Baker Without Borders

These are black and white cookies with a surprise twist: the cookie underneath is gingerbread, and the lemon and chocolate icings are infused with freshly grated ginger. The idea came to me after a friend and I shared a black and white cookie at a New York City bakery (the cookies are a staple item…

These challah rolls are filled with apple butter and pecans, and sprinkled with brown sugar and cinnamon. They are  less sweet than traditional cinnamon rolls, but just as delicious.  I shared the recipe in my latest column for The Knockturnal; read more about the them here.

Every holiday season, I bake Russian tea cakes, also known as Mexican wedding cookies, snowball cookies, and polvorones (a traditional Spanish Christmas cookie), and share them with friends and colleagues. Popular around the world, as the various names suggest, these crumbly, buttery shortbread cookies are filled with nuts and rolled in powdered sugar. This is…

Galettes, free-form tarts originating in France, are simple to prepare, fun to shape, and a great way to showcase seasonal ingredients. Last summer, I made a peppery crust and filled it with peaches and blue cheese. For the fall, I used the same black-pepper-infused crust recipe and created a butternut squash and goat cheese filling….

Pumpkin chocolate muffins are a Thanksgiving tradition in my family. I’ve been baking them since I was 13 years old, using a recipe my mom’s friend found on the internet, and thought it was about time to mix things up. The original recipe calls for adding chocolate chips to a buttery dough flavored with cinnamon…

This is an autumn twist on one of my favorite cookie recipes: banana oatmeal chocolate chip, by Two Peas & Their Pod. I swapped mashed banana for apple butter, replaced chocolate with currants, and added pecans and a heaping teaspoon of cinnamon. Apple butter, a mixture of pureed apples, cinnamon, cloves, and other spices, is…

Studded with fresh pomegranate seeds and filled with condensed milk, these colorful bar cookies are at once tangy and sweet. They are perfect for early fall, when pomegranates first come into season. The fruit grows predominantly in India, Iran, California, and the Mediterranean region, and is used in a variety of sweet and savory dishes….

In Mexico, corn bread, called pan de elote in Spanish, has a cake-like consistency and is at once savory and sweet, prepared with whole corn kernels, condensed milk, grated cheese, and only a tiny bit of flour. I first made pan de elote when teaching a cooking class for kids, and later decided to experiment…

I always look forward to late summer and early fall, when concord grapes make an appearance at farmers markets in New York City. The dark purple grapes, which are deliciously sweet yet tart and filled with crunchy seeds, originated in the town of Concord, Massachusetts. These days, they’re commonly grown around the Great Lakes and…

One of my coworkers lived in England until she was 11 years old. Of all British desserts, the one she misses most from her childhood is the Bakewell tart: a buttery crust with an almond filling and layer of raspberry jam. This delicious tart is a variation on Bakewell pudding, a jam-filled egg custard named after…

Biscotti are twice-baked cookies with origins in ancient Rome. In Italy, the cookies are typically dunked in cappuccinos for breakfast. In this light adaption of one of my favorite biscotti recipes, which I’ve been making on a regular basis since college, the dough itself contains ground coffee beans, along with cinnamon, walnuts, and chocolate chips….

The other day, my coworker gave me a recipe for mshabak, a doughnut-like pastry popular in Syria, Egypt and Lebanon. The dessert, which is typically served on holidays, is piped into spirals and deep-friend much like funnel cake. The Syrian variety is made from an unsweetened dough containing yogurt, semolina, and rosewater. After frying, the…