to help the veterans: selling small silk poppies inspired by John McCrae’s memorial poem “In Flanders Fields.” (“In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses row on row.”) Miss Moina from then on wore a red poppy to bring attention to the cause of disabled veterans. By 1921 the American Legion had adopted her red poppy as a symbol of remembrance for fallen soldiers. To me this delicious cake, decorated with red poppies, is as fitting for a patriotic celebration as anything red, white, and blue. Memorial Day is the perfect occasion to serve these poppy seed petits fours.

To me egg custard pie is an exemplary Southern dessert. Simple vanilla-flavored custard graced with a dusting of grated nutmeg atop a crisp crust is just what I would have served Miss Welty if I had ever had the chance to thank her for how much her stories have meant to me. I would have also thanked her for a gift that I have begun to appreciate, now that I am—for lack of a better term—grown up: the idea that you don’t have to leave the place you love and know, that it is not a prerequisite that to understand home you must exile yourself to gain perspective. No, she led by example and temperament. I hope she would have enjoyed this gratitude pie. I think she might have, with her keenness for custards and all.