Flour

Now here’s a wholesome cake you can feel equally happy about for dessert as you can for breakfast. A fluffy sheet of banana cake is the perfect partner to a mix of crunchy, earthy nuts and seeds. To make this wholesome cake a bit more sweet, we’re finishing it off with a drizzle of bittersweet chocolate. I love the ease of making this cake. Like banana bread, it’s a one-bowl wonder, thanks to the use of oil instead of creamed butter and sugar.

Last year we hosted family at our house on Christmas Day — all with a brand new baby. After a few moments of minor stress and lots of pacing, I’ve decided that the only way to have an easy, effortless day that I can truly enjoy is to do much of the food preparation in advance. So I started playing around with interesting, festive waffle recipes and landed on this incredibly tasty, fragrant eggnog waffle dressed up for the occasion with spiced whipped cream and a dusting of cinnamon.

When the perfume of gingerbread floats through the air, and you catch a first glimpse of gingerbread men and houses, you know that holiday season is here for real. Gingerbread, in some form, has been a European holiday staple since medieval days, when using prized spices meant that it was a very special time of year.

This seasonal twist on classic stuffed shells keeps the tender cooked pasta, the ricotta, and the stringy, melted mozzarella cheese, but ditches traditional filling for the flavors of Thanksgiving. And we mean that literally! These shells are stuffed with stuffing, roasted vegetables, and even bits of leftover turkey. If you love a next-day turkey sandwich, you have to try this quirky twist on Thanksgiving leftovers.

Even without the rhubarb, tomato dumplings are a mystery to those who didn’t grow up eating them. They are an old-fashioned favorite of some grandmas and meat-and-three diners. Juicy canned tomatoes, either home-canned or store-bought, simmer in a fragrant stew that is topped with dollops of biscuit dough that poach in the delicious liquid. Think of them as chicken and dumplings, made with tomatoes instead of chicken.

I’m a purist when it comes to summertimes treats. I like fresh berries folded into whipped cream or a sheet cake with a tumble of fresh fruit — and when the ice cream truck comes around, I always get a creamsicle. So when I came across Sara Moulton’s recipe for creamsicle pudding cake in her new book, Sara Moulton’s Home Cooking 101, I knew I had found my new go-to dessert for summer. First, let’s talk pudding cakes.

This Riesling rhubarb crisp cake has it all: tender white cake, rhubarb-strawberry compote and matching buttercream, a crispy oat crumble, and a fanciful, ruffled finish. It’s the perfect cake to bake when you’re feeling like showing off your cake-baking skills or looking for a weekend project to tackle when you want to spend the day in the kitchen.

When you’re looking for something beyond vanilla, but still aiming to please a crowd, try a classic lemon cake. Something as simple as lemon might get overlooked in a world of salted caramel, velvety raspberry, and matcha-everything, but this lemon supreme cake is anything but ordinary. With three layers of lemon-soaked cake blanketed in satiny vanilla buttercream, this little cake makes for an exceptional dessert for anything from a bridal brunch to afternoon tea to a birthday party.

Craving cake, but don’t necessarily have an occasion to make one for? Well then it’s a pretty good thing that you don’t need to wait until your birthday to make this honey-apple cake. This recipe falls under what I call “casual cakes,” meaning cakes that are perfectly suitable for Sunday brunch, afternoon tea, or any random Wednesday night when you need to fulfill a relentless cake craving without having to make something completely over the top.

Strawberry shortcake is the ambassador of summer, showing off juicy berries like jewels. It’s usually a humble dessert built on a biscuit, but here we turn it into a towering showstopper of cake, whipped cream, and fresh strawberries. Yet it brings drama without fuss; this is layer cake the easy way. This cake stands four-layers tall, each one too gorgeous on its own to be hidden behind a blanket of frosting or smothering of chocolate sauce (although that totally works for other cakes).

Healthy and pizza aren’t words that often cohabitate well, but this dough — rich in the nutritional benefits of two types of whole-wheat four, and laced with the addition of semolina — tastes and behaves like a “real pizza dough” (not a this tastes like it must be good for you version).