Cinnamon

This rum-spiked hot toddy is infused with fiery black pepper, revitalizing cinnamon, and cleansing cardamom to cure the winter blues.

I like to make a batch of Lebkuchen Spice Mix—a mixture of all the “usual suspects” in wintertime baking—in early fall so that I’m ready for the Christmas baking season. The mixture below is a great all-purpose one. But you can also tinker with the amounts if you want to highlight one flavor or another.

Making Stollen is not for the faint of heart. Avoiding it altogether because excellent store-bought Stollen abounds is further abetted by the invention of Stollenkonfekt, bite-size chunks of spiced, tender Quark dough studded with almonds and raisins and thickly cloaked in vanilla-scented confectioners’ sugar. They may be a relatively recent development in the world of Christstollen, which dates back to the Middle Ages, but they more than make up for their youth. In other words, want the rich, buttery, spicy flavor of Stollen without the work of a yeasted dough and the weeks of impatiently waiting for the loaves to be ready? If so, Stollenkonfekt is the thing for you.

Also known as advieh, this aromatic blend comes from Persian cuisine. It’s fragrant, a little sweet, and gently warming. It is delicious mixed with sugar and sprinkled over baked goods, donuts, and rice pudding or added to dried fruits that are cooking into jam. It straddles the sweet and savory world because it’s also great for flavoring rice pilaf with toasted nuts, lentil soup, lamb meatballs, braised chicken, or vegetable stew. It’s a blend that is shared by chefs and pastry chefs. Use it to make Persian-Style Carrots and Black-Eyed Peas.

One of my favorite crops from my husband’s farm are his fall carrots. I prefer the fall carrots because as the weather gets colder the vegetable sugars concentrate, yielding the sweetest carrots of the year. We use lots of carrots in this recipe, so that it’s more about the carrots than anything else. For the best flavor, serve it cold the day after you make it. You can substitute chickpeas for the black-eyed peas, if you prefer to use another type of bean.

This pared-down mulled wine recipe is great for impromptu entertaining this weekend.

Tangy cranberries and sweet orange zest add a floral tartness to this apple crisp topped with an almond-studded, oatmeal-cookie crumble.

Speculoos cookies in "butter" form add a spicy complexity to pumpkin purée for a new spin on the classic fall dessert.

Can’t get enough of pumpkin pie spice? With this easy whipped cream, you can add it to everything: our awesome Build-Your-Own Thanksgiving Pie Bar, the ultimate autumn icebox cake, and, yes, even your next latte.

Every October as kids, we loved to go pumpkin picking and buy fresh pumpkins. Our grandmother would take the pumpkin flesh and bake it in the oven with a little cinnamon and sugar, and then we’d stick it in the blender, puree it, and use it for baking. We’d bake pumpkin bread, pumpkin cake, and pumpkin pie, and we would also roast the pumpkin seeds in the oven. Really, she used every single part of that pumpkin! The thing we loved the most was our grandmother’s pumpkin cake. It was more of a cake-bread hybrid: very dense and savory yet sweet. It smelled amazing coming out of the oven. We would sometimes just eat it without any icing, hot from the oven. We’d burn our tongues because we wouldn’t even wait for it to cool!

You can use the same weight in regular apples for this gingerbread cake recipe, but don’t the little lady apples just look so awesome?!

Steam, fluff; steam, fluff. This couscous recipe is time-consuming but worth it.

These buttery, flaky twists have a crispy, warmly spiced glaze.

Anybody who knows me knows that I have a soft spot for cupcakes and soy chai lattes, so combining these two creates my own piece of heaven. These cupcakes are moist, tender, and lightly spicy, thanks to the combination of ginger and cardamom. Go ahead and pair with a steaming hot chai latte...you won’t overdo it.

To help prevent the ice cream bars from melting while you are cutting and dipping them, choose a vanilla ice cream that freezes solid. How can you tell? Squeeze the pint in the freezer case to test which brand feels hardest.