When a recipe calls for a flavor extract, it typically calls for just one at a time. Cookie Madness‘s Five Flavor Sugar Cookies use a little bit of each of five different extracts – which means you could put almost every one in your pantry to use in one recipe. The sugar cookies include coconut, lemon, rum, butter, and vanilla extracts, which all meld together surprisingly well to give these cookies a unique flavor. The cookies are good plain, but they can also be topped with a thin layer of frosting and decorated with sprinkles if you want to turn them into a really kid-friendly treat.
Fans of the flavors in a Snickers candy bar will love the Snickers Cake from Bakers Royale. This is an icebox cake, which means that it is is not baked but built in layers and then refrigerated (or frozen) so that everything melds together. The cake is made with layers of homemade chocolate and caramel puddings that are separated with layers of graham crackers, which take on a cake-like texture by the time the cake is finished. It may not look exactly like the candy bar, but when you put all these elements together, you end up with something that tastes a lot like it and is a very impressive (yet easy to make) dessert, too.
Thin mints are the Girl Scouts’ number one selling cookie flavor, and during cookie season many of us have a box – or three – around the house. You can always eat them with a glass of milk, but they can be incorporated into other recipes, as well. The Thin Mint Scones that The Food Librarian baked up are a perfect example. These simple scones get a generous dose of chocolate and mint from crushed up Girl Scout cookies that are folded into the dough. This is a great way to showcase the flavor of the cookies, and a nice change of pace from eating them just out of the box.
There is something very homey about Bake-aholic‘s Iced Oatmeal Cookies, perhaps because they look like the type of cookie that you would find stacked in an old fashioned cookie jar. They’re thin and chewy, with a thin lemon icing that adds an extra layer of sweetness to them. The cookies themselves are very simple, getting most of their flavor from sugar, oats and ground cinnamon. They’re also a good base for variations, and you could change things up by using different spices (perhaps at different times of the year) or varying the flavors in the icing.
You can see why Berry Lovely chose to bake this Lemon Celebration Cake to celebrate a recent birthday. The impressive cake has four layers of tender lemon chiffon cake that are stacked up with layers of silky smooth lemon cream and homemade caramel sauce. It is topped with a rich lemon mascarpone icing that ties in with the other flavors very well, but is versatile enough that you might find yourself using it to top other cakes and cupcakes, especially during the spring when a splash of lemon will brighten up just about any dessert.
St. Patrick’s Day will be coming soon, and the Baileys Irish Cream Cookies that Buttercream Blondie seem like they would be fun to celebrate with. The butter cookies have a generous amount of Irish cream liquor in them for flavor, and they’re sandwiched together with a tasty Irish cream filling. For a holiday look, be sure to dress them up with a Shamrock cookie cutter, a chocolate glaze and some green and white sprinkles. The cookies are also good as-is and can be cut out using a plain, round cookie cutter to enjoy them any time of year.
These Chocolate Chip Cookie Peanut Butter Cup Brownies from Mis-Cakes Oven Adventures might be one of the most addictive bar cookies that you’re likely to run into. These over the top bars combine three decadent desserts into one treat that should be almost irresistible. The bars start out with a layer of chocolate brownie batter, which is then topped with Reese’s chocolate peanut butter cups. A chocolate chip cookie dough is whipped up and spread on top, then the whole thing is baked. You end up with cookie, chocolate chips, peanut butter cups and brownie in every bite of this tall bar – and you’ll come back for seconds as long as you have a glass of milk to wash it down with.
Nothing says spring quite like fresh berries as they come into season, and the Wild Strawberries in Prosecco Jelly with Elderflower Syrup that Aprons and Sneakers recently made is a beautiful way to showcase them. This simple dessert is full of tiny, wild strawberries and they look like jewels inside of the prosecco jelly. The jelly is made with agar-agar, a plant-based gelatin substitute that gels at room temperature (it can be found at most natural food stores), but you can easily adapt the recipe to work with regular gelatin if you’re more familiar working with that.
Sweet scones are usually a treat you’ll find at breakfast, brunch or tea time, but savory scones can be a wonderful accompaniment to other meals. How Sweet Eats made some Pesto Parmesan Scones that have the light, flaky texture of a traditional scone with a lot of flavor and a savory twist. These scones are made with a generous amount of pesto sauce, which tint the scones green and add a lot of flavor to each bite. You can use homemade pesto or store bought and spice things up with different types of pesto, sticking with a classic basil, opting for an arugula-based recipe or even losing the green tint completely in favor of an addictive walnut pesto. Whatever flavor you go with, these scones will go well with any soup, salad, pasta and most other main dishes you can think up.
Annie’s Eats has the right idea for an easy, yet elegant, breakfast with Baked French Toast. French toast is comfort food and always a welcome start to the morning, and you can include it even on a busy weekday morning by starting it off the night before. This recipe is prepared and kept in the refrigerator overnight, to be baked off in the morning just before serving. The nice thing is that baking the french toast – which is similar to a bread pudding at this point – takes no hands-on effort, so you can sip your coffee, get the kids ready for school and just pull this out and serve it when its done. Of course, you can also easily serve this at a brunch or enjoy it on a lazy weekend morning, dressed up with fresh berries and whipped cream.
Blueberry muffins are always an option when you have fresh blueberries in the kitchen, but Vanilla Sugar‘s decadent Blueberry Cream Cheese Fritters might be an alternative when you’re in the mood for something a little different. The batter for these homemade donuts is similar to a muffin batter, made with cinnamon, vanilla and blueberries. The fritters are fried in a heavy duty pan until they’re golden brown, then quickly dipped into a sweet glaze made with cream cheese and confectioners’ sugar. Serve these right away while they’re still warm, as eating warm donuts is the best part of making them yourself.
Sugar Hero was inspired to make a batch of Kettle Corn Cookies after seeing them at a local Trader Joe’s. The cookies combine two much-loved snack foods: cookies and sweet-salty kettle corn. The store-bought rendition of this cookie is crisp and crunchy, but the homemade version it inspired is softer and chewier. The cookies use three whole cups of kettle corn, where other cookie recipes might use mix-ins like chocolate chips, to add in the kettle corn flavor. Browned butter enhances the popcorn’s buttery flavor, too.
The Twisted Cookies from Cook & Be Merry are very unique, and are guaranteed to be very tasty. The beautiful bow tie-shaped cookies are made with a buttery, yeasted dough that is folded up to create flaky layers. The dough is then cut into strips and twisted, so that when those layers separate during baking, they are showcased in all their crisp, buttery deliciousness. Each of the cookies is generously topped with vanilla sugar before baking, but it would be easy to make variations on the vanilla version by using cinnamon sugar, lemon sugar or adding another spice to the mix, though you cannot go wrong with the classic vanilla version.
There are all kinds of banana bread variations out there, adding things like chocolate chips and coconut to a basic quickbread recipe. Lemon Drop‘s Spelt Banana Bread is a variation that switches regular wheat flour for spelt flour. Spelt flour is not gluten free, but it has a lower gluten content than wheat flour. The flour is high in protein and calcium, too. Because of its lower gluten content, spelt tends to make for a more tender baked good (especially in quick breads) than wheat flour alone, so you are going to get a softer and more banana-y banana bread with this version.
Tahini is sesame seed oil, and while it can be used in all kinds of recipes, many of us have only used it to make hummus (if you’ve used it at home at all!). Heart-healthy tahini is actually very versatile and can be used in all kinds of baked goods, including cookies and cakes. The Caramel Cookie baked some Tahini Lemon Cookies that use the sesame oil to infuse a nutty flavor and to give the cookies a soft, chewy texture. The combination of tahini and lemon makes these flavorful, and a nice change of pace from your typical sugar cookie. This cookie recipe is vegan, so it is egg and dairy free, too.
Vanilla slices are a great dessert for custard fans. The typical slice has a thick layer of vanilla custard sandwiched between two layers of crisp, flaky puff pastry. It’s also a great base for other flavors, and the Passion Fruit Slice that Hotly Spiced recently made is a great example. These bars have a plain vanilla base and are topped with a tangy and floral passion fruit icing that transforms them from something plain to something a little more exotic.
Blood oranges are in season right now and there are many desserts that will showcase their unique color and flavor. Tish Boyle‘s Blood Orange Mousse with Ginger Orange Shortbread is an easy to make dessert that is a good place to start. This mousse starts out with homemade blood orange curd, which is not only a fantastic way to use blood orange juice, but lends an attractive orange-pink color to the mousse. You don’t get quite the vibrant color of the pure juice, though garnishing the mousse with a small wedge of orange will solve that problem and showcase the deep color of the blood oranges when you go to serve your dessert.
If you’re a fan of malt and chocolate, then Not Quite Nigella‘s 10 Minute Malteser Slices o’Crack will live up to their name. It’s a very simple treat made with chocolate, malted milk powder and regular milk powder, along with a generous number of malted milk chocolate candies. It packs a lot of chocolate and a great malty flavor. You can tell that these will be addictive. US bakers will be able to find Whoppers more easily than Maltesers, but the flavor of a Malteser is slightly maltier (one of my favorite candies, actually) , so you might want to pick some up at a specialty/import store to make these.
The Chocolate Speculoos Tart from Lemonpi is a treat the combines the spicy-sweet brown sugar flavor of speculoos cookies with chocolate. The cookies – which are the same type used to make Biscoff Spread – are crushed finely and incorporated into the chocolate filling of the tart. This adds those characteristic brown sugar notes to the filling, and a generous number of chocolate chips that are also folded in ensure that you won’t forget that this is a chocolate tart, at heart. This tart is made with a shortcrust pastry, but the filling would work well with a crumb crust, too – especially if there are some speculoos crumbs in that crust!
Flapjacks are a type of cookie popular in the UK that are made with oats and golden syrup. I’ve had both crisp and chewy variations on these treats and enjoyed them both, but there is something about a Chewy Flapjacks, like these made by Like a Strawberry Milk, that is very addictive. These are bar cookies made with golden syrup, sweetened condensed milk, brown sugar, butter, salt and oats. They bake up to have a slightly crisp crust and a chewy, tender center.
Custard Cream Hearts from Eat Little Bird are heart-shaped sandwich cookies where a light vanilla filling is sandwiched between two tender, crumbly biscuits. The recipe calls for custard powder, a starch-based (usually cornstarch) thickener that is used to easily make puddings and custards without eggs – to make the cream filling. Custard powder also includes flavoring and coloring. This isn’t an ingredient that most people in the US are going to have at home, but it’s easy to find at specialty/import markets and makes custard-making a snap.
If you have a donut baking pan in your kitchen, you’re probably always on the lookout for new recipes to try it with – after all, a baked donut is a much healthier than a fried donut, right? The Cupcake Avenger‘s Chocolate and Cream Cheese Red Velvet Donuts are an indulgence worth baking up. These donuts are tender and fluffy, as they are made with cake flour, and have a texture that is lot like a regular cupcake. Cream cheese glaze fits very well with the red velvet cake donuts, but a chocolate glaze recipe looks just as nice and makes these a little more dessert-like.
The Whole Wheat Valentine Sandwich Cookies from Dianasaur Dishes aren’t just for Valentine’s Day, even though using a couple of heart-shaped cookie cutters certainly makes them perfect for that occasion. These cookies are made with a basic sugar cookie dough that can be rolled out and cut into any shape you want, and unlike other sugar cookie recipes, they’re made with whole wheat flour. It’s nice to include a few more whole grains into a favorite treat and this is an easy way to do it. The buttery cookies are still sweet and flavorful, perfect for filling with your favorite jam or ganache to make some sandwich cookies.
There is something about Jungle Frog Cooking‘s Lemon Poppyseed Cupcakes that really reminds me of springtime. Lemon poppyseed is a popular combination for muffins and cakes, but isn’t seen quite as often in cupcake form – although we’ve all clearly been missing out because of it. These cupcakes are light and tender, made with a mixture of wheat flour and almond flour. The buttercream icing is flavored with a little bit of lemon juice and tinted to a lovely buttercup color with some yellow food coloring. Put them in some pastel cupcake wrappers (to contrast with the pastel icing) and they’re just about perfect for any springtime celebration.
Chocolate covered strawberries always look so indulgent, as they combine two foods that are often associated with indulgence, sweetness and special occasions. Yammie’s Noshery turned this treat into Chocolate Covered Strawberry Milkshakes, easy to make shakes that allow you to experience chocolate covered strawberries in a whole new way. The shakes start with strawberries and ice cream, which are blended together until very smooth. Pour the mixture into a glass and top off with homemade hot fudge sauce. The sauce could be used on any kind of frozen dessert, but when poured on top of the milkshake, it sets on the top and sides of the glass, making the milkshake look a lot like a real chocolate-covered strawberry!
