Author: Baker Without Borders
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Salted Lime Bars
Lime juice and homemade condensed milk are the star ingredients in these tangy, sweet, and slightly salty pie bars. Condensed milk is very easy to prepare: just simmer milk and sugar on the stove, stirring frequently, until thick. It’s so much better than the canned variety! I paired the filling with a thin layer of…
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Lemon Verbena Shortbread Cookies
This is a variation on my lavender shortbread recipe, one of a series of floral and herbal shortbread cookies I’ve been experimenting with. Here, the star of the show is dried lemon verbena, an herb native to South America that was brought to Europe in the 17th or 18th century, and has been particularly popular…
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Lavender Shortbread Cookies
Buttery shortbread cookies are the perfect medium for dried tea leaves, herbs, and flowers; their high fat content easily absorbs flavors. Inspired by spring, with all its blooming flowers, and a friend, who had picked up some dried lavender and wasn’t sure what to bake with it, I took a recipe for earl grey shortbread…
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Banana Chocolate Chip Challah
With bursts of chocolate throughout the dough, this challah tastes a lot like a chocolate babka, only sweeter and more moist, thanks to mashed, extra-ripe bananas. Like many traditional challah loaves, this one is topped with seeds. I chose a combination of poppy and black sesame seeds, but feel free to use whatever you have…
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Seeded Chocolate Chip Banana Bread
I first tried seeded banana bread at a popular brunch spot, and sought to replicate it at home using my favorite banana bread recipe, from Food.com, as a starting point. I replaced butter with olive oil and threw in some mini dark chocolate chips. Just before baking, I sprinkled the batter with a medley of…
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Pistachio Semolina Shortbread Cookies
Semolina and finely ground pistachios add a nice crunch to these buttery shortbread cookies, which are a variation on an almond cookie recipe I developed last year. I was inspired to add semolina, a course flour made from durum wheat, after preparing nankhatai, a cookie popular in India and Pakistan. The recipe I used called…
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Apricot Spice Cake
This moist, rich breakfast cake is similar to carrot cake or banana bread, but with a tangy kick from sour cream and pureed Turkish apricots. My original intention was to coat the cake with cream cheese frosting. Then, I remebered I had a mixture of sugar, cinnamon, ginger, and cardamom leftover from baking my new…
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Sage Pesto Pizza
This pizza has the elements of one of my favorite pasta dishes: butternut squash ravioli with sage leaves and freshly grated Parmesan. The idea emerged from a conversation with a friend, who suggested I bake a seasonal pizza pie with sage, brown butter, and winter squash. I incorporated sage, the leaves of an evergreen shrub…
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Baked Vanilla Nutmeg Donuts
These fragrant, fluffy donuts were a hit at a Hanukkah baking class I taught for preschoolers and kindergartners. Traditionally, sufganiyot are filled with jelly or custard. Like other Hanukkah staples, including latkes, they are fried in oil to symbolize the ancient legend that a small amount of oil, meant to last only one night, kept…
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Pear Hazelnut Tart
Frangipane, a cream made from almonds, eggs, and butter, is one of my favorite tart fillings. I’ve experimented with a walnut variation in a concord grape pie, and a pecan one in a summery strawberry galette. Here, I replaced almonds with hazelnuts in my take on a classic French winter tart. To complement the hazelnuts,…
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