Recipe Sifter

Amish friendship cake with brandy-soaked fruit starter, warm spices, and pecans in a bundt pan. A share-with-friends chain recipe where the fermented fruit starter grows and gets passed along.

Honey beer cake baked in a tube pan with apple butter, orange juice, walnuts, raisins, and warm spices. A dense, fragrant cake with five layers of sweetness and a beer-malt backbone.

Warm pear pudding cake with pecans, cinnamon, and cloves baked under a bubbling brown sugar caramel sauce. An old-fashioned comfort dessert best served hot with ice cream or whipped cream.

Italian chocolate nut cookies (mostaccioli) are dense, spiced cocoa cookies with chopped almonds and raisins on whole wheat flour. A traditional Calabrian holiday cookie with deep chocolate-clove flavor.

Yule log cookies shaped into scored logs, baked, sliced on the diagonal, and decorated with holly icing. Spiced with cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, and nutmeg.

A diabetic-friendly spice cake made with whole wheat flour, sour cherries, dates, and applesauce instead of refined sugar. Warmly spiced with cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg.

Oxtails braised in red wine with celery, leeks, carrots, and a French-style sauce made from the reduced braising liquid. Rich, fork-tender, and worth every one of the 4 hours.

Tourtiere is a traditional French-Canadian pork pie seasoned with cloves, mace, and marjoram in a flaky double crust. A Quebec holiday classic that's just as good warm or cold.

Have some fun when it comes to baking with these scrumptious cookies your kids will love!

Traditional English plum pudding, a steamed Christmas classic packed with raisins, currants, apples, walnuts, and beef suet. Spiced, dense, and deeply boozy-optional.

Swiss Leckerli cookies: honey-spiced almond bars with candied citrus peel and kirsch, finished with a hardening sugar glaze. Traditional Basel Christmas market sweet that improves with age.

Old-fashioned spice cake with cinnamon, allspice, cloves, and nutmeg, sweetened with brown sugar and studded with raisins. A tender crumb built on evaporated milk and topped with caramel frosting.

One-bowl orange marmalade tube cake with warm spices, chopped walnuts, and a hint of lemon. A bittersweet British-style tea cake that dusts clean from a vanilla-wafer-lined pan.

Spice walnut cake marries toasted walnuts with whole-wheat pastry and barley flours, warm cinnamon and clove, then soaks in a fresh orange syrup after baking. A healthier Greek-inspired karydopita.

Old-fashioned boiled fruitcake with raisins and warm spices. Simple one-bowl method where you boil fruit first then fold into spiced flour for incredibly moist cake.

Medianyk is a traditional Ukrainian honey cake spiced with cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves. Whipped egg whites give it a light, airy crumb despite all that honey.