Category

Desserts

  • Maida Heatter’s Key Largo Cookies

    Maida Heatter’s Key Largo Cookies

    I rewrote and revised the first sentence of my novel Food Person so many times, I know the finished one by heart: “Isabella Pasternak baked treats to bring to work every day; not as a way to endear herself to her co-workers, but as a way to avoid them.”

  • Banoffee Pie

    Banoffee Pie

    British baking wasn’t something I thought much about until I started watching The Great British Baking Show (or “Bake-Off” as it’s known in its mother country). Now all I think about is Swiss rolls and Hobnobs and soggy bottoms. Also I spend time wondering if the show’s stylist dresses everyone, including the contestants.

  • Nectarine Upside-Down Gingerbread

    Nectarine Upside-Down Gingerbread

    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…

  • Gina DePalma’s Obsessive Ricotta Cheesecake

    Gina DePalma’s Obsessive Ricotta Cheesecake

    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…

  • Mixed Berry Pie

    Mixed Berry Pie

    Generally I try to avoid neighborhood message boards / Facebook Groups because half the time people post things like “there’s a man with a machete standing outside the bodega” or “packs of wild dogs are roaming the streets.” Occasionally, though, someone will post something that’s not terrifying. Such was the case the other day when…

  • Calabrian Walnut Cake

    Calabrian Walnut Cake

    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…

  • Flourless Chocolate Cake

    Flourless Chocolate Cake

    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…

  • Sassy Strawberry Sorbet

    Sassy Strawberry Sorbet

    When strawberries are season (like they are now), you have a few options. Option one: eat them raw. Option two: eat them raw dipped in homemade whipped cream. Option three: Strawberry Shortcake. All of these are totally reasonable options — especially option three (which I plan to make this weekend for a friend’s birthday) —…

  • Chocolate Cherry Poppyseed Cookies

    Chocolate Cherry Poppyseed Cookies

    Call me a rebel, but when a recipe calls for dried cranberries? I used dried cherries. “Adam!” you might say. “What are you? Some kind of thorn in the side of society, trying to topple the status quo?” To that I say, “Hey, I’m just your average every day food blogger who happens to like…

  • Almond Cake

    Almond Cake

    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…