The key to elevating this dessert is topping it with Chantilly cream, berries, syrup, and beautiful flowers.

Ingredients

Like meringues of all kinds, pavlova requires egg whites. I use 4 whites for a 6-inch diameter one. To get the best pavlova, use fresh eggs instead of old ones.

Ginger molasses cookies have been around since the 1800s – and with good reason. They are easy to make, so festive, and don’t require rolling out dough or using any special tools like cookie press recipes do. I can’t even begin to fathom the number of these cookies that have been made over the past 100 years!

Ingredients

These cookies are made using pantry staples and gingerbread spices (ginger, cinnamon, and cloves).

Like my pumpkin cupcakes, this delicious dessert is one of the many reasons that I look forward to fall baking! It’s ideal for a festive treat in October or November!

Ingredients and Equipment

This recipe is made with pumpkin pie spices – cinnamon, ginger, allspice, and nutmeg.

This post shares step-by-step decorating instructions so you can make this to serve at your Halloween party!

This post is geared specifically toward intermediate and advanced bakers. It doesn’t cover how to bake the cake or how to achieve a smooth base coat of frosting. If you need help with those topics, I strongly recommend taking some online classes or with Lia directly (if you happen to be in St. Louis).

Star bread is often made at Christmas time because it looks a bit like a snowflake. However, I’ve made it for all manner of occasions. This red, white, and blue one is perfect for a July 4th dessert!

How to Make Star Bread

The Dough

Star bread starts with an enriched bread dough. That’s dough that may contain eggs, butter, milk, and sugar (a.k.a. the good stuff) rather than lean dough which is made with just the basics like all-purpose or bread flour, water, and salt. Enriched dough is the same type of dough typically used to make challah and honey buns.

The dessert nachos are even adorable without the accoutrements.

But, I say, “Load ’em up,” for a perfect game day or Super Bowl dessert.

These brookies – chocolate chip cookie brownie bars – deserve a place alongside some of the world’s best mashed up desserts like the cronut (croissant plus donut) and duffin (donut plus muffin).

Brookies are for serious chocolate lovers only. They are wonderfully dense due to the sheer number of chocolate chips used in the recipe – 2 full pounds!

Fill them with any pie filling, relish, or jam that you want using the tips and instructions in this post along with your favorite filling to personalize the recipe.

I make this dessert using two round circles of pie dough crimped together or one circle folded on itself.

The recipe for these fabulous red wine cupcakes comes from Stella Parks’ fabulous book, Bravetart [paid link] (it’s one of the best baking books out there). She dubs them red wine velvet cupcakes and offers them as an alternative to the heavily food-colored red velvet cupcakes. These are like a grown up red velvet cupcake.

My favorite way to eat these cookies is hot out of the oven, waiting just long enough to not burn the roof of my mouth on the molten chocolate. They are also fabulous at room temperature.

They are great with a cold glass of milk – or try them with a mug of warm milk and honey on a cold day!