50+ Recipes to Bake This Weekend (and Eat All Week)

updated Aug 3, 2023

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a dozen kitchen sink cookies on a surface — Credit: Photo: Andrew Bui; Food Styling: Rebecca Jurkevich
Kitchen Sink Cookies

We’re in the middle of winter with a long weekend in front of us, so what better time to hunker down in the kitchen and bake something. It can be as simple as a batch of muffins or a pan of chewy brownies. Maybe you want to make something a bit more involved like a really good layer cake. Or you can go all in with a project, like flaky, buttery croissants.

No matter what you do, it’s a good time to treat yourself to a week of delicious homemade baked goods. We’ve put together a list of our favorite weekend baking recipes for every schedule and every baker.

Fast Breakfast Baking Recipes

Some weekend mornings I wake up with an intense craving for fresh baked goods that cannot be ignored. In times like these, I go for instant gratification with quick-and-easy muffins and biscuits. Lemon lovers can’t go wrong with lemon poppy muffins or a citrusy spin on simple cream biscuits. If you prefer something on the savory side, load your muffin batter with radishes and tangy goat cheese.

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Cranberry Vanilla Breakfast Buckle

This fruit-filled coffee cake is worth waking up for on a Saturday morning.

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Cinnamon Roll Monkey Bread

This pull-apart monkey bread is a gooey, triumphant breakfast bake, not to mention it's a clever way to hack a can of cinnamon rolls.

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Cranberry Orange Muffins

These bright, orange-zested and cranberry-studded muffins are a subtly sweet breakfast that only requires one bowl to mix up.

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Blueberry Oatmeal Muffins

These muffins are not only easy to make but they’re also perfect in nearly every way: they’re not too sweet, boast a tender crumb, and are bursting with blueberries and hearty oats in each and every bite.

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These one-bowl banana muffins are made entirely with pantry staples, and will be ready to devour in just 30 minutes.

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Butter Biscuits

A simple homemade biscuit dough is baked atop a stick of melted butter, creating light, tender, and extra-buttery biscuits in mere minutes.

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Cornbread Muffins

This easy muffin recipe is just a little sweet (although you can skip the sugar entirely if you want), nicely browned on the outside, and tender and moist inside.

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Gluten-Free Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins

These easy lemon poppy seed muffins are naturally gluten-free thanks to a combination of almond and oat flour.

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Savory Radish and Goat Cheese Muffins

This recipe makes a muffin that’s buttery and hearty, with a soft texture and a light crumb. Baking works to tame the bite of the radish a bit, and it pairs so well with the creamy crumbles of goat cheese.

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Fast and Fancy Lemon Biscuits

With a touch of sunny citrus and coarse sugar, these pillowy lemon biscuits skew slightly sweet, feel instantly fancy, and come together in a single bowl.

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Carrot Cake Scones with Spiced Maple Cream Cheese Glaze

Unlike carrot cake, these tender, flaky scones come together fast — you’ll be sitting down to freshly baked goodness in under 45 minutes.

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The Easiest Cream Cheese Breakfast Pastries

These quick and easy puff pastry breakfast pastries are filled with cream cheese and your favorite fruit jam.

Cookies, Brownies, and One-Bowl Cakes

For all you bakers who love recipes that won’t keep you in the kitchen all day, these recipes are for you. Cookies, brownies, one-bowl cakes and cupcakes, as well as Instant Pot cakes are all here. This weekend, why not cozy up with some classic cookies, like chocolate chip or peanut butter — or try a batch of pantry cocoa brownies (my favorite). I bet you already have everything you need. You could also whip up an intensely rich chocolate cheesecake in your Instant Pot. Trust me, it’s way easier than it sounds.

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Cornflake Cookies

These candy-like cornflake cluster cookies are a fabulous no-bake sweet for the holidays (and beyond).

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Kitchen-Sink Cookies

An easy and delicious cookie fully loaded with sweet and savory bits straight out of your pantry. Pretzels, chips, chocolate, you name it!

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The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies

Do you really need a tutorial just to make chocolate chip cookies? Nah! We just wanted an excuse to whip up a batch of our very favorite cookies and share it with you!

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Classic Peanut Butter Cookies

These cookies are chock-full of peanuts and peanut butter chips, making it just the kind of cookie you want to eat with a glass of cold milk or a tumbler of Scotch.

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Strawberry Cookies

Tender cookies made with chopped fresh strawberries are a surprising delight.

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Pantry Cocoa Brownies

If you’ve got some cocoa powder, flour, and sugar in the pantry, and just a few eggs in the fridge, you can make these dense and rich brownies.

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Cheesecake Brownies

Your two favorite sweets in one very streamlined dessert.

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2-Ingredient Nutella Brownies

In times when you're short on baking supplies but desperate for a fresh hot treat, turn to our fudgy, chewy brownies made with four eggs and a jar of Nutella.

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Salted Toffee & Brown Butter Blondies

These chewy blondies are made with nutty brown butter, a generous pinch of salt, and a handful of chocolate-coated toffee pieces.

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Ube Butter Mochi

Made with Asian baking ingredients thrown into the stand mixer, these violet ube butter mochi bars are buttery, chewy, and 100% crave-worthy.

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One-Bowl Apple Cranberry Upside-Down Cake

This pretty fruit-topped treat is glazed with a cinnamon caramel and comes together quickly in one bowl.

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One-Bowl Funfetti Cupcakes

For funfetti cupcakes on the easy, use our super easy one-bowl vanilla cake recipe and add a dash of rainbow sprinkles.

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One-Bowl Yogurt and Honey Olive Oil Cake

This humble cake is moist, tender, and perfumed with just a touch of fresh thyme and lemon zest.

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One-Bowl Tres Leches Cake

Served cold straight from the pan, our one-bowl tres leches cake tastes much like vanilla ice cream with a pudding-meets-cake texture.

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Strawberry Cake Mix Brownies

Here's an easy way to turn a box of strawberry cake mix into dense, chewy brownies, topped with swirls of cream cheese frosting.

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Instant Pot Death by Chocolate Cheesecake

This over-the-top dessert features a buttery Oreo cookie crust, a double-chocolate filling made with both cocoa and melted chocolate, and a crown of the most luscious and silky chocolate ganache.

Slightly More Involved Baking Projects

Up for spending a little more time and effort in the kitchen? You should totally make a cake! Try an impressive-looking Swiss roll (it’s like a giant Little Debbie!), a bright and sunny glazed lemon bundt, or a decadent German chocolate cake. The long weekend is also an ideal time to make a batch of swirly buns — and you won’t regret mixing in some sweet potato, orange, and cardamom — or getting a bit more sophisticated with your brownies.

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Raspberry Cheesecake

This dreamy raspberry cheesy has a simple 3-ingredient fruit topping and the perfect sweet-tart balance. It's a longer baking project but it is absolutely worth it.

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If you're looking for a fun project bake that channels the iconic goodies of a Chinese bakery, look no further than our recipe for pineapple buns. These classic buns don't actually have pineapple, but make up for it with a sweet, crackly, cross-hatched topping.

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A double-layered chocolate mousse cake with a press-in cookie crust is next level. It might be more involved than a one-bowl cake, but not by much.

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Chocolate Swiss Roll Cake

This chocolate roll cake is filled with marshmallowy frosting and coated in a shiny chocolate glaze. Each slice is a perfect balance of tender cake and creamy frosting.

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Chocolate cake and caramel flan get baked together in a bundt pan to become chocoflan, an impossibly delicious hybrid dessert.

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Galette des Rois

With a little effort, Galette des Rois is an elegant French dessert—sweet almond pastry cream sandwiched between layers of flaky puff pastry—that even a novice baker can make.

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Easy Lemon Bundt Cake with Fresh Lemon Glaze

Not only is it fast, fancy, and packed with sweet citrus tang, but this is the easiest, most foolproof lemon bundt cake you'll ever make.

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German Chocolate Cake

This step-by-step recipe results in a classic German chocolate cake, complete with a gooey coconut-pecan filling and a creamy chocolate frosting.

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Victoria Sponge Sandwich Cake

A tender vanilla cake, a layer of your favorite berry jam, and a puff of whipped cream make Victoria sponge a British classic.

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Sweet Potato Cardamom Buns with Pistachio and Orange

These fluffy buns are sweet enough to please the pastry-lovers but much less sugary than your average cinnamon roll.

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These triple decker mint brownies start with a rich fudge brownie base, topped with a layer of mint buttercream, and finished with dark chocolate ganache.

Ambitious Baking Projects

Perhaps your only plan for the weekend is to cozy up in the kitchen with a fun baking project. We’ve got some ideas for you! For a treat that’s buttery and rich, and perhaps sweet, go for kouign amann or croissants. They both use laminated dough, which is a process that’s worth the effort. Maybe you want try your hand at a beautiful braided challah, a cinnamon-raisin loaf, or even a batch of English muffins. As you toast them through the week, you’ll be glad you did.

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Nothing screams ambitious baking project quite like a showstopping three-layer cake. This pistachio cake contains no artificial flavors, cake mix, or pudding mix, but is still infused with a delicate pistachio flavor.

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Battenberg Cake

While this cake looks like it would be way too difficult and ambitious to make, it is actually quite easy and doesn’t even require a special baking pan.

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If you don’t have a whole afternoon to make the kouign amann from start to finish (or don’t want to get up at 6am to make them for breakfast), there are a few places where you can break up the work and make this recipe over a few days.

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Homemade Croissants

You will never have better croissants than the ones you make yourself and eat fresh from the oven while standing over the kitchen counter. And here’s how to do it.

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Here is a bread that is as much a pleasure to look at as it is to eat. Check out that braiding! Challah is a bread that should be in everyone's repertoire.

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English Muffins

If perfectly round English muffins are your aim, then muffin rings will help. But this dough is sturdy enough that you don’t really need them — the hand-shaped rounds hold their shape quite well during baking.

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Cinnamon-Raisin Swirl Bread

Cinnamon swirl bread always feels like a special treat. Toast it and peel the layers away one at a time. Nothing compares to that last buttery bite from the very middle.

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Homemade Brioche

Learn to make brioche, and you’re well on your way to turning your kitchen into your very own bakery.

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Boston Cream Doughnut

Turn the pie into a luscious, silky doughnut.

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Sour Cream Doughnuts

Making sour cream doughnuts from scratch is great because then you can enjoy the tender, cake-like doughnuts while they're fresh and warm.

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A step-by-step guide for making your own homemade bagels.

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Citrus-Cranberry Tart

This rosy tart features a spiced speculoos cookie crust, a citrus-cranberry curd, and a sweet-tart cranberry glaze.

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Homemade macarons are well worth the effort and easy enough to make with a little patience and care.

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This yeasted sweet bread is studded with candied fruit and nuts with a log of almond paste running through it. Enjoy it lightly toasted and slathered with butter for breakfast or an afternoon snack.

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Cashing out on a whole tray of baklava is a delectable splurge, but why not try making your own following our recipe? It layers frozen phyllo pastry with a mixture of walnuts and pistachios, then soaked with a floral rose water syrup.

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