cinnamon

Babka

I couldn't imagine baking a babka as good as the ones I'd brought home from Russ and Daughters in New York. I'd suspected the gooey, eggy bricks of cinnamon and chocolate-swirled bread took years to perfect, maybe even generations. That's why I'm thrilled my babka turned out like it did - imperfect.

Let me explain.

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Moravian Spice Cookies

The last time I went to fancy food section of a department store, I swear I saw Moravian Spice Cookies in nice holiday gift tins. I didn’t eat them growing up, and I don’t have any other cookbooks that reference them, so I was intrigued by their inclusion in Alice Medrich’s Cookies and Brownies. I always wondered where Moravia was and what made these cookies Moravian, so this would be my chance to find out.

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Homemade Granola

Do you remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books? I had tons of them as a kid, and like everyone else I know, I read them over and over again, hoping for new outcomes no matter how I chose. I liked the seemingly endless variety, and perhaps a little too much the lack of consequence of changing my mind mid-stream. But those books stuck with me, and I was walking through Kalustyan's on Lexington years later when I had reason to think of them again.

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Abbott's Bitters

I don’t know what started Todd’s exploration of bitters – maybe it was an episode of Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie that sent him on that path. Making your own bitters is a relatively simple thing to do if you have a well-stocked spice drawer, a bunch of fresh herbs in the garden, and a Chinese medicine apothecary or other herbalist nearby for those odd things.

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