Recipes

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

Fluffy, soft butter cake and fresh peaches are a match made in heaven. This butter cake is made using the reverse-creaming method (the dry ingredients are coated in fat before the wet ingredients are added), which makes for a supertender, melt-in-your-mouth cake. While you can use fresh or frozen peaches in this recipe, it would be best to save the juiciest in-season fruit for eating out of hand, as overly ripe fruit could make the cake soggy. Baking the medium-ripe peaches, artfully nestled in a buttery bed, brings out their natural sweetness and transforms even less-than-perfect fruit into something special.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

Sweet, savory and super-simple, this dish is made mostly from pantry staples and cooked all in one pot. Chewy raisins add an unexpected sweetness tempered by a bit of acidic red wine vinegar. Canned tuna is a great protein choice for weeknight dinners but be sure to buy the oil-packed variety for cooking — it’s much more tender. If you find it, high-quality oil-packed jarred tuna is even tastier. That said, jarred and canned tuna is fully cooked, so it’s best added at the end to warm the tuna through without overcooking it.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

Agrodolce means “bittersweet” in Italian and usually refers to a tangy sauce made with honey or sugar along with vinegar. This summertime riff is inspired by the Italian classic but uses fresh plums to add an additional sweet tart element. Simmered with sherry vinegar and honey, the softened plums make a beautiful sauce to top simple chicken thighs making this a weeknight meal that’s lovely enough for company. Round out the meal with some rice and roasted asparagus.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

Soft and perfectly chewy, here is our best recipe for sugar cookies.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

An apple galette is the quintessential fall dessert. With so few ingredients and only a bit of sugar, the apples can really shine. Look for sweet apples that hold their shape after baking like Golden Delicious, Pink Lady or Honeycrisp. If you’d like a little more acidity you can mix the apples to include more tart varieties like Granny Smith. Brushing the crust with heavy cream helps achieve a bit of shine and nice color. If you don’t have heavy cream, you can use milk or a lightly beaten egg to create a similar effect.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

The quintessential breakfast on-the-go, these banana muffins are tender, light and just sweet enough. A pinch of cinnamon is all they need but ½ cup of chopped walnuts, chocolate or even candied ginger wouldn’t hurt. Starting the oven at 425 degrees gives the muffins a boost right at the start. The water in the batter (from the bananas and sour cream) turns to steam quickly and the muffins puff up and create a nice dome. Lowering the heat to 350 degrees then allows them to cook through more gradually. Just don’t forget to turn the oven down right before you pop the muffins in.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

Reminiscent of the Almond Joy candy bar, these blondies are gussied up with a hefty dose of chewy, sweetened coconut flakes and crunchy salted almonds. They are made with melted butter, which makes the process of throwing them together super simple and gives the final product that heavenly chew. For extra pretty bars, be sure to reserve some of the add-ins to sprinkle on top before baking.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

What’s better than rich and fudgy cocoa brownies? Decadent brownies with a layer of creamy cheesecake swirled throughout. When making the cheesecake layer, the cream cheese should be just soft enough to incorporate with the other ingredients easily but not super soft. If it is too warm, the cheesecake batter will be too runny and will flow over the top of the brownies. Instead of creating a swirl, you’ll have two layers. If you want to take these brownies to another level, dollop a bit of your favorite jam or preserves on top of the cream cheese batter before swirling everything together.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

Sweet and spicy ssamjang is a Korean sauce, mostly used for grilled dishes. Made with slow-fermented soybean paste, it’s salty and pungent and adds quite a bit of flavor, perfect to spruce up some ground pork for a quick, weeknight meatball. You can buy it in the Asian grocery section or make your own. Try these meatballs in a lettuce cup with rice and kimchi or served straight-up with some grilled vegetables.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

Peanut butter and bananas make a delightful sandwich. Why not put them together in a loaf? The peanut butter gives the banana bread a pleasant savory edge. Be sure to use sweetened, conventional peanut butter, but the texture — chunky or smooth — is up to you. The chocolate chunks already give this bread a dessert vibe, but if you’d like to go all out, finish the cooled loaf with this salted caramel glaze (stirring in a tablespoon of peanut butter along with the sugar).

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

Buttermilk pie is one of those desserts that can be made with pantry staples whenever the fancy strikes: a make-do pie, if you will. It belongs to a category of pies, also called desperation pies, that home cooks turned to when ingredients were scarce. Start with a store-bought crust or your favorite pastry and then fill it with a deliciously simple custard flavored with the appealing tang of buttermilk and lemon and the creamy richness of butter. Blind baking, or baking an empty crust with pie weights, is an important step for many custard pies. The baked custard slightly softens the underlying crust, but blind-baking sets the crust and gives it a head start towards crispness. Be sure to fill the empty, chilled crust with enough pie weights, beans, or rice to come all the way up to the top so that the edges don’t slump down while it bakes.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

This moist gently spiced cake would be delicious on its own but slathered with an extra-creamy mascarpone frosting it becomes divine, each cutting the richness of the other in just the right way. A classic cream cheese frosting would also be good, adding a slight tang to the overall cake. Be sure to use regular, unsulphured molasses. Blackstrap molasses is too strong for most baking and its use will result in a dense, unpleasant cake. For easy cleanup, measure the vegetable oil before the molasses and honey — the residual oil should help the sticky ingredients slide out with ease.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

Three types of ginger — ground, fresh and crystallized — run through these flavorful cookies with a secret. Hidden inside is a creamy cheesecake filling that readily complements and tempers their spicy bite. Skip the crystallized ginger, if you like, but it really makes them pop, as does a finish in brightly colored sanding sugar. If you have only regular white sugar, they’ll still be stunning.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

Perfectly petite, these apple cinnamon muffins are sweet, spiced and ideal for breakfast or an on-the-go snack. Use whichever apple you like best — Granny Smith for tartness or Fuji if you like your apples on the sweeter side. Brushing with melted butter and cinnamon sugar gives them a soft doughnut-like vibe, but a crunchy, crumby topping would be nice too! To switch it up, combine ¾ cup flour, ½ cup brown sugar, 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, and ¼ teaspoon kosher salt with 4 tablespoons of melted butter. Sprinkle this mixture over the batter before baking.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

These perfectly portable hand pies are made with standard pie dough ingredients, but the method is slightly different. In order to create puffed, layered, super-flaky pastry, the dough is rolled out and folded multiple times in order to create thin layers of butter that melt and create steam in the oven. This step is somewhat unnecessary when it comes to baking pies in pie plates because the filling would prevent major puffing anyway. A hand pie is baked free form, so it has all the room in the world to puff up. These are lovely and just sweet enough, but if you’d like to dress them up a bit, combine 1 cup of powdered sugar, 1 to 2 tablespoons of whole milk, and ½ teaspoon vanilla and drizzle before serving.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

Overripe bananas find another happy home nestled in these super-moist, chocolatey muffins. These muffins teeter between breakfast and dessert thanks to the addition of semisweet chocolate chips. For an extra special treat, warm halved muffins in a skillet with a pat of butter and sprinkle with a bit of kosher salt. A swipe of cream cheese wouldn’t hurt either. Freeze overripe bananas peeled in order to make baking with them even easier. Let them thaw first and then stir any liquid back in before measuring the mash.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

Torta caprese is a dark, rich almond and chocolate cake lifted only with whipped eggs. Originally from the Italian island of Capri, they’re usually made with raw almonds or almond flour. This version uses toasted, salted almonds to add a bit more savory, roasted almond flavor. The almonds must be ground in a food processor before folding into the batter, but if you don’t have one, feel free to substitute 6 ounces almond flour plus ½ teaspoon more salt. Adding some of the sugar to the egg whites while beating makes it much easier to achieve medium-stiff peaks without over-beating them. It also makes them smoother and easier to incorporate into the chocolate mixture and helps create a light flaky top.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

Compared to garnet sweet potatoes and other types of sweet potatoes, the flesh of the Japanese variety is pale in color, sweeter and somewhat drier. This means that after cooking, they become pleasantly fluffy and creamy, as opposed to watery, and are ready to take on copious amounts of dairy and salt. Here they are topped with a super-simple tahini crème fraîche. Feel free to use sour cream as a substitute for the crème fraîche, but you may want to adjust the lemon juice as sour cream has a bit more tang. If you don’t have a steamer basket or colander that can accommodate 2½ pounds of potatoes, simply roast them.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

Perfect for breakfast, these bars feel like cake but taste like a granola bar in the best way. They are light but substantial. Instead of old-fashioned rolled oats, these bars call for quick-cooking oats and a little bit of all-purpose flour. Rolled oats don’t soften enough in a quick bread but quick-cooking oats bake up soft and fluffy. Delicately flavored with cinnamon and a bit of applesauce, they are simple but satisfying and easily dressed up. Try adding up to 1½ cups of mix-ins like chocolate, shredded coconut or dried fruit, or a combination. Leftover slices are delicious toasted in a skillet with butter and sprinkled with flaky sea salt.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

What could be better than an ethereal, sugar-dusted cream puff, with its light and crisp pastry shell and creamy vanilla custard filling? Not much. And they taste even better when you know how easy they are to make. You have a choice when making cream puffs. If you’d like them to look more professional, use a pastry bag when piping out the dough to make perfect, identical buttons. But if you don’t mind wabi-sabi cream puffs, a cookie scoop or a small ice cream scoop makes the job super easy and fast. They bake up a little bit irregular, but beautiful just the same. The same goes for the cream filling. You could use a pastry bag with a small tip to pipe in cream from the bottom of the puff for a seamless finish, but it’s easier to simply cut off the top, scoop in the custard, and replace the top. Just be sure to bake the pastry thoroughly so the filled puffs end up crispy and chewy, not soggy.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

These waffles tick all the boxes. They’re light, crisp, delicately sweetened and will make your kitchen smell like heaven as they cook. Belgian waffles are thicker than standard waffles and are often leavened with yeast. This version uses baking powder and whipped egg whites to make it easy to cook up big, crisp fragrant waffles without a lot of foresight. There are two important factors that ensure the lightest, crispiest waffles. First, make sure that your waffle iron is very hot and that the waffles are cooked through completely and well-browned. Secondly, when ladling batter into the waffle iron, make sure to completely fill the wells. Crisp edges can only develop if the batter makes contact with all of the grooves.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

A quick rest in spicy, superflavorful Thai green curry paste — made from aromatics and herbs like cilantro, galangal, garlic, lemongrass and fresh chiles — imbues skirt steak with complex floral heat. Besides making wonderful curries and marinades, the paste makes a great addition to soups, dressings and sauces. Look for jars or cans in Thai markets or the international aisle at the supermarket. Green curry paste can pack quite a bit of heat; red curry paste will offer slightly milder results for this dish. Serve this steak alongside a sliced tomato salad for extra color and brightness.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

Clams, tomatoes and chorizo come together quickly to make a simple and satisfying one-pot dinner. It tastes of the sea without being overly fishy, and the tomatoes add acidity and brightness while the chorizo gives it richness and a bit of smokiness. While some brands of tinned shellfish can be on the pricier side, consider that each 4-ounce can packs in up to 4 dozen clams without the bulk of the shells. Look for whole clams in brine and olive oil for the best flavor.

Samantha Seneviratne · NYT Cooking

Rice Krispies treats are a classic dessert for a reason. They’ve got everything: crunch, chew, buttery sweetness and just the right amount of salt. You’ll get extra credit for browning the butter first. What happens if you also stir some cocoa powder into the browned butter before mixing in the rest of the ingredients? The classic transforms into something deeply chocolatey, gooey and even a bit sophisticated. These treats are reminiscent in flavor to hot chocolate, thanks to the cocoa and marshmallows, but you can enjoy them any time of year. For some campfire vibes, stir in about ½ cup broken pieces of graham cracker with the crisp rice cereal.