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There’s are certain cheats that are universally acknowledged as acceptable by food people and one of them is that it’s totally fine to use canned pumpkin in place of fresh pumpkin in baking recipes. I realize a lot of you are rolling your eyes at that: “Who in their right mind would ever trouble to…

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A new Dorie Greenspan cookbook is always a cause for celebration. Her latest, Dorie’s Anytime Cakes, is just the kind of book her loyal fans want from her: a cookbook full of expert advice that’s also cozy and comforting . Reading her headnotes is like having your favorite teacher show up at your house with…

I’ve had a copy of David Lebovitz’s Ready for Dessert on my cookbook shelf for well over a decade, probably longer, and you can tell it’s much-loved because of all the flour, cocoa powder, and melted butter streaked across its pages. The fresh ginger cake is so iconic that I’m convinced one of the hottest…

Can you channel a spirit with a recipe? That’s how it feels every time I open Gina DePalma’s Dolce Italiano, the authoritative Italian dessert cookbook that my friend Gina wrote before she died of ovarian cancer in 2016. For a dinner party this weekend, I made her Obsessive Ricotta Cheesecake. It’s funny because I convinced…

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We hosted a brunch here last weekend. The original plan was just to offer bagels and cream cheese (four different kinds!) and smoked salmon with red onions and sliced tomatoes and capers and coffee made to order. That seemed like enough but then I asked myself,”What else would you want there if this were at…

As many of you know, I’m an almond cake guy. So much so, if were I given the opportunity to take three recipes into my next life, one of them would absolutely be the almond cake from Cooking for Mr. Latte. You’ll find it funny, then, that when I finally set out to make a…

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Most cakes tell you what they’re going to look like before you put them in the oven. If you make a flourless chocolate cake, it’s going to be the same color going in as it is coming out. Same for an almond cake, a coconut cake (pre-icing), a hummingbird cake, etc. Upside-down cakes are different.…

There are certain recipes that stay with you. They follow you throughout your life and when you return to them, it’s like visiting an old friend. That’s how it is with this flourless chocolate cake that I first made for my playwriting thesis class (taught by Pulitzer Prize-winner Marsha Norman) at NYU’s Tisch School of…

We all have our ride-our-die recipes. These are the recipes we love above all others, the recipes that we’d go to hell and back for, the recipes that we want chiseled into our gravestones. In my particular case, I have two: the cavatappi with sun-dried tomatoes that I talk about all the time, and this…

Banana bread is a great way to pretend you’re that eating something virtuous when, really, you’re eating cake. That’s what makes this chocolate banana bread, from Jessie Sheehan’s Snackable Bakes (my new favorite baking book), such a treat. There’s no pretense here about “healthfulness” or “low-calories” or “gluten-free” (not that there’s anything wrong with that).…