Baking

Juicy, buttery roasted grapes top this simple ricotta dessert.

Editor's note: Lisa Loeb shared this recipe exclusively with Epicurious. To read more about Lisa and get a peek inside her kitchen, see our Celebrity Kitchen Tour videos. These are Lisa Loeb's favorite cookies, a version of Mark Bittman's "Refrigerator (Rolled) Cookies," which appeared in his seminal How to Cook Everything. She substitutes high-in-fiber whole-wheat flour for regular all-purpose flour, uses rich dark brown sugar instead of plain, and adds natural peanut butter and an extra pinch of kosher salt for a rich, nutty flavor. Before baking, she tops each cookie with a dollop of all-fruit jam, which balances out the sophisticated saltiness with the perfect hint of sweetness. If you prefer not to use jam, before baking try sprinkling cookies with good-quality sea salt, such as fleur de sel, to bring out their sweetness.

If you don't have a pastry bag, you can spoon the meringue mixture onto the traced circles. Smooth the top of each circle and, using the back of a spoon, make a depression in the center.

Layer store-bought vanilla ice cream with peanut butter, caramel sauce, and a peanut–graham cracker crust for the ultimate summer dessert indulgence.

Here's a real showstopper, with an exotic touch of cardamom. To crush the cardamom, place the seeds in a resealable plastic bag and tap with a rolling pin.

A chocolate-dipped frozen banana meets an ice cream sandwich.

The rich and tender biscuits would also be great with plums or blackberries. Rinse and wipe off any fuzz from peaches before using.

This supple homemade dough rolls beautifully into a solid base and laces into a pretty lattice top.

Though these delicately spiced soufflés reach toward the skies, they capture the fragrant earthiness of pumpkin.

When steeped overnight in a grappa syrup, dried fruits plump up with juices that infuse a moist, cakey almond filling in a golden crust.

Just right for breakfast on the go, these muffins are subtly spiced, fluffy, and speckled with plenty of golden raisins.

Adorable Seckel pears are on display in this showpiece, but the essence of pear permeates the entire tart. Musky, honeyed Bartletts are juiced into white wine, creating a poaching liquid for the Seckels. Doubly infused with pear, that syrup becomes the base for the poire William-spiked pastry cream and glaze.

Cranberries, pears, and apples form a sweetly irresistible autumn trinity beneath a crisp oat topping.

Truth be told, it’s hard to reinvent the Thanksgiving wheel year after year. But this crust—anise seeds baked into sweet pastry dough—is a little kiss of Italian spice; it takes pumpkin pie to a whole new level.

We took a regular apple-pie recipe and sweetened the filling with Mexican piloncillo, an unrefined brown sugar. What a difference a sugar makes. This one has a lot of character and adds syrupy molasses notes to a blend of sweet and tart apples.

When tomatoes are at their peak, I could eat them three times a day and straight from the vine. But every once in a while, it's nice to give them a little special attention. When that time comes, this is the recipe I turn to. It's a tartlet that looks like it takes all day to make, but is really a quickie. It's warmed in the oven for such a short time that the tomatoes never lose their fresh-picked taste and texture. I serve these as a first course at dinner or with a salad as the main event at lunch.

I remember exactly when I first encountered these celestial biscuits. It was in the early 1970s as I prowled the South in search of great grassroots cooks to feature in a new series I was writing for Family Circle magazine. Through country home demonstration agents, I obtained the names of local women who'd won prizes at the county and state fairs. I then interviewed two or three of them in each area before choosing my subject. And all, it seemed, couldn't stop talking about "this fantastic new biscuit recipe" that was all the rage—something called Angel Biscuits. The local cookbooks I perused also featured Angel Biscuits, often two or three versions of them in a single volume. Later, when I began researching my American Century Cookbook, I vowed to learn the origin of these feathery biscuits. My friend Jeanne Voltz, for years the Women's Day food editor, thought that Angel Biscuits descended from an old Alabama recipe called Riz Biscuits, which she remembered from her childhood. Helen Moore, a freelance food columnist living near Charlotte, North Carolina, told me that a home economics professor of hers at Winthrop College in South Carolina had given her the Angel Biscuits recipe back in the 1950s. "I remember her saying, 'I've got a wonderful new biscuit recipe. It's got yeast in it.'" Others I've queried insist that Angel Biscuits were created at one of the fine southern flour millers; some say at White Lily, others at Martha White (and both are old Nashville companies). In addition to the soft flour used to make them, Angel Biscuits owe their airiness to three leavenings: yeast, baking powder, and baking soda. Small wonder they're also called "bride's biscuits." They are virtually foolproof.

Next to brown sugar pie, this is my favorite chess pie. There are several theories as to how these pies came by their name. Some say that "chess" is a corruption of “chest,” meaning that these pies were so rich they could be stored in chests at room temperature. Others offer a different explanation: It seems that long ago when a good plantation cook was asked what she was making, she replied, "Jes pie," which over time became "chess." Still others insist that "chess" derives from “cheese,” as in the English lemon "cheese" (or curd). According to food historian Karen Hess, "cheese" was spelled "chese" in seventeenth-century England. In her historical notes and commentaries for the 1984 facsimile edition of Mary Randolph’s Virginia House-wife (1824), Hess writes: "Since the archaic spellings of cheese often had but one 'e' we have the answer to the riddle of the name of that southern favorite ‘Chess Pie.' " When I lived in New York, I baked dozens of lemon chess pies for the annual Gramercy Park fund-raiser and they sold as fast as I could unpack them. From that experience, I learned to buzz up the filling in the food processor. I even grate the lemon zest by processor. Here’s how: Strip the zest from the lemons with a swivel-bladed vegetable peeler, then churn it with the sugar to just the right texture. I next pulse in the lemon juice, then the eggs one by one. Finally, I drizzle the melted butter down the feed tube with the motor running. That’s all there is to it.