Frosted with velvety smooth chocolate icing, this chocolate cake is a dessert irresistible to cocoa lovers! Top with fresh strawberries or other fruit.
Creamy ricotta gives these lemony cookies a soft, cakey texture. To get the most defined crackled tops, be sure to generously coat the cookies with icing sugar before baking.
Three forms of maple add just the right amount of sweetness to these simple cookies. Maple sugar is available in the baking aisles of large grocery stores or in gourmet food shops. Use leftover maple sugar to flavour coffee and oatmeal or in place of white sugar in selected dessert recipes.
These invitingly spicy glazed German cookies, which can be baked ahead, are what many holiday cooks like best. Roll and cut out rectangles, fun gingerbread folk, trees, stars, or — in the northern European holiday tradition — hearts.
Nothing beats a classic carrot cake with cream cheese icing. When tracing the parchment paper outline, add an extra 2 inches (5 cm) to the circumference of the slow cooker; this extra buffer will help you lift the cake out of the insert with ease. Cost: $0.70/serving
This homemade take on sesame snaps is crunchy, sweet and nutty. For gifting, wrap them in squares of waxed paper and layer in a decorative box.
Freshly grated orange rind brightens the flavours of this loaf, and marzipan carrots lighten the look. Doubling the parchment paper keeps the outside from darkening too much.
This recipe is an adaptation of the Canadian Living Dark Christmas Cake from their 2004 Holiday Cookbook. Due to allergies in my husband's family, I had to remove the nuts from the original recipe, and substituted the dates instead. As well, I am not a fan of a lot of candied fruit, so substituted dried fruit for a lot of the candied stuff. It took three tries to come up with the recipe below (which is simply Dark Christmas Cake, 2006 recipe in my cookbook), but my family, in-laws, and coworkers certainly like this one. Hope you do too.
Store a log of this oatmeal raisin dough in your freezer so you can enjoy freshly baked cookies at a moment's notice.
A brown butter spread gives flaky spiced pumpkin scones nutty flavour and an extra touch of sweetness. Overworked dough can become tough when baked; for the flakiest pastry, knead it just until the dough comes together.
