Flour

Individual knots of challah bread, rich with eggs and ready for a slathering of butter.

While there are many things I can tell you about my grandfather, the one thing you should know is that he loved pecan sandies. In fact, I cannot bite into these buttery, nut-studded cookies without thinking of him. This version, which he’d heartily approve of, is firm and sturdy, and greets you with a crisp edge all around that softens as you get towards the center.

Gingerbread cookies have long been one of my favorite holiday treats. I think it has something to do with the fact that they are just so overtly festive (they really only make an appearance between November and December!). But it’s not the little cut-out men that I adore — it’s these soft, thick, chewy rounds sweetened with molasses and coated with crunchy sugar to tame the spicy bite.

Vanilla often plays a supporting role in baked goods — a teaspoon or so gets tossed into a batter or dough without much thought. Here, it gets the attention it deserves and takes center stage, just in time for the holidays. While these cookies may look plain, they are anything but; their complexity is understated.

Add these triple-layer cookie bars to your holiday baking plans and cookie trays ASAP, and you will not regret it. With a buttery, barely sweet shortbread base topped with a rich, thick layer of semi-sweet chocolate and chopped toffee bits, these sweet treats are nothing short of outrageously impressive. They’re intensely chocolatey and wildly decadent. Sign me up. The beauty of making these bars is how surprisingly easy they are to pull together.

With the help of the slow cooker and little hands!

On a busy weekend day when you have a lot of things to take care of around the house but not much time to devote to dinner, pull this slow cooker chicken and dumpling recipe out of your back pocket.

Sometimes the simplest cakes are the best cakes. In this case, one lemon has enough bright-tasting zest to flavor a tender white sheet cake. Its juice is combined with powdered sugar and drizzled on top where it hardens into a sweet-tangy, crunchy coating. The familiar and comforting flavors make this easy cake one to cut slivers from all week long.

When I need a festive dessert that’s wildly easy to pull together and made for sharing, a pan of blondies is my go-to treat every single time. A cousin to the brownie, this version skips the chocolate chips for butterscotch chips. They bake up with a dense, chewy texture — just like a bar cookie should. Consider these blondies a blank canvas.

My favorite kind of sugar cookies are the ones that bake up tall and pillowy, with that dense, gooey, and almost slightly under-baked center. This recipe channels everything there is to love about those cookies, and brings them to you in the form of a bar cookie. Top it with a thick swipe of lightly scented strawberry frosting and a shower of colorful sprinkles, and you’ve got a sweet Valentine’s Day treat to feed the classroom, your coworkers, or your book club buddies.

This Italian Easter bread has a strong Sicilian accent and carries the taste of spring all baked into joy-filled, adorable little wreaths. The bread is strongly spiced and rich with anise as a little reminder of winter. Down to the colorful sprinkles, this bread celebrates the breaking of the Lenten fast. The glaze, poured over after baking, creates a crust of sweetness as it dries and adds delicate crisp to start every bite.

Yes, it’s true. You can cook a whole chicken in the Instant Pot. Just keep in mind a couple of things: The chicken must weigh four pounds or less (essentially a broiler-fryer), and it won’t come out with a crispy, crackling skin like it would from the oven. I find that the convenience and the speed of the Instant Pot make up for those two differences, as does the delicious mushroom sauce this chicken is served with.

If you’re a longtime reader of Kitchn, no doubt you have come across Faith’s chicken ragù with bacon in the years since it was first published. This is one of those magical recipes whose flavor is inversely related to the number of ingredients and effort required to prepare it. A favorite among editors here at Kitchn, it’s hard to believe it has taken us this long to revisit it.

Add this one to the dinner plan ASAP!

Before the Victoria sponge, British sponge cakes were leavened only by eggs hand-whisked with sugar until foamy and thick. Sometime in the mid-1800s, an unheralded genius realized that the recent invention of baking powder meant butter could be creamed in with the sugar, resulting in a firmer, longer-lasting, less temperamental sponge. And that’s how we ended up with cake we know today: a toothsome, bouncy sponge that is comparatively easy to whip up and has a rich, buttery flavor.

A lemon drizzle cake is more of a concept than an actual recipe. Although there is a time and a place for Madeira-type plain lemon sponge, sometimes just a bit more pizzazz and sugar is required. A drizzle cake is just a lemon sponge cake that’s soaked while still warm with a glaze made of lemon juice and sugar, which adds a crisp crust as it cools.

For a fun, easy twist on chicken marsala, give boneless pork chops a try for dinner instead. When cooked in a bit of browned butter and then simmered in a glossy sauce rich with golden-brown mushrooms and sweet marsala wine, these pork chops can make dinner just a tad more elegant. It may seem a bit fussy to use both oil and butter, but that’s what makes this recipe special.

We streamlined the comforting classic so you can have it on the table faster.

Serve this with dinner tonight.

Breakfast for dinner is a weekly staple in our house. It’s easy on the cook (and the wallet!) and the kids love it, too. Chrissy Teigen’s Crispy Parmesan Waffles are going to be your new favorite breakfast-for-dinner recipe and here why: They’re more than 50 percent cheese by volume but they cook up light as a soufflé and crispy like Parmesan frico.

As the days grow shorter and colder, a creamy, comforting beef stew loaded with seared beef and savory mushrooms fits the dinner bill perfectly — especially if you’re a fan of beef stroganoff. The slow cooker works all day, tenderizing the beef and creating a flavorful sauce, and all you have to do is add some cream when you get home and figure out if you’d rather serve it over egg noodles or mashed potatoes. For this recipe, any cut of stew beef will work well.

It's the best (and tastiest) way to serve brunch to a crowd.

Although I could eat tahini with a spoon and have a heavy hand with sesame seeds, I’d always dismissed black sesame as a fleeting Instagram-fueled trend. But when I tried the flavor firsthand (in a cookie, no less) I immediately understood the hype — and gained a newfound interest in the black sesame treats that had taken over my feed. Its deep, nutty flavor adds a slight savoriness to baked goods, making these pinwheel cookies suitable for brunch or a mid-morning snack.

With just one bite, it was clear to me why so many people love the orange chicken from Panda Express. Between the crispy chicken and the thick, sweet, lightly spiced blanket of sauce, it’s pretty irresistible. But this at-home version is even better than the original. Bite-sized pieces of chicken are cooked until crispy, then coated with a sticky-sweet citrusy sauce with just a hint of heat. It’s everything you love and expect, without the greasiness that so often comes with takeout.

Comforting cheesy chicken and broccoli casserole.

This cake might look the most simple take on our one-bowl vanilla cake, but it has a delicious, ingenious tip that sets it apart from any other cake: The subtly sweet frosting is brightened with Greek yogurt. That’s right, part of the butter in the classic American-style buttercream is replaced with Greek yogurt for a naked cake that is more flavorful than a fully frosted cake any day. A naked cake is one way to add simple style to a layered cake.

Strawberry shortcake is a springtime staple that can hardly be improved upon, unless you can find a faster way to bake a shortcake. Enter: the one-bowl vanilla cake. Mixed in one bowl and baked in a sheet pan, this cake can be baked up from start to finish in less than an hour. Once baked, cut the cake into rounds, top with fresh strawberries and whipped cream, and boom — near-instant strawberry shortcakes for your you and your lucky family and friends!

As an ardent pie crust lover, it’s only natural that I adore empanadas, the sweet or savory stuffed pastries from Latin America or Spain. They’re usually served at parties or even as a meal, and one of my favorite fillings is chicken with olives. This quick weeknight version reimagines the handheld pastry as a skillet pie, with a bubbling layer of juicy ground chicken cooked with bell peppers, onions, and olives in a savory spiced sauce, all topped with a flaky pie crust.

This vanilla stunner only requires one bowl for mixing and one pan for making, making it extra easy.

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).