Category

baking

  • How to Make the Perfect Apple Pie (Step-by-Step with Photos)

    How to Make the Perfect Apple Pie (Step-by-Step with Photos)

    First things first: there’s no such thing as the perfect apple pie. The perfect apple pie is whichever apple pie you love the most. That said: there are good apple pies and there are bad apple pies. Bad apple pies have a stiff, flavorless crustl a gooey, gloppy, synthetic filling. and they taste like something…

  • 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.”

  • 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…

  • Focaccia with Butternut Squash, Garlic, and Sage

    Focaccia with Butternut Squash, Garlic, and Sage

    Butternut squash and sage in the spring? Alice Waters would throw a fit! But, hear me out: we went to Sailor last week in Fort Greene and April Bloomfield’s food was so incredible — I’m still dreaming about that green toast… and that chicken… and that stuffed radicchio — that I spent much of Saturday…

  • Banana Upside-Down Cake

    Banana Upside-Down Cake

    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.…

  • 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…

  • Makoviy Rulet with Apples and Poppyseed Paste

    Makoviy Rulet with Apples and Poppyseed Paste

    Baking a recipe at home is hardly a political act and yet, as a show of solidarity, you can’t really argue against it. With all of the horror going on in Ukraine right now, it feels important to honor and celebrate Ukranian culture, especially its recipes. If that sounds like homework, let me put it…

  • Marbled Matcha Pound Cake

    Marbled Matcha Pound Cake

    Sometimes I make mental note of a food-related thing that leads me to buy another food-related thing and then that food-related thing sits around for a very long time until I look at it and remember the original food-related thing that led me to buy it in the first place. That’s the case with the…

  • Miso Peanut Butter Cookies

    Miso Peanut Butter Cookies

    Do my friends read my food blog? We’re about to find out. See, I had this idea of buying cookie tins and making a whole assortment of holiday cookies to bring to friends around L.A. a la Melissa Clark’s latest NYT piece. But then I thought: it’s Covid, am I really going to drive all…

  • Got Persimmons? Make Persimmon Bread

    Got Persimmons? Make Persimmon Bread

    And so it was that I found myself at an AirBnb in Santa Barbara with persimmon trees. The trees were so beautiful — I’m mad at myself for not taking a picture of them (sorry!) — it felt like a crime to actually pull persimmons off of them. But pull persimmons off of them, I…