Baking

We dressed up this chewy classic for the holidays with a festive, to-die-for drizzle of chocolate. Oats replace part of the coconut to make this a lowfat yet still satisfying goody.

We're taking the highway to French elegance with these stacked desserts. Unsweetened whipped cream is a wonderful foil for gooey caramelized pears and flaky puff pastry.

These muffins are inspired by a favorite dessert: sticky toffee pudding. But they are revamped for breakfast and renamed with hope that as you present your beloved with a plate of these, you'll be invited to open your Filofax and check on next Friday night.

Marble cakes are both homey and festive. A marble cake looks slick when you slice into it and reveal the delicate pattern created when the two batters are swirled together. My first experience working with this type of mixture came about as the result of a marbled chocolate terrine that appeared first in the pages of the old Cook's Magazine, and then in my chocolate book. Everything about it was right—the texture, the flavor, the quantity of mixture in relation to the mold—everything, that is, except the marbling. Even when I barely mixed the white and dark chocolate mixtures, what I got was a few streaks of dark and white, and mostly a muddy combined color. After several frustrating attempts, I realized that I had too much dark chocolate mixture and I recast the recipe so there was twice as much white chocolate as dark and the terrine marbled perfectly. So this marble cake is proportioned in the same way: Rather than dividing the base batter in half, I like to remove about one third of it and add the chocolate. Thanks to my old friend Ceri Hadda, who shared her mother's recipe years ago.

With all the amazing fresh produce available at this time of year, we always find ourselves facing the same dilemma: Which delicious, sun-warmed vegetable shall we choose tonight? But when food editor Ian Knauer threw the whole farm stand into a cornmeal crust, it took us only one bite to realize that he had solved the problem once and for all.

The best flavors of fruitcake baked into a tart that’s a balance of sweet, tangy, and buttery.

This deep, rich cake gets extra flavor from bittersweet chocolate, coffee, and crystallized ginger.

You’ll need a 7 3/4-inch-diameter trifle dish that is at least 4 3/4 inches deep. The recipe makes an extra gingerbread cake; have it for breakfast the next morning. If you prefer to make 12 individual trifles, use all three gingerbread cakes and cut each in half horizontally. Using a pretty glass as a guide, cut out 4 cake rounds from each cut cake layer. Alternate 2 cake rounds with 2 to 3 layers of the mascarpone cream, a few candied kumquats, and some poached cranberries in each glass.

When it comes to gingerbread, I almost always find that the allspice and cloves overpower the ginger flavor. To remedy that imbalance, I created a cookie with a double dose of ginger (ground and crystallized) and a little bit of cinnamon. And although the traditional cut for gingerbread is fat, sturdy men, I thought the lightness of angel wings seemed more appropriate for these delicate cookies.

Every year, I make homemade fruitcakes for friends and family. I bake the dense pound cakes studded with dried fruits months in advance, then wrap them in muslin. These cookies are similar to my fruitcakes—only they’ll take you a lot less time. For a fun presentation, the cookies are baked in bonbon-size baking cups.

When I was growing up, everyone put out bowls of toasted pecans during the holidays. To this day, the heady perfume of toasting pecans brings me back to my childhood. To capture that memory in cookie form, I made a buttery-rich, highly addictive shortbread, then decorated it with toasted pecans.

Serve this elegant Euro-style treat with a sweet late-harvest Sauvignon Blanc.

When I told my friend (and fellow southern cookbook author) James Villas that I was making almond tassies, he had a fit. "There is no such thing," he said. It’s true that tassies (miniature tartlets) are traditionally made with pecans. But I happen to have history on my side. Almonds have been imported into the South since colonial times, and they were once as commonplace in holiday baking as pecans are today. I’m not sure that will convince James to make these, but trust me—they’re absolutely delicious.

Flan is amped up with holiday spices and a crispy cookie crust.

To complete the dessert buffet, bake a batch of Mexican wedding cakes (butter cookies rolled in powdered sugar).

Be sure to use whole milk and whisk the batter by hand (overbeating with an electric mixer may prevent the puddings from puffing and rising).

We southerners love ambrosia, a mélange of sliced juicy-sweet oranges and grated coconut. The sweet salad has been a part of southern Christmas traditions for the better part of two centuries, and I thought it would be fun to use the coconut-orange combo in a new way. I added some finely grated orange peel to classic coconut macaroons, then drizzled the cookies with bittersweet chocolate for a festive finish.

A big, beautiful soufflé with a festive chestnut flavor. You’ll need to bake the dessert right before serving, but you can make the soufflé base (minus the egg whites) two hours ahead, then fold in the whites up to one hour before baking.

The cake is layered with dark chocolate ganache and white chocolate cream, then topped with marshmallowy peppermint frosting.

With just a hint of whiskey in the ice cream and a strong coffee presence in the caramel sauce, this is a grown-up take on a classic chocolate dessert.