Baker Without Borders

Whenever a pizza craving strikes, I tend to bake it from scratch at home. The other day, I made a rare exception, and visited Brooklyn with friends to sample some of the borough’s best pizzas. My two favorites – a thin-crust slice from Best Pizza topped with ricotta and caramelized onions (and baked in a…

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In Brazil, condensed milk and cocoa powder are cooked until thick and shaped into bonbons called brigadeiro. This was one of my favorite treats growing up; my mom and I would heat up the condensed milk and chocolate in the microwave, and I would eat spoonfuls of the rich, caramelized mixture as it cooled down.…

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A few weeks ago, a friend and I visited a Greek bakery in my neighborhood, where we spotted a tray of dome-shaped cookies coated in a shiny chocolate glaze. My friend, who grew up in Athens, had never seen anything like them, and we were both intrigued. The decadent treats turned out to be chocolate-covered melomakarona,…

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This decadent twist on cinnamon rolls features white chocolate chunks baked directly into the dough, and a filling made of cinnamon, pecans, and raspberry preserves. Inspiration for this recipe came from two sources: a pecan and white chocolate viennoise (enriched sweet bread) I often buy at a French bakery in New York City, and a…

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Made of little more than flour and potatoes, this flatbread recipe is one of the easiest and fastest I have yet to prepare. I first came across it on the blog Happy Foods Tube, where I learned that potato flatbread is a staple in Slovakia, often served alongside cabbage and duck. This bread is also…

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For my latest column in The Knockturnal, I wrote about a simple, flourless cookie with only one source of fat: pecans finely ground into a buttery paste. I had come across a recipe for three-ingredient peanut butter cookies online, and wondered how a butter-and-oil-free cookie would taste with a less conventional nut butter, such as…

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Grapefruits are in season this time of year, and ginger adds warmth to cold-weather desserts. Both are ingredients I associate with winter, so I thought: why not combine them in one dessert? The result was my take on a classic French fruit tart, with a ginger-almond crust, layer of vanilla custard, and slices of fresh…

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Crisp on the outside, gooey in the middle, with pools of melted chocolate, these have all the best elements of a classic chocolate chunk cookie, with a twist: sea salt is added to the dough and also sprinkled on top before baking. The original recipe, from the Smitten Kitchen website, calls for using bittersweet chocolate…

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I had some fresh thyme leftover in the fridge from baking a Sicilian whole orange cake, and planned to use it in a batch of lemon-flavored dinner rolls.  Then it occurred to me that lemon and thyme would be even better suited for challah, with its rich, brioche-like consistency. Lemon zest adds a hint of…

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