Dessert

While brandy is the traditional partner for fruit cake, you could also try using a dessert sherry such as Pedro Ximénez. It’s an intensely sweet, dark sherry made from the Spanish grape variety of the same name. Perfect in festive cakes, puddings and custards, you can find it in liquor stores.

You’ll find these a fudgy, sweet and lightly fermented addition to your brownie repertoire.

Imagine a pumpkin pie with pecan pie’s best feature: the candied nut topping. Now spike the custard with rye whiskey, up the flavor of the crust with rye flour, and voilà.

A sharp lemon filling, sweet-and-salty meringue, and shatteringly crisp crust combine to make a balanced update to this classic.

A dazzling chocolate pudding pie cloaked in voluminous whipped cream. The secret to that whipped cream’s great height: Setting it with dissolved gelatin means it won’t deflate or weep when chilled.

Bake your pie crusts ahead so your oven is free for the turkey on the big day. They will keep at room temperature, tightly wrapped, for up to 2 days.

Roasted peanuts pull double duty in the graham cracker crust and sprinkled over the topping, keeping the bananas from making this pie excessively sweet.

Goat’s milk butter is mildly tangy, complementing the whole wheat flour and wheat germ in these cookies.

An outer coating of sumac-sugar gives these slice-and-bake cookies a bright pop of flavor that balances the rich, buttery shortbread.

To give almond shortbread cookies the pastel treatment, dust them with tinted confectioners' sugar blended with finely ground freeze-dried blueberries, raspberries, and mango.

The textured end of a meat mallet is gently pressed into the dough of these cardamom- and rose water–scented cookies to form a grid pattern.

Lebkuchen recipes are many and diverse—some are flourless, made with almond and hazelnut meal; some are made in bar form and others in cookie form; some are glazed with chocolate and others with a thin lemon glaze.