Graham Cracker

Spumoni is a delicious dessert made from three flavors of ice cream stuffed into a cup, and cut in four when frozen. The ice-cream colors reflect the colors of the Italian flag—red, white, and green—and spumoni has long been a big item on the menus of Italian American restaurants. Spumoni has its origins in a Neapolitan dessert, and supposedly came to America in 1905 with Salvatore Lezza. Lezza’s spumoni can still be had on Chicago’s Upper West Side. I filled many a cup with my own homemade ice cream in my early restaurant days, in the seventies, but spumoni is still delicious when made with good store-bought ice cream as well. Here rum gives the spumoni an extra layer of flavor, but the juice of the sour cherries is a great alternative.

Chocolate cream pie has a place of honor in roadside diner pie cases across the country. This deconstructed version inverts the classic format because the gorgeous, silky, deeply chocolaty pudding is worth digging for. Break though a crunchy, buttery graham cracker crust and a smooth layer of whipped cream before making your way to the rich chocolate depths of this decadent “pie.” Chocolate lovers, rejoice.

My cousin Vera sent me this recipe from Ann (Mrs. Dan) K. Lucy, a regular at the Elderville Cemetery Association’s annual homecoming picnic held on the grounds of the modest East Texas church where my great-great-grandparents met. It did not look promising. How could a layer of common graham crackers with butter, sugar, nuts, and toffee tossed on top amount to much? Then I made them—and repented. (My sincerest apologies to Mrs. Lucy.) I have taken this confection to several potlucks and have yet to escape without someone (or two or even three fellow guests) begging me for the recipe. I have made them a day in advance and been unable to resist snacking on them—just a few at a time, mind you—so that by the time they arrived at their intended destination their numbers were severely diminished. These crisp little squares are divine, seriously addictive, and making them is almost as easy as dropping dollar bills into the church-offering basket.

When I was a teenager, summer meant the beach. If I was lucky, I’d arrive in time for one of the great big beach-bonfire fiestas staged frequently by my friends, complete with roasted weenies, just a touch of beer (I swear!), and my total favorite—bonfire s’mores. Sadly, times have changed. Only a few Texas beach communities allow bonfires, so I came up with a s’more cupcake that puts me into a beach party mood no matter where I happen to be. The only fire necessary to bring their marsh mallow topping to the pitch-perfect golden brown of a genuine s’more is the skinny blue flame that shoots from my portable kitchen torch. These cupcakes are sure to bring smiles to just about any kid who shows up for a casual party, whether it takes place in the kitchen, at the shore, or on a beachfront deck. Now that my daughter is a seasoned college student, I make the cupcakes in advance, and whip up the marshmallow topping just before party time. I provide disposable plastic pastry bags fitted with open star tips so Fran and her friends can decorate the cupcakes themselves. Then it’s time for me to pass the torch—the kitchen torch, that is. Now that I think of it, it’s not the only torch I’m passing.

If nut brittle is my muse, blondie pie is our love child. It is, to date, my favorite pie we’ve ever created. Dense, sweet, salty, nutty, chock-full of textures large and small, it’s perfect to grab a piece of on the go and crush as if it were a slice of pizza.

At our East Village Milk Bar, we have two big-boy soft-serve machines that churn ice cream day and night. To keep ourselves entertained and to keep customers interested, we change the flavors every six weeks, basing each flight of flavors around a theme. This recipe was part of a suite of ice creams flavored liked baked goods, and, true to its name, it tastes just like cheesecake. The twist with it and our key lime pie ice cream was crazy good!

One of our favorite things to do is to make a frosting with an unexpected flavor. For this one, we puree graham crust down to a liquid form and then paddle it into whipping butter with a little seasoning.

When I was a baker at a conference center on Star Island, twelve miles off the coast of New Hampshire, I learned to make this kind of cookie from one of the best bakers I know, Mandy Lamb. She would put different ingredients in the cookie each day or each week and have people try and guess what the random secret ingredients were. Because we were on an island in New England, when storms blew in, we were trapped. No one traveled to the island, and, more important, no boats with food on them came our way, either. We had to get creative and use what we had on hand. We might not have had enough chocolate chips to make chocolate chip cookies, but if we threw in other mix-ins as well, the seven hundred some guests would never notice the shortage of one ingredient—and the cookies would always feel brand new, because they were different every time. I found after many batches that my favorite compost cookies had my favorite snacks in them: chocolate and butterscotch chips, potato chips, pretzels, graham crackers, and coffee (grounds). Compost cookies always turn out great in my mother’s kitchen because she infamously has a hodgepodge of mix-ins, none in great enough quantity to make an actual single-flavored cookie on its own. My brother-in-law calls them “garbage cookies”; others call them “kitchen sink cookies.” Call them what you want, and make them as we make them at Milk Bar, or add your own favorite snacks to the cookie base in place of ours.