Pastries

Fresh currants come into season in August, but they also can keep for months in the freezer. You can substitute frozen or more widely available dried currants for fresh, making these muffins a year-round indulgence.

Juicy blackberries garnish these moist, flavorful corn muffins, which have a soft and rich interior. Not overly sweet, these muffins go especially well with cheese omelets. Try substituting raspberries or blueberries for the blackberries.

Buttermilk gives these muffins a tender crumb and light texture, and they really need no accompaniment—though they’re even more irresistible topped with butter or one of the delicious flavored butters in the Toppings and Sauces chapter. If you like a fruity muffin, add fresh raspberries or any other berry, and for a cheese flavor, stir in grated sharp white Cheddar (see variations). You can also add a zing by adding black pepper or jalapeño peppers.

These classic muffins are simple to make and taste great with just about any brunch dish. They have a generous proportion of berries to batter, which makes them extra appealing. Use fresh blueberries picked at the peak of the season or frozen ones that you were smart enough to pop into the freezer when they were abundant in the summer. You can also use good-quality store-bought frozen berries. Frozen berries tend to be juicy and very flavorful because they are picked and flash-frozen on the spot. These muffins freeze well and can be rewarmed in a 250°F oven for 15 minutes or so. They are delicious plain or with fresh fruit preserves.

A warm scone is an object of extraordinary comfort, but even more so when it has potato in it. The farl, a slim scone of flour, butter, and mashed potato, is rarely seen nowadays and somehow all the more of a treat when it is. I have taken the idea and run with it, mashing steamed pumpkin into the hand-worked crumbs of flour and butter to make a bread that glows orange when you break it. Soft, warm, and floury, this is more than welcome for a Sunday breakfast in winter or a tea round the kitchen table. Cooked initially in a frying pan and then finished in the oven, I love this with grilled Orkney bacon and slices of Cheddar sharp enough to make my lips smart—a fine contrast for the sweet, floury “scone” and its squishy center.

You can purchase a product called chocolate batons (available at specialty stores and online) that’s specifically designed for rolling into chocolate croissants. But, if you’d like to make your own batons from scratch, here’s a recipe, followed by a method for shaping chocolate croissants. You could also fill these croissants with almond paste, or try savory fillings, like ham and cheese, creamed spinach, or bacon crumbles.

There are dozens of shapes for Danish pastry, far more than I have room to demonstrate, but the shapes below are fundamental and fairly easy to master. (For more shapes, I suggest going to the Web.) The first shape, called Schnecken (German for “snail”), is probably the most common shape; with Schnecken, you have the option of applying cinnamon sugar to the dough before cutting and shaping. The second shape is a simple pinwheel that’s very pretty and popular for serving to guests and on special occasions. I’ve provided a few recipes for fillings, but you can also use commercial pie fillings (just don’t use regular fruit preserves, jams, or jellies because they don’t contain starch and aren’t oven stable, so they’ll melt out of the Danish). I’ve also provided recipes for two glazes for finishing the Danish and recommend you use both: a hot syrup glaze for shine and retaining freshness, and a simple fondant glaze to accentuate the flavor and provide visual appeal.

Hot cross buns are a traditional Good Friday bread, but they can be made anytime (in Elizabethan England they could only be baked during Easter week or during Christmas, but times have changed). There are, of course, many similar commemorative breads throughout Europe, each with their own twist. Currants and spices such as allspice, mace, nutmeg, and cinnamon are commonly used in the English version. Much folklore and many recipe variations for hot cross buns are available on the Internet (and they’re worth reading), but I prefer the following additions to the basic holiday bread recipe. However, feel free to use your own favorite spice and fruit combinations, or simply bake the buns without any additions, as the buns are wonderful with or without the fruit, spices, and glazed cross.

The dough for croissants, Danish, and certain other pastries is made by a method known as lamination, which involves folding layers of dough and butter (or another fat) to create many thin layers that puff when baked. Puff pastry, the classic unyeasted version of this dough, is used to make many pastries. In this book, I’ll stick with a yeasted formula that can be used to make both croissants and Danish pastry. There are many versions of laminated dough and many systems of rolling to create a specific number of layers. The system I’m presenting here certainly isn’t the only one that works, but I like it because it’s easy and also incorporates overnight fermentation to create a superb product. Feel free to modify it if you prefer more or fewer layers. The most common error home bakers make when laminating is to apply too much pressure to the dough, which breaks the paper-thin layers of dough and fat. To help with this, the formula here creates a very soft, pliable dough, and the method calls for a fair amount of dusting with flour to prevent sticking. There are two parts to the final dough: the détrempe and the butter block. The détrempe is the plain dough before the butter is rolled in. The butter block is the fat that will be laminated between layers of dough. There are many ways to incorporate the fat into the détrempe, including spreading it by hand in dabs over the rolled-out dough, which is sometimes called spotting. The method here is more systematic, using a series of letter folds (in thirds) to produce 81 layers of dough and fat—more than enough for a great accordion-style expansion of the layers (one of the recipe testers called it a concertina effect). Should you decide to experiment and try making more layers, just keep in mind that the layers are more vulnerable to rupturing as they get thinner, which defeats the purpose of laminating. I always suggest getting good at 81 layers before adding a fourth letter fold, which will increase the number of layers to 243. You can use either unbleached bread flour or all-purpose flour for the dough. Bread flour provides more structure, while all-purpose flour, being slightly softer, makes a more tender product.

I’ve set myself up by staking a claim to the best biscuits ever. But when I made these biscuits, I was so astonished by their flavor and texture that I decided there couldn’t possibly be a more perfect biscuit—at least not any that I’ve ever tasted. Be forewarned, a generous amount of butter is a key ingredient here, so these biscuits are not for those who are squeamish about fat! That said, if you find these biscuits to be too rich, feel free to use low-fat buttermilk instead of cream for the liquid. Some people insist that only shortening has enough pure fat in it to make a flaky biscuit. While lard and shortening do contain 100 percent fat to butter’s mere 85 percent, there’s nothing to match butter when it comes to flavor. Also, I find that biscuits made with shortening sometimes have a waxy aftertaste. If you insist on using shortening, chill it for 1 hour before cutting it into the dough, and reduce the amount by about 15 percent, to 7 tablespoons (3.5 oz / 99 g). I have heard it said that there are two types of people in the world, those who like tender biscuits and those who like flaky biscuits. (I’m usually in the flaky camp.) In this recipe, I’ve replaced the traditional buttermilk with cream, which essentially makes this both a cream biscuit (and therefore tender) and a flaky biscuit. If you wonder how I arrived at this idea, it was one of those aha/duh moments, in this case brought about because I had forgotten to buy buttermilk. Discovering that I had some heavy cream on hand, I realized that there was no rule prohibiting me from trying to bring the best of both worlds together. I learned a new trick for incorporating the butter into the flour from a few of my excellent recipe testers: Freeze the butter, then use the large holes on a cheese grater to grate it directly into the dry ingredients (or use the grater attachment on a food processor, with the dry ingredients in the bowl below). Not only does this method save time, but it creates the perfect size butter pieces for the biscuits. You can use this method when making pie dough too!

Although this is made from the same dough as the panettone, the final proofing time is very different: none! Stollen’s origins are attributed to Dresden, Germany, but it is made in many forms and variations throughout Europe. The name refers to baby Jesus’ blanket and it is filled with fruit to signify the gifts of the Magi. It can be folded and formed into a crescent shape or simply rolled up into a log. It is usually finished with a brushing of melted butter and heavily dusted with either confectioners’ sugar or granulated sugar. My German friends like to age their stollen for weeks before eating it, but I like it best as soon as it cools—it never lasts more than a day, let alone weeks. Almond paste is a sweet confection made with sugar and ground bitter almonds; when flavored with rose water or treated with other flavorings and food colors it is also known as marzipan. I find it amazingly delicious. It can easily be rolled into a cigar-shaped bead and used as a center core for stollen; the amount is up to you but about 4 ounces (113 g) per small loaf is probably enough.

Feel free to be creative with the fillings for these delicious pastries, which are similar to kolaches. I have suggested a couple of fillings below, which are also excellent for Danish, but you can also use store-bought pie fillings.

Babka is a rich, yeasted cross between bread and coffee cake with an equally rich Russian and Polish culinary heritage. The name is derived from the Russian baba, which means grandmother, an appropriate name for this wonderful comfort food. While it is mostly known as a popular Jewish bread filled with some combination of chocolate, cinnamon, almonds, even poppy seeds and sometimes topped with streusel, it can also be filled with raisins or soaked with rum, as in baba au rhum. The dough is rich enough that it can also be used for brioche and kugelhopf. In American bakeries, babka is most often formed as a twisted loaf with veins of the sweet filling running throughout, baked either in a loaf pan or freestanding. However, the Israeli version, known as kranz cake, uses a dramatic shaping technique that many of my recipe testers found appealing. This recipe is my favorite version, with both cinnamon and chocolate in the filling. Of course, you can leave out the chocolate and make a cinnamon sugar version, or leave out the cinnamon and make just a chocolate version, but I say, why leave out either? It’s easier to grind the chocolate chips or chunks if they’re frozen. After you grind them, you can add the cinnamon and butter and continue to process them all together. The streusel topping is also optional, but I highly recommend using it on the freestanding versions.

The simple, sweet enriched dough for these cinnamon buns is very versatile. It can also be used to make to make everything from sticky buns (page 145) and coffee crumb cake (page 150) to fruit-filled thumbprint pastries (page 152). Even though this dough doesn’t contain eggs, it can still make all of these products, and more, but with less work and fewer calories than some of the richer recipes that follow. I wouldn’t exactly call this health food, but anything made with this dough is definitely comfort food to the max! I’ve suggested chopped walnuts or pecans, but feel free to experiment with other nuts. I’ve given you the option of either a cream cheese frosting or a fondant glaze, both of which are delicious and commonly used in pastry shops. The corn syrup in the fondant glaze is optional, but using it will make the glaze smoother. Using milk, rather than water, in the fondant will also make it creamier and softer.

For sticky buns, be sure to use pans with at least 2-inch-high walls, as the slurry will bubble and foam while baking and could overflow a pan with a shallow rim. Place the pans on a sheet pan to catch any glaze that does bubble over. I’ve given you three options for the sweet slurry in the bottom of the pan. Each is delicious, so you’ll just have to give them all a try and see which you prefer. Thanks to recipe tester Jim Lee for the delicious creamy caramel slurry recipe, a classic cream and sugar version, which is very easy to make. His caramel is different in texture and color from Susan’s (my wife’s no-longer-secret recipe!), which is made from a sugar and butter combination, but both result in serious childhood flashbacks. If you use the honey almond slurry, yet another wonderful glaze, it would be a good idea to use slivered or coarsely chopped almonds if you sprinkle nuts over the dough before rolling it up. Whichever version you use, the uncooked slurry should cover the bottom of the pan to a thickness of about 1/4 inch.

My contribution to my family’s Thanksgiving meal has always been cornbread. In making it so many times, I discovered that it’s a great vehicle for fruit, cooked grains, or vegetables. This variation has a thick batter, so these are more like biscuits than bread. Pale orange and scarlet-flecked, these biscuits make a beautiful addition to a holiday table.

Start this recipe the night before serving it so that the lavender can soak in the cream and impart a strong flavor. Use fresh or dried lavender, but stay away from ornamental lavender, which is usually treated with pesticides. If you prefer, substitute peaches or nectarines for the apricots.

Forget fancy gènoise or sponge cake; in the South, a shortcake is really just a sweet biscuit. Granted, this recipe is a step above, flavored with orange zest and sprinkled with raw sugar that sparkles like amber on the golden tops. At Martha Stewart Living Television, we served miniature versions of these buttery brown sugar shortcakes filled with peaches, strawberries, and blueberries at a luncheon attended by President Clinton.

What impresses me the most about all the types of cornbread is how quickly they can be brought to the table. Warm bread for supper makes everything taste better. My version of pantry cooking is to pull a bag of butter beans or black-eyed peas frozen last summer out of the freezer and cook a pot of rice. While the rice is cooking, I can throw together a batch of corn muffins. It’s a simple, quick supper ready in less than thirty minutes. The fallacy that you need to open a can or use a mix is just that—a lie. I find that shortcuts and prepared products actually do not often make things easier, and usually take as long as doing things “right” in the first place.

Meme most often made rolled biscuits. For large biscuits, she had a special aluminum cutter with a small wooden handle that fit in the palm of her hand. She cut out small biscuits with an empty apple juice can open at both ends. Some purists use lard instead of butter. Although I like biscuits made with lard and understand the tradition and history, Meme and Mama had started using butter by the time I was born. The perfect biscuit should be golden brown and slightly crisp on the outside, with a light, airy interior. For a flaky, tender biscuit, don’t overwork the dough: gently combine the ingredients until just blended. A very hot oven is essential. The steam interacts with the baking powder to create the biscuit’s ideal textures inside and out.