Baking

Fresh fruit caramelized and embedded in rich buttery cake makes a great dessert any time of year. Just about any seasonal fruit that you have on hand works very well in this recipe. Try peaches, apricots, and, of course, pineapple. The beauty of this one-pan cake is its simplicity: you don’t even need a cake pan. If the basil in your herb garden has, like mine, grown to the size of a bush, and you’ve had your fill of pesto, consider trying the basil ice cream recipe. Basil is a super fruity and floral herb, which to me is a natural for ice cream. When people take their first bite, the reaction is always the same: oh my God!

Super addictive, these delicious soft breadsticks are laced with garlic, cheese, and herbs on the inside and out. They make a fun handheld snack that’s a real crowd-pleaser. Serve them with Provençal Vinaigrette (page 240) or Lemon Aïoli (page 126) or just by themselves. Feel free to get creative and play with the ingredients, adding kick with chili powder or paprika, or for a Latin twist, try using cilantro, cumin, and cinnamon.

Monica makes the best, most intense fruit pies I have ever eaten, so good that her friends beg for birthday pie instead of cake. She keeps the kids happy while the pie cools with “whim wham”: While the pie is baking, take the rolled-out dough scraps, sprinkle them with cinnamon-sugar or fold a little jam inside, and bake until browned.

This is a traditional Southern holiday dessert, though the mysteries of its origins have been lost to time. Having had some less-than-wonderful renditions in my time, I decided to come up with my own ideal version. I went to the test kitchen with two things in mind: First, too much corn syrup yields a pie that is too sweet and runny. There is nothing worse than a pie with a soggy crust and syrup pooling in the pan where a piece has been cut out. Second, beating the eggs too much destroys the creamy texture of a properly cooked pecan pie. I am pretty pleased with these results, and I bet you will be too.

Big Mama always had a large supply of dried apples on hand for recipes like this one. It was a family favorite because these simple flavors could be served with almost anything. When researching this particular dish with the family, very different memories surfaced regarding the crust. Some remembered the apple rolls having a very puffy dough crust, while some remembered it being thin and flaky. After pondering this conundrum, I concluded that Big Mama made this recipe to use up leftover dough; the crust would vary depending on whether she had been making biscuits, pie shells, or rolls. This is only a hypothesis, but I encourage you to try all three types of dough for these delicious apple rolls!

Just like barbecue, the art of making something as simple as pound cake is often forgotten as we are always looking to make things better through the sheer volume of ingredients. Sometimes foods don’t need to dazzle to make an impression. Pound cake is best when it acts as a counterbalance to a meal made up of rich flavors. Big Mama’s pound cake supports the “keep it simple, cook it right” approach. How can you go wrong with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, and vanilla? The most important attributes of perfect pound cake are flavor, density, and moisture. Too dense and you sacrifice moisture, too moist and you might as well frost it and break out the candles. Let Big Mama show you how it’s done!

Like barbecue, bread pudding is a dessert with humble beginnings. The dish began as a way to recycle stale leftover bread into a simple filling and dessert through the addition of water and sugar. Today, bread pudding is served at the finest white-tablecloth restaurants, and it is often made with specialty breads and fresh fruit. Instead of water, chefs substitute milk, cream, eggs, vanilla, and spices to create a creamy custard. To make this dessert more decadent, a ladle of rich and creamy sauce flavored with whiskey, rum, or vanilla is poured over the bread pudding.

Pork is a natural pairing for anything apple. More like a slightly sweet bread than a dessert, Big Mama’s Apple Nut Cake is perfect with any pork main course, although it can also be served to end the meal. It can be made either in a loaf pan or in a traditional tube pan, depending on how you plan to serve it. The spiced fruit aroma this cake emits made it one of Big Mama’s favorites. With six kids and Big Bob to look after, she was entitled to a little aromatherapy. Because it was not overly sweet, the kids were allowed to snack on it during the day. After viewing this recipe I asked Ruth, the youngest daughter of the Gibson clan, what kind of nuts should be used. She said the nut of choice was either hicka nuts or scaly barks, two varieties you are unlikely to find at your local grocer. “Hicka nuts” is turn-of-the-century Southern country slang for hickory nuts, and “scaly barks” are the nut from the shagbark hickory tree. Hickory nuts are tough to crack, and getting the meat out is very difficult, but they must be superior in flavor because Big Mama would walk past three pecan trees to get to the scaly barks. You can substitute whatever nut you prefer.

Old-fashioned and still delicious.

This pie is lighter in flavor and texture than its pumpkin cousins. If you’ve got a pie shell waiting, it’s a snap to get this treat into the oven.

This cookie dough can be kept in the freezer for up to at least two months, so whenever you want warm, freshly baked cookies (with none of the additives found in commercially prepared frozen cookie dough), just slice it and pop it in the oven.

Sweet-smelling, dense, and moist, these cupcakes don’t really need a frosting—it’s just icing on the cake! And yes, they really do taste good made with olive oil. These cupcakes are good keepers; they stay moist for up to a week.

Making cake batter in the blender? What could be easier? This cake is elegant enough for a dinner party and easy enough for a weekday.

The easiest crumble we know of—it uses frozen cherries and store-bought shortbread cookies that you can find on the natural foods shelf. (See photo)

The classic combination of chocolate cake, cherries, and cream found in the traditional Black Forest cake was our inspiration for this cream’wich. In the summertime, fresh cherries can be used in lieu of dried. As is true of all of our ice cream sandwiches, we advise that you make them at least a short while in advance of when you want to serve them. Otherwise, the ice cream tends to squeeze out the sides.

We used pears in this ice cream’wich, but many other fruits would work well, too, such as apples, figs, or peaches. Because the fruit is poached, it won’t harden in the same way that raw fruit does when it is frozen. And not to worry if you do not like rum: you can simply leave it out of the ice cream recipe, yielding a simple and tasty vanilla ice cream.