Dessert, Baked Good Recipes

New Zealand rock cakes with butter, raisins, and orange marmalade, baked rough and craggy on purpose. A rustic teatime scone that comes together in 30 minutes with no special equipment.

Chocolate mayonnaise cake is an old-fashioned secret for incredibly moist chocolate cake. A full cup of mayo replaces butter and adds richness without any greasy taste.

Cherry date skillet cookies skip the oven entirely. Buttery dates and brown sugar bubble together in a skillet, then bind with rice cereal, coconut, and maraschino cherries into chewy, no-bake bites rolled in coconut.

Banana ginger cake with 2 teaspoons of ground ginger baked in a 9-inch square pan, topped with spiced whipped cream. A lighter snack cake using margarine and skim milk.

Flaky puff pastry spiraled around horn molds, baked golden, then piped full of sweetened whipped cream and topped with grated chocolate. A classic European pastry at home.

No-bake Kahlua cocoa balls made with vanilla wafer crumbs, pecans, cocoa, golden raisins, and candied cherries. Roll in coconut, powdered sugar, or nuts.

Mandel rolls (mandelbrot) made with cake meal, matzo meal, potato starch, and chopped nuts. Twice-baked Jewish biscotti that are crisp, cinnamon-spiced, and Passover-friendly.

Authentic biscotti di Prato from Tuscany. Twice-baked Italian almond cookies with toasted almonds, a pinch of saffron, and the traditional pasta-board well method. Crisp, dunkable, and built to keep.

Easy amaretto cake built on a doctored yellow cake mix with vanilla pudding, toasted almonds, and a buttery amaretto-soaked glaze. The bundt that fooled every dinner party into thinking you spent all day.

Palm Beach pineapple squares: a chocolate walnut cake base topped with a lemon-scented pineapple layer, baked together into one tropical dessert bar.

Traditional New Mexican biscochitos with anise seed and cinnamon-sugar topping. These shortening-based cookies are crisp, fragrant, and cut into festive shapes.

Mom's apple cookies are soft, cake-like drop cookies with grated fresh apple, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and walnuts. Old-fashioned spiced bakery flavor from a lunchbox-friendly batch of three dozen.

Chocolate red beet cake: deep cocoa cake with mashed beets baked into a moist, tender crumb you'd never guess was hiding a vegetable. An old-school secret-ingredient cake.

Deluxe chocolate chunk walnut cookies with semi-sweet chunks and milk chocolate morsels in a chewy brown sugar dough. Bakery-style thick cookies with two kinds of chocolate.

Alice's white cake is a tender vanilla and almond-scented layer cake leavened with whipped egg whites for an airy, snowy crumb. The kind of from-scratch white cake that makes box mixes look amateur.

Key lime pie from the Pierhouse in the Florida Keys, a custardy filling of sweetened condensed milk, egg yolks and tart key lime juice in a graham cracker crust. Finished with a reduced lime syrup glaze.