Dessert recipes

Red Velvet Cocoa Cake made with buttermilk, cocoa powder, and vinegar for a tender, tangy crumb with that classic crimson color. A Southern layer cake staple.

Vintage 1930s special cocoa cake: a tender chocolate layer cake made with bloomed cocoa, brown sugar, and cake flour. Old-fashioned recipe that beats most modern boxed mixes.

Crisp rolled poppy seed cookies made with oil instead of butter, loaded with a third cup of soaked poppy seeds and a sugar-sparkle top. Simple dough, big crunch.

Date-nut pinwheel cookies with brown sugar dough rolled around a sweet date and chopped nut filling. The classic icebox cookie that slices into spirals before baking.

Christmas cream wafers sandwich tinted buttercream between sugar-coated, fork-pricked butter wafers. A retro holiday cookie that comes together with just five ingredients in the dough.

Classic white cake with buttermilk and egg whites for a pure white, tender crumb. Easy two-layer recipe with a marble cake variation built in.

Mandel-Halbmonde are German almond crescents: buttery shortbread cookies shaped like half-moons, baked pale, then rolled twice in powdered sugar. The kind of melt-in-your-mouth Christmas cookie every German bakery puts on the holiday plate.

Chocolate meringue pie with a silky cooked custard filling and a billowy sweetened meringue topping baked golden. The diner-counter classic done from scratch with unsweetened chocolate for that unmistakable old-fashioned cocoa flavor.

Koala Kookies are buttery walnut shortbread balls dusted in powdered sugar. Five ingredients, no eggs, and a melt-in-your-mouth texture that puts these in the same family as Mexican wedding cookies, Russian tea cakes, and Greek kourabiedes.

Sheila's apple pie tops green apples with a buttery batter made from pancake mix, sugar, egg, and butter. The unconventional shortcut topping bakes into a tender, cake-like crust over tart apple filling.

Lighter pound cake made with egg whites instead of whole eggs and buttermilk for a tender crumb. Flavored with vanilla and a hint of mace, no yolks needed.

Slice and bake sugar cookies: a make-ahead dough rolled in wax paper and chilled, then sliced and baked into tender cookies. Yields nearly eight dozen.

Italian pizzelles with butter, sugar, eggs, and a hint of anise pressed in a hot pizzelle iron into delicate snowflake-patterned wafer cookies. Traditional Italian holiday cookie.

Sesame seed cookies are an Italian-American holiday classic with a tender shortbread-like dough rolled in toasted sesame seeds before baking. Massive batch (240 cookies) for cookie tins.

Nut refrigerator cookies (icebox cookies) with brown sugar, butter, vanilla, and chopped nuts. Slice-and-bake dough that chills overnight and yields crisp, buttery cookies with caramel notes.

Classic walnut-crusted thumbprint cookies with tender shortbread base and jewel-toned jelly centers perfect for cookie swaps and holiday gift boxes.