Rice Flour

Like bubble-gum ice cream, Sno Balls were one of those grocery-store items I coveted as a very young girl. All I knew was that they looked like Barbie food and that was precisely what I wanted and needed. And then I tried one. Absolutely awful. Like, terrible. I wondered how something so pretty could taste so wretched. And then, when it came time to write this book, I decided, No, something so adorable need not be so incredibly foul-tasting. So I reworked them. In the process, I stumbled on a new bakery favorite. What’s more, you get two recipes in the process of making a batch of these; head over to the recipe for Bread Pudding (page 102) and see just one idea for what you can do with the unused part of a cupcake.

I take my graham crackers extremely buttery and very crunchy, so that’s what you’re getting with this recipe. In fact, this graham cracker is so decadent, you may want to double the recipe so you can deliberately have leftovers. There’s tons of mileage to be gained out of these. Like piecrust, for one! Or donut toppings, for two!

Who can resist a madeleine? They are so charming, so fair—so impossibly French. These Proustian delights have always appealed to the buttery fringes of my soul, and they’ve always acted as the perfect foil to the rebellious and messy attitude of my first love, the American chocolate chip cookie. Plus I get to whip out my handy madeleine tray, which I cherish wholly and completely. Get yourself one and be the envy of your baby girl’s bake sale.

This is a perfect example of using the exalted Sugar Cookie as a launching pad. Once you’ve fussed around with it enough, you begin to understand its dormant qualities. What if you asked your brain what would happen if you had the foresight to roll a butter-taste-based batter around in a cinnamon-sugar mixture before baking? If your brain, schooled in the ways of the Sugar Cookie, answered that you’d get a wonderfully wrinkly explosion of the Snickerdoodle variety, you and your brain are well on your way to total cookie enlightenment.

This recipe is the foundation of a lifetime’s worth of holiday merriment, a blank but delicious canvas for you and your kids to customize until your hearts explode with happiness. By way of texture, I aimed for something traditionally crisp, playing up the flakiness and butter-tinged richness. Just roll out the dough; they’re a cinch. In general, just about any flourish you can imagine to add to the top—sprinkles? Gummi bears? frosting?!—will complement this cookie with a little density. There’s a photograph on page 46, so you know what you’re working with.

For the longest time, I might have been the only person in the tristate area completely oblivious to the beautiful oversize black-and-white cookies found in every bodega from Brooklyn to the Bronx. Have you had one? Me, I was never allowed because of my food sensitivities, of course. So when I went to the kitchen and started brainstorming ideas for iconic cookies, this was one of the first ones I tackled. Prepare to be bathed in the sweet comfort of vanilla-chocolate overload.

So you went and invited everyone over for brunch one fateful Sunday morning. Sunday! The day you ordinarily sleep until eleven, don’t bother to wash your hair or change out of your pajamas, and end up watching TV upside down on the couch with newspapers and gossip mags strewn all over the floor. Tsk-tsk—it doesn’t sound to me like you’re quite ready for that hostess habit you picked up somewhere along the way. And yet here we are! Thank God there is this brunch-ready recipe you can prep the night before without even the most obnoxious of your foodie friends being any the wiser. Just get your dough and vegetables all set up and let them chill in the refrigerator overnight. Come morning, simply follow the quick baking instructions. If sweet potatoes sound too mushy for you, swap them out for 3/4 cup sautéed mushrooms.

The slightest whiff of cinnamon and melted sugar is likely to send any lady into a nostalgic reverie for the food court of her youth. Today this recipe commands center stage at the bakery whenever we fire up a batch—no small feat considering the competition of fragrant apple muffins, nutty cornbread, and dozens of other aromatic samplings. You’ll find that BabyCakes NYC’s Wonder Buns have everything you’ve been missing for so long: that subtly sticky chewiness, the spicy pockets intermixed with the sweet streaks of joy, a dense but layered texture that is the stuff of dreams.

Honeybees get most of the attention, but squash bees do the most work. These busy bees crawl out of their underground nests and get going a good half an hour before the honey team when the squash flowers are in full bloom. Both the male and female squash bees set to the field work gathering nectar from blossoms, but only the females do double duty collecting pollen. Bees transfer pollen from the male flowers to the female flowers. The first several flowers of a plant are male and will not produce any fruit. By midday the squash blossoms begin to close and the bees return home. Get to work early like these busy squash bees and pick your squash blossoms early in the day. Squash blossoms filled with herbed goat cheese and fried with a crisp batter are an annual summer event thanks to the hardworking squash bees.

Before BabyCakes NYC, my dreams were limited to potential hairstyles, sarcastic comebacks, and still more prospective hairstyles. Nowadays, I dream almost exclusively of baked goods. One restless night, after being awakened by images of a fluffy blueberry cake topped with spiced crumbs and a rich vanilla sauce, I sprinted to the bakery to begin testing. I encountered a few setbacks, but once I found out that the crumb cooks faster than the base and must be added halfway through baking, my dream came true. Please don’t trust your instincts with this one; the window for applying the crumb is small. Add it too soon and your crumb topping will burn, too late and it will be soggy. Use those timers, people!

By now you’ve no doubt realized that many of these recipes call for high-quality ingredients that are a bit more costly than a tub of shortening or a sack of bleached flour. As I’ve mentioned before, though, I also abhor waste. This recipe might be the most ingenious recasting of leftovers you’ll ever find, the best part being that nobody could ever possibly know!

Dear Outraged Icebox Cake Purist: I understand you will be frustrated and angry that what follows is in no way an icebox cake, and for that I’m sorry. But those traditional icebox cakes you are so staunchly defending are nothing more than raw eggs, butter, and sugar mixed together and dumped into a pit of sponge cake or stale ladyfingers. Not cool for your stomach, or mine! We can do better—and have with this towering ode to the magical pairing of mint and chocolate. The cake may seem a touch underdone when the baking time is up, but trust me: You will have a beautifully moist cake that won’t dry out in the freezer, one you’ll pick at happily each time you pass the fridge for weeks to come! If you avoid evaporated cane juice, omit the cookies but add some berries or Chocolate Crumb Base (page 116).

I’m all for mindful eating—scanning each and every nutritional label, chewing each bite of food twenty times before swallowing—but we all know there comes a time when we want to slide into a pair of elastic-waisted pants and go to town. When that urge arises, I, for one, succumb. Composed of three of the bakery’s most popular items—frosting, brownies, and cookies—this extraordinary layered cake is an indulgence that would make even the lovely Paula Deen blush. Right with you, Ms. Deen!

This is my healthy version of the popular Hostess® cupcake. This double-stuffed cupcake is a frosting lover’s fantasy (see Anderson, Pamela, opposite). Although the recipe calls for 1 tablespoon frosting for the filling, you won’t be blamed for upping the amount a bit—just be reasonable! Too much and you’ll bury the innocent, delicious cake. Although I have found what follows to be the best flavor pairing, you can freely use any of the cupcakes and frostings in this book together with dazzling results.

In order to get the same melty chocolate sensation that comes with the basic brownie without evaporated cane juice, I rely on a simple method of denting the agave brownies in the center and filling them with a puddle of rich, silky chocolate sauce (page 93). The sauce seeps out when bitten into and is so gratifying I wasn’t surprised when they began to move off the shelves faster than their sweeter counterpart. You can mix it up a bit by adding vanilla sauce to the center if there happens to be some, you know, lying around. Be sure to keep a special eye on the agave with this recipe. It’ll dictate whether you end up with a dry chocolate roll or a luscious fudgelike brownie.

I grew up in California just inches from the Mexican border, so I’ve always had an affinity for that country’s culture—in particular the lightly spiced cookies rolled in powdered sugar and served at weddings, ingeniously referred to stateside as Mexican Wedding Cookies. My homage to this perennial favorite has more crunch and some newfangled flavors, but I’m sure you’ll agree it, too, is piñata-worthy.

Lemon can be a baker’s best friend or her worst enemy. Often it tastes less like fresh-squeezed lemonade and more like a 15-cent lollipop. Achieving the perfect balance of lemon flavor in this teacake was a long and arduous journey; fresh lemon juice toys with the acidity in the batter, causing it to rise and fall unpredictably, while the rind on its own has a mousy presence at best. I tried everything from the yellow squeeze bottles of sugar-pumped citric acid to preserved lemons to lemon oil—everything short of boiled-down Lemonheads. Eventually I found that if you grate lemon rind into the batter with a generous helping of a high-quality lemon extract (I prefer Frontier’s product), you end up with a uniform, easy-to-manage batter that maximizes the lemon flavor while downplaying its domineering nature. Add the subtle nuttiness and earthy texture of poppy seeds, and you’ve stumbled onto a marriage unequaled since Luke and Laura’s.

I love all things fried, so I had to add a sweet tempura to my dessert menu. The batter comes out of the fryer crisp and full of flavor—a great foil for the sweet and tangy dipping sauce.

Mochi are sweet, filled Japanese dumplings that are served chilled. I’ve been fascinated by them from the first time I had one, but I’d always been told that they could be made only in factories. And since the commercial ones are artificially flavored and colored and filled with ice-hard ice cream, that didn’t surprise me. One day, I promised my friend David Chang of Momofuku that I’ d make fresh mochi for him. It became a mission. Once I learned how to do it, I found that it really wasn’t difficult at all to make the tender, sweet rice dough and flavor it naturally. And since I fill mochi with a compote, they’re fork-tender. The basil fluid gel is an ideal herbal foil to the compote. I use 2-inch demisphere molds when I make mochi, but I’ve found that an egg carton works fine. The secret to the dough is working quickly. This recipe makes twice as much as you need for the fourplay, but I hardly consider leftover mochi a problem. The mochi will keep for 1 day in the refrigerator.