Flour

It's the grown-up version of cream of mushroom chicken.

Two kinds of bars — candy and cookie — come together in a superhero-worthy pairing that, yes, truly satisfies. A chewy cookie layer replaces finicky nougat in this homemade version, leaving you free to expend your energies on making caramel from scratch. (Yes, it’s simpler than you think! Just use that candy thermometer for guaranteed success.) It’s not traditional, but adding a sprinkle of exquisitely flaky sea salt like Maldon takes a nostalgic treat to the next level.

Have a hankering for cake? Skip the cake pan and break out your cast iron skillet! This breakfast-friendly cake has juicy blueberries and lemon, all in a light cornmeal batter. It’s a low-key way to get a sweet start to any day. If you like cornbread, you’ll like this cake. Cornmeal adds sweetness and texture to the cake batter, which also has yogurt for tang and tenderness, and it’s finished with lots of fresh blueberries and lemon zest.

Delicate though they might seem, these egg noodles are in reality rough-hewn, homey, and versatile. They’re great added to slurpy soups, served with a light sauce, or topped with a hefty, meaty stew or mushroom ragout. Make this dough up to a day in advance and store, covered, in the fridge. Bring the dough back to room temperature, roll into sheets, and slice into noodles. No need to wait or dry these before using like so many pastas.

Of all the reasons cacio e pepe — a Roman pasta made with black pepper, Pecorino Romano cheese, and olive oil or butter — has skyrocketed back into the limelight, we’re willing to wager its simplicity is the key. Made with just three ingredients, the pasta has inspired everything from roasted potatoes to these savory cookies infused with Parmesan and flecked with black pepper.

People show fierce devotion to their favorite childhood snack cakes and treats. Mine was the individual fruit hand pies that probably contained very little real fruit, all encased in a thick crust glazed with sugar. Executive Editor Faith’s was oatmeal cream pies, so in celebration of her new journey into motherhood, this homemade version of the Little Debbie classic is dedicated to her!

We rely on chickpeas as our go-to ingredient for everything from dips and salads to stews and stir-fries, but chickpeas also have a sweet side. The most practical pulse gets playful here and gives these blondies more snack-worthy substance, not to mention a welcome protein boost. Blondies are the golden, vanilla-flavored cousin to brownies.

If you’re already an oatmeal-lover, then you’ll need little convincing that this baked oatmeal, reminiscent of a soufflé and verging on dessert, is a must-try recipe. And if you’re hesitant about oatmeal’s texture or feeling less than enthused about your regular ol’ heat-and-stir routine, then you’re in luck.

Get the dipping sauce ready — there's a new fry in town.

Sometimes there’s an occasion to make a beautiful, towering strawberry shortcake to grace the dessert table. But more often we’re managing a busy weeknight when the hankering for a slice of soft, spongy cake accompanied by fresh sliced berries and whipped cream hits. Even if you had the time and energy, you don’t need a whole cake, and you definitely don’t want to turn on the oven if it’s high summer. This sweet mug cake is your single-serve solution.

If there was ever an MVP of desserts, I have no doubt it would be awarded to this Nutella mug cake. When all you need is one bowl, four ingredients, and five minutes for a seriously chocolatey cake that can crush any sweet tooth, it’s hard to argue otherwise. This cake comes together with four common baking staples you likely already have in the kitchen: flour, baking powder, milk, and Nutella.

Crisp, cheesy crackers are here to finally give broccoli the snack-time cred it truly deserves. In turn, broccoli makes classic cheddar crackers a smart snack you can really feel good about. I’m sure most of us would agree we’d love to get more veggies in our diet. It can usually feel easier said than done, but this is one time it really is easy. Inspired by the flavors of broccoli-cheddar soup, these crackers instantly become a smarter snack with the addition of frozen broccoli.

At the top of the must-cook list is apple crisp, the fuss-free cousin to apple pie. With the help of the slow cooker, we're making this easy fall classic even easier.

“Dark and stormy” epitomizes many summer evenings. Clouds often roll in just after dinnertime, bringing a burst of cooling rain, with dark clouds and bright lightening. These storms are best enjoyed on a porch with a cocktail in hand, or — even better — an ice cream sandwich inspired by a favorite summer cocktail and the night itself. The ease of making this ice cream sandwich is twofold.

Grab a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jam, and turn them into layers that bake up into these sweet and tasty bar cookies that will satisfy a PB&J craving anytime. Smooth peanut butter is the base for an easy dough that does double duty as both the crust and the crumble topping layer. In the middle goes Concord grape jelly, but you can of course substitute your favorite jelly instead if grape isn’t your thing.

This bake is going to change the way you view light and airy popovers. Did you know that you can bake one giant popover for a crowd? And that you can fill the sizzling batter with good things like thyme-scented mushrooms and goat cheese? This is popover 2.0 — just in time for Thanksgiving! A classic popover is a beautiful thing: a puff of airy, custardy goodness with a crispy edge. Here, we’re baking the batter in a single large baking dish instead of individual tins.

Leftover pasta always seems to be in my fridge, sitting in plastic containers, waiting to be repurposed. This extra pasta is perhaps as a vestige of when my kids were really young and I needed fast and simple meals. Sure, I could throw together a pasta salad with mayo or vinaigrette and some vegetables, but in the fall and winter, I want to serve — and eat — a warm, hearty meal.

Pie crust can stump even the most confident baker. Then, when you add a gluten-free requirement, things get overwhelming pretty quickly. Thankfully, with the right flour blend and a few simple techniques, you’ll quickly master a pie crust that’s both delicious and easy to make. Although there are a bevy of gluten-free premixed flour blends and pie crust mixes on the market, I recommend using a blend of millet flour and tapioca starch.

A combination of cornmeal and flour make a tender crumbed cornbread with a thin, crispy crust from baking in a cast iron skillet.

Whether you also know these little powdered sugar-dusted cookies as Russian tea cakes or Italian wedding cookies, these buttery, nutty cookies are a welcome addition to any cookie plate — especially since they can be made ahead and frozen. You can use almost any nut that you’d like, and this version adds cocoa powder and cayenne pepper for a taste that’s reminiscent of a mug of spicy hot chocolate.

Classic Linzer cookies have a lot of yummy things going on for them. These buttery, nutty cookie sandwiches have a peekaboo cutout at the top to showcase the jewel-toned jam nestled inside, all dusted in powdered sugar. But all the rolling, cutting, and filling might be a more involved project than you’d like to tackle, especially around the holidays.

Rugelach is a rolled baked treat that cooks as easily as a cookie, yet tastes like a pastry. It’s crisp and sweet on the outside, and so delicate and tender on the inside that it melts in your mouth. This circular pull-apart rugelach is a charmingly decorative variation — yet another take on a confection that has had many versions. If you make rugelach often, you will notice that this dough is a bit sturdier and holds its shape a bit better than other rugelach doughs.

Inspired by our soft, chewy, made-for-s’mores graham cracker cookies, this reinvented holiday version is made for the season’s cookie plate. This twist on the classic thumbprint cookie bakes up plump and tender, thanks to a base made from a duo of crushed graham crackers and flour. Right in the center is a dollop of the jelly or jam of your choice. The highlight of any thumbprint cookie is the sweet valley of jam that rests at the center.

Mandelbread, or mandelbrot (or mandelbrei, as I knew it as a young child), is an Eastern European and Russian Jewish twice-baked cookie. In some ways it is like its cousin, biscotti, the famous Italian twice-baked cookie, but mandelbrot is richer in eggs and fat and bakes up into a softer, more delicate cookie, with a toasty exterior that pairs as well with hot teas, as biscotti does with espresso.

Ready your icing and round up the gum drops because this is the gingerbread cookie recipe to carry you through the holiday season.

There’s something elegant about the simplicity of shortbread cookies, especially when the flavor and richness of butter and sugar shine through. To give them some wintry flair, we added just a handful of fresh rosemary, making them special enough to go on a holiday cookie plate or package up as a homespun food gift. When making shortbread cookies, adopt the mindset of making pie dough: Work quickly and keep everything as cold as possible.

Spritz cookies are a busy baker’s best friend. The ingenious contraption of a cooke press allows you to create different shapes of cookies so that you have a wide variety of cookie designs, all with very little effort. While the standard vanilla-flavored spritz cookies are delicious, simply adding some fresh lemon juice and zest to the dough gives it a bright flavor that’s welcome on any cookie plate.

Everyone loves a swirled sugar cookie, especially when it’s infused with a touch of peppermint. This season we’re inviting you to take this cookie to the next level for a holiday treat that will bring your cookie plate up a notch: Brush one side of the finished cookies with melted chocolate and sprinkle them with crushed peppermint candies for something extra festive, extra minty, and extra delicious.

Stop the search — you’ve found your new addition to this year’s lineup of holiday cookies. This lemon curd sandwich cookie starts off with just-sweet-enough cookies, made rich and tender by a simple cream cheese dough. Don’t expect to find a snappy cookie here — these rounds have some give because we want them to melt a bit when you bite into them. Nestled inside is a sunny, tart and sweet lemon curd.

Rich and nutty brown butter is a special ingredient with the power to make everything it touches taste a little more luxurious — including sugar cookies. With the addition of brown butter, the classic sugar cookie of our childhood takes on a deep, mellow richness with hints of toasted nuts in every bite. By simply browning the butter, we’re giving everyone’s favorite holiday cookie an instant upgrade for an extra-special touch on this year’s cookie tray.

Pinwheel cookies are a simple upgrade on a classic sugar cookie, perfect for the home baker who wants to bake beautiful sugar cookies but doesn’t have the time (or desire) to decorate two-dozen cookies with royal icing. The premise is simple: Mix up your favorite sugar cookie dough, divide that dough into two, color and flavor one of the doughs, roll them out, roll them together, slice, and bake.

A fast and fancy cookie made from pantry staples with no mixer, rolling pin, or cookie cutter required.

Magic cakes are a one-pan wonder for folks who love lots of different textures in their desserts. The top is crisped and golden-brown; airy as a gossamer angel food cake. The center is custardy, flan-like, and creamy. The bottom is a dense layer — not quite a cake and not quite a custard and altogether delicious. With a few cartons of eggs, a few gallons of milk, and some pans, I started the journey to creating a magic cake recipe that works every time.

I’ve seldom met a cake I didn’t like, so it’s hard to pick a favorite, but if I absolutely had to, this olive oil cornmeal cake would be it. I’ve long preferred olive oil cakes for their wonderfully tender crumb and depth of flavor, and that goes doubly so for the toothsome texture of this cornmeal-flecked version.

Birthday cake is the only thing you need to make a birthday special. Whether you’re celebrating your kids or yourself, I believe everyone should have a cake on their birthday. Homemade birthday cake is one of my favorite gifts to give, despite having a family birthday in almost every month of the year.

Hummingbird cake tastes like it could be the love child of banana bread and pineapple upside-down cake. In this Southern classic, bananas and crushed pineapple moisten a spiced cake sweetened with brown sugar and studded with pecans, and then whole the cake is coated in perfect cream cheese icing and decorated with pineapple flowers.

My heart beats a little faster when I talk about caramel cake. The tender yellow cake, the thick, crystalline frosting that marries caramelized sugar and butter — it’s an easy cake to fall in love with. The very best caramel cakes are anything but simple; the yellow cake must only carry the whisper of caramel flavor and be both tender and sturdy enough to support the frosting, which is the real star of the show.

Be prepared to fall hard for this cake. If not for its soft-pink hues, then for the moist, tender crumb lightly spiked with Champagne and wells of strawberry syrup. Or maybe it will be the rosé buttercream that really does it for you. What I’m trying to say is that this cake is the whole package — a dessert primed for celebration and yet surprising easy to pull together.

You love spinach-artichoke dip and you love mac and cheese, so it only makes sense that these two crowd-pleasers come together to make this luxurious weeknight dinner. If you think each one is amazing on its own, you haven’t lived until you’ve experienced this dip-meets-dinner mash-up. With four (yes, four!) cheeses, a double dose of veggies, tender pasta, and a single pot, it doesn’t get much better than this easy-fancy mac and cheese.

Almond-lovers, this playful marzipan cake is for you. It’s made with almond flour and marzipan — a rich, sweetened paste of ground almonds — leaving you with a dense, moist cake steeped with the flavor of this nut. The cake is wrapped in a coating of buttercream frosting and decorated with colored marzipan cut-outs you can create and shape yourself.

Puréed carrots, eggs, milk, and sharp cheddar cheese get blended into a soufflé base that puffs beautifully into a light, airy, almost custard-like side dish.

I’ve got a thing for nuggets of crispy chicken. Not necessarily chicken nuggets — although good ones can fall in this category — but chicken that’s been cut into chunks, is cooked until crispy, and takes well to eating in one or two bites. What can I say? I’m just looking for joy in the form of a salty, meaty, crunchy revelation.

If the combination of strawberries and rhubarb wins your heart the way it does mine, then this is the only dessert you’ll need from now through the end of summer. Made with tender cream biscuits, these individual shortcakes start off like the basic version you know, with a few twists that will dazzle your tastebuds. A quick roast in the oven tames the tart bite of the rhubarb and heightens the sweet flavor of the strawberries.

The secret to being the hostess with the mostest? Gougères in your freezer.

Sometimes you need a cake — like, now — and getting out a stand mixer and dirtying a few bowls isn’t ideal. It’s often in these situations we lean on cake mixes to get a cake in the oven. Inspired by the virtues of cake mix (it is easy and reliable, after all) we set out to create an everyday vanilla cake — something sweet but sturdy and resilient that we could quickly turn into everything from an everyday coffee cake to cupcakes to a giant ice cream cake sandwich.

Banana bread is a great use of overripe bananas, but what if you want to turn bananas into an Instagram-worthy dessert or an everyday treat instead of breakfast fare? This brown sugar-glazed, cinnamon-scented banana upside-down cake is the most delicious way to bring bananas to brunch or an after-dinner dessert. Using our one-bowl vanilla cake recipe, we can turn everyday bananas into a sumptuous treat. One of the joys of banana bread is its ease and simplicity, and this cake is no different.

Popular throughout Latin America, tres leches is a buttery cake baked and then soaked in a combination of evaporated milk, sweetened condensed milk, and whole milk, hence the “three milks” name. While milk-soaked cake might sound soggy, this cake is the perfect summertime cake, thanks to its cool serving temperature. The cake acts as a sponge for the milk mixture and takes on a rich pudding-like texture after the milks are added.

Put just about any baked treat in front of me and I am happy, but there’s something extra special about these seasonal blondies. The base is a classic blondie that’s been seriously upgraded with the help of brown butter and a slew of chopped white chocolate. Fresh strawberry halves dot the surface — their sweet summer flavor concentrates and caramelizes in the oven, leaving you to bite into juicy, candy-like flavor in between bites of buttery, cookie-like goodness.

What’s not to love about trail mix? It’s equal parts sweet, savory, crunchy, and chewy — a perfect snack no matter what you’re craving. Throwing all these elements into a soft oatmeal cookie yields a one-handed treat that’s easier to eat than trail mix, yet still offers that same satisfying mix of dried fruit, toasty nuts, sweet chocolate, and yes, even salty bits of crunchy pretzel. Let’s just call these little guys trailblazers (pun intended), shall we?

Calling all coconut-lovers! If you’re a looking for a special dessert for this weekend’s festivities, this coconut poke cake won’t let you down. With a coconut cake base, homemade coconut pudding (featuring homemade coconut cream!), and shredded coconut over a layer of fluffy white frosting, it’s coconut sweetness through and through.

If you have a soft spot for oatmeal cookies and a particular fondness for ginger in baked goods, this recipe is for you. With chunks of candied ginger throughout and a sweet, jammy thumbprint center, these are classic oatmeal cookies with the volume turned up. These thumbprints are basically your favorite classic, chewy oatmeal cookie, upgraded with a fruit-filled, sweet-and-spicy twist. The dough gets a double dose of ginger from the ground spice and chopped-up pieces of candied ginger.

The only thing better than a slow cooker chicken dinner is one that’s cooked on a bed of tender red potatoes, then tossed with a buttery lemon sauce that’s punched up with briny capers. This piccata will win your heart not only for its bold layers of flavor, but also for how simple it is to pull together. There are some set-it-and-forget-it slow cooker meals where we can go to sleep or dash out the door to work, and let it simmer away for upwards of eight to 10 hours.

Au revoir, Paris! Ann Mah takes us off the tourist path on a culinary tour of France’s favorite regional foods. Hailing from the region of Brittany, which is located on the far edge of northwestern France, these shortbread cookies may appear ordinary, but don’t be fooled by their plain-Jane appearance. These Breton biscuits are special because they rely on cultured butter to flavor them … and that’s it. No vanilla, no citrus zest — just high-quality, salted butter.

My quest for a peanut butter cookie that's thick and soft, that bends rather than breaks when folded in two, has come to a glorious end.

Cheese crackers, whether they are square or shaped like an animal, are highly snackable. They’re tender and crisp, a little buttery, and bursting with cheese flavor. Replicating these snack staples can be disappointing, as my 5-year-old told me often during attempt after attempt to make her beloved “cheddar bunnies” at home.

French toast is the gold-standard of slow Saturdays – a hot cup of coffee in one hand, a sizzling skillet on the stove, and Billie Holiday crooning in the background. There’s nothing like the soothing repetition of whisking eggs and cream, cutting rich egg bread into impossibly thick slices, combining the two, and watching the toast sizzle in a pool of butter. That is the dream until you have two toddlers begging for breakfast before your feet find your slippers.

Ever eye those shrink-wrapped tubes of polenta in the grocery store and wonder what to do with them? Turns out they’re the perfect base for casseroles — all you have to do is cut them into rounds first. The sauce, which I’ve been dreaming about for a while, is inspired by eggs Florentine. It’s a basic Parmesan white sauce fragrant with garlic, onions, and, of course, a whole bag of sautéed baby spinach.

Here’s my proposition to make boneless, skinless chicken breasts a whole lot more interesting: Get them drunk. Yes, the protein can often be likened to that colleague who is a touch boring and has a personality that’s a little too dry, but get her a bit tipsy at the work happy hour and suddenly she’s way more fun to be around.

This chocolate cookie is a master of many disguises, all tucked into the guise of a quite specific purpose. It is a roll-out cookie that is made with a dough you will simply love to work with. It’s crazy forgiving, re-rollable, re-chillable, and re-freezable. What makes it so versatile and, yes, masterful is that it also tastes like cocoa without being bitter or insanely sweet and bakes up soft in the middle (orwith the most incredible crackly crisp with a little more oven time).

Roasting a whole head of cauliflower is a transformative experience, both for the cook and the cauliflower. At first you might be befuddled as to why anyone might want to cook an entire head of cauliflower whole, but as you pull the burnished heads of tender, aromatic cauliflower from the oven, you start to understand.

Fried jelly doughnuts, called sufganiyot, are a common Hanukkah treat in Israel, and are increasingly popular in the United States. But while homemade doughnuts filled with strawberry or raspberry jam are delicious as a once-in-a-while treat, they make the house smell like fried food and leave a pesky amount of cooking oil behind to dispose of. These gougères, which come sandwiched with fig preserves, offer a savory, sophisticated twist on sufganiyot.

The holiday season is approaching — do you have your go-to cookie recipe ready? Spritz cookies involve careful pressing, and Linzer cookies require filling and decorating. These cookies, however — lightly scented with orange zest and studded with white chocolate chips and dried cranberries — are full of holiday flavor and take next to no time to pull together.