If you can melt chocolate and stir, you can make these cakes, and no commercial mix has chocolate as good as this. Quality chocolate is like breeding: it always shines through. Gooey chocolate pockets stud the cakes, while the cake itself is nearly as dense as fudge.
This is a lovely light (and nondairy if you want it to be) chocolate mousse with intense chocolate flavor. It is the lightest mousse of all if you make it with water or coffee. Milk or cream adds a little body. Either way, you can top it with whipped cream, unless you are serving Albert himself. If you are using fresh farm eggs or are confident about the quality of your eggs, you can use the fresh-egg method instead of the heated (egg-safe) procedure.
These are fail-proof oatmeal cookies, chewy and wholesome, with just enough spice and plenty of oatmeal. I like them with dried cranberries and walnuts, but you could add any dried fruit or nut. Try them with dried blueberries and pecans for a change, or currants and chopped almonds, or they're always good with the traditional addition of raisins. This is a terrific lunch box cookie, or great with tea in the afternoon.
This delicate, fruity sorbet—pastel-pretty and dotted with brilliant red pomegranate seeds—reminds me of a festive glass of pink Champagne. Come September, when our pomegranates ripen in Provence, this appears at the dinner table frequently. The touch of honey here is essential, bringing a depth of flavor that sugar alone cannot provide.
My mom, Betty Keller, was a creature of habit. She worked very hard at her job managing restaurants while raising five boys and a daughter as a single mother. She loved to have cookies on hand at the end of the day, and she especially loved the Keebler pecan sandie. It was part of my childhood, and it's a flavor combination, vanilla and pecan, that I associate with her. It was an adult cookie to me. There was always a bag of them in the cupboard.
If you're going to take on an ambitious dessert, it had better look and taste spectacular. This is one of those creations — a dome of cake filled with alternating layers of almond and pistachio mousses, fresh raspberries, and finished with billows of whipped cream. It comes to the table looking like a great white snowdrift studded with fresh raspberries.
Sometimes there's nothing better than the simplest of flavors. We both love these cookies as they are or with a simple glaze, or we sprinkle demerara sugar on them for a bit of sparkle. If you add 1 tablespoon of cream of tartar to the dry ingredients and roll them in cinnamon sugar prior to baking, you will have classic snickerdoodles. With orange or lemon zest, they can easily be nudged in other directions. When we lived in New York, there was a little bakery, now gone, called Mary's Off Jane. She made the most incredible lime shortbread-ish cookies with a lime glaze that we devoured. These come close, but we have yet to re-create them to her standard.
These cookies were inspired by Jeni Britton Bauer's Bangkok peanut ice cream--a tantalizing blend of toasted coconut and peanut butter cream, finished with a sharp prickle of cayenne pepper.
This cookie is like a well-made cardigan: it always presents handsomely and requires very little fuss. Almond flour gives the cookie a tender bite and a subtle nutty flavor. Replace the almond flour with hazelnut, pecan, or pistachio flour if you prefer. I make these cookies year-round and always have a log or two in the freezer.