Cinnamon

Deliciously cinnamon-y pecan cupcakes are a wonderfully warming treat on a chilly winter day. I like to have mine smothered in Cream Cheese Frosting (page 95) with a cup of dandelion root coffee (you can find the recipe on my website, elanaspantry.com). Garnish these cupcakes with a few chopped pecans.

Tart chunks of green apple and warming cinnamon make this healthy and delicious cupcake the ideal after-school snack. Pack, unfrosted, in a lunch box along with a small container of Cream Cheese Frosting (page 95) for a special school-lunch dessert.

Try these aromatic, child-pleasing, cinnamon-walnut cupcakes on a Sunday morning. The comforting scent wafting from your kitchen will wake up all of your little sleepyheads. I like to serve these bare, without frosting, because the top of this cupcake is a streusel delight.

If you’d like an accompaniment to summer fruit soups but don’t want to turn on the oven, these slightly sweet scones are just the thing to make.

It takes minutes to make this sweet soup. Try serving it after a meal rather than before—it’s a wonderful palate cooler after a spicy meal. Or it can be the main event at lunch on a hot summer day, served with blueberry muffins.

This super-quick no-cook soup is delicious enough to serve as a dessert.

Enjoy the convergence of strawberries and midsummer berries in a sweetly spiced broth.

This and the following berry soup are the only fruit soups in this chapter that need a bit of cooking. The wine and spices give it a wonderfully complex flavor.

Moroccan food has a distinct earthy flavor from the combination of cumin and turmeric. Cinnamon also is a characteristic element here, and raisins add a touch of sweetness. This recipe also works well using lamb or turkey.

Mama used to make us cheese toasts and cinnamon toasts for breakfast. (She would leave the oven door open after making them, so we could warm up on chilly mornings.) We started to play with that for Jack, and came up with these tasty cream cheese sandwiches sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. They taste a bit like a cinnamon raisin bagel with cream cheese, but the crunch of the sugar on the outside and the creamy cheese inside make them way more interesting. Plus the cream cheese adds protein, so they’re heartier than your average serving of cinnamon toast.

I find that most store-bought oatmeal cookies can’t touch the rich homemade variety I remember from my childhood. We used to get them at the old Schrafft’s stores, and when I asked Jim Beard if he remembered those cookies and, if so, could he give me the recipe, he immediately called the head of the company and got a formula for producing a huge amount. Jim helped translate some of the unfamiliar ingredients and reduce the recipe to a manageable amount. I have been making this oatmeal cookie ever since—now in small amounts. Double the recipe if you have children around.

Both Sandy and Crystal’s love for cooking stems from their mothers. This particular recipe is one that Sandy and her mother, Marge, shared throughout her youth, and it signifies that mother-daughter bond. What better place to get to know your kids than through cooking your favorite recipes in the kitchen?

Crystal’s nieces have nicknamed their mother “Butter.” This term of endearment for Karen stems from the fact that she cooks everything with butter. One of her specialties is this cake, and—you guessed it—there’s lots of butter! A cream cheese and apple mixture bakes up nice and gooey on top of a soft cake layer. Served warm, it just doesn’t get any butter—we mean, better.

Anyone would get right out of bed if he or she smelled these rolls rising in the oven—even on a Saturday! We believe the magic lies in the homemade caramel sauce. The caramel is rarely something we consider making from scratch, yet it is surprisingly easy to do. Double the sauce recipe and store the extra goodness in a plastic squeeze bottle in the fridge. The squeeze bottle is the perfect tool for drizzling this rich caramel over ice cream or apple slices.

Every time I go to a street fair or the New York state fair, I breathe in the smell of fried dough as it wafts through the crowd and just go crazy for it. So I couldn’t help but come up with my own version of the classic zeppole. But of course I added my own sexy twist: a delicious chocolate dipper! With this dessert, your kitchen will be as popular as the zeppole stand at the state fair.

Think of this sweetie as a giant Linzer tart cookie. Use any flavor of fruit preserves that you want, add a bit of fresh fruit if you like, and have fun making a little crisscross lattice top! It’s super-cinchy—the only thing to remember is to use really high-quality preserves.

Donuts are usually fairly judged by both the quality of their crumb and the imagination of their topping, but this is one donut you will want to eat straight out of the oven as is. The chocolate swirl creates an interesting balance to all the spice, while also adding a smooth yet crunchy texture.

To be fair, bread pudding is an extremely delicious dish that was simply tagged with a terrible name and a rather unfortunate look. As a youngster I could hardly stomach the sight of it, all soggy and sad in its bowl, like a sandwich that had fallen into the pool and then been tossed in the blender. Now that I’m older and smarter, I see the beauty of bread pudding. It’s a day-old visionary’s dream that delivers so much texture and spice it’s suddenly not so hard to understand what keeps it shuffling down through the generations. You can use any bread you choose, just make sure it’s something sturdy.

I take my graham crackers extremely buttery and very crunchy, so that’s what you’re getting with this recipe. In fact, this graham cracker is so decadent, you may want to double the recipe so you can deliberately have leftovers. There’s tons of mileage to be gained out of these. Like piecrust, for one! Or donut toppings, for two!

This is a perfect example of using the exalted Sugar Cookie as a launching pad. Once you’ve fussed around with it enough, you begin to understand its dormant qualities. What if you asked your brain what would happen if you had the foresight to roll a butter-taste-based batter around in a cinnamon-sugar mixture before baking? If your brain, schooled in the ways of the Sugar Cookie, answered that you’d get a wonderfully wrinkly explosion of the Snickerdoodle variety, you and your brain are well on your way to total cookie enlightenment.