This is what I like to call macaroon perfection!  It’s the go-to quick-and- easy dessert that I pop in the oven before company comes over. Not only does everyone go nuts over the macaroons, but they fill the house with a delicious vanilla, cinnamon, and almond scent as they bake. The macaroons have achieved vault status in our household. My secret is slow baking the macaroons at a very low oven temperature to ensure that the delicate coconut  and almonds don’t burn before the interior is baked. Drizzle them in melted dark chocolate  for the ultimate treat. Be sure to use melted coconut  butter and not coconut  oil in this recipe. The coconut  butter is necessary for proper binding, and coconut  oil will not work in this recipe.

These delicious “anytime” bars are vegan, lunchbox-friendly, gluten-free, and made with a refined sugar-free strawberry-vanilla chia seed jam. (With the chia jam, the bars will be lightly sweet; if you use store-bought jam, they’ll be much sweeter.) It’s hard to resist gobbling them up once you slice them, but I actually find that they taste better the following day, after the flavors have had a chance to meld in the fridge overnight. I also recommend  making the chia jam in advance, so it has time to cool in the fridge before you begin making the recipe. Once chilled, the bars firm up (thanks to the coconut  oil), but at room temperature they soften and will virtually melt in your mouth while you eat them! Hubba, hubba. Either way, you are going to go crazy over the roasted sunflower seed “cookie” crust. Enjoy these as a quick breakfast with tea or coffee, as an afternoon snack when you need a boost, or warmed up for dessert with a scoop of ice cream (it’ll remind you of a berry crisp!).

This cake is a showstopper! I bake the cakes one day and make the buttercream and assemble the cakes the next so it is not too daunting. I adore the combination of moist chocolate cake and lighter-than-air buttercream.

Merrill and I had a cookie bake-off in 2015 where each of us was tasked with creating a holiday cookie that incorporated vanilla. I wanted a cookie that merged the benefits of a chewy chocolate chip cookie with the fragrance of a holiday spice cookie. I began by using a chocolate chip cookie base that’s made with vegetable oil rather than butter—inspired by Ovenly’s vegan chocolate chip cookie. I infused this base with vanilla by grinding up a whole vanilla bean with the sugar; I increased the chocolate (because I wanted to win) and chopped it so there would be a mix of shavings and chunks; and I gave it a little holiday oomph with cinnamon and ground chile.

Merrill went in another direction, blending chocolate and almond flour into her dough and larding it with plump dried cherries. We handed out twenty-eight thousand of them around the city from our Holiday Cookie Truck. The public voted on social media. And vote they did. If you’d like to bake the winning cookie, turn to page 252, but if you’re more of an underdog type, then settle in here.

My mother, an excellent cook, likes to dispense her cooking wisdom in a slow, carefully timed trickle of detail. For years, I made her oven-fried chicken and wondered why mine was never as crisp. Because she hadn’t yet told me about the critical step of soaking the chicken in salted ice water for a few hours before cooking it.

With grilled cheese, I felt I’d learned a pretty good version on my own—buttering the outside of the bread and grating cheese for the inside, so the exterior gets supercrisp and toasty and the center is a glorious goo. Merrill and I even did a video on this grilled cheese. My mom watched the video and said, “Looked good, but you forgot the bacon.” She always laid a piece of bacon across the outside of the sandwich so it would be embedded in the grilled cheese like a fossil and the bacon fat would scent the bread. Mom, 1. Me, 0.

This roast pork came about by accident. I found a beautiful pork butt at the farmers’ market on a Sunday morning and set my sights on pork tacos. I didn’t realize until I got home that the roast was frozen solid. After thirty hours in the fridge, it had finally thawed, but by then it was Monday night and I didn’t have time to make the taco filling before bed. I’d heard that you can cook a pork roast overnight, and a quick Google search told me that Jamie Oliver is a believer. If he’s on board, that’s good enough for me. I made a quick paste of garlic, brown sugar, mustard, thyme, and spices and slathered the pork with it. I gave it a quick blast in a scorching oven to get some caramelization going, then turned the oven down as low as it would go, and went upstairs to bed. The next morning, we woke in a cloud of garlic, sugar, and pork aroma—like bacon on steroids. The surface of the roast was burnished and crisp, and when I went at it with two forks, the meat virtually fell apart. Every accident should be this happy. 

Buying Pork: Pork has changed a lot over the years. Commercial pork is leaner than it used to be, making it less flavorful and prone to dryness. I typically don’t buy it a lot, except for the occasional sausage. Instead, I seek out local pork from small farms whenever possible. It may be a bit more expensive, but the taste is far superior. When you’re buying pork shoulder, look for a piece of meat with good marbling and a generous fat cap. You’ll taste the difference.

How Amanda Riffs: “I make this pork shoulder as often as possible, and when I do, I sometimes change up the seasoning. I capitalize the spices and lowercase the sweetness by adding a tablespoon of smoked paprika in place of the chipotle and a large pinch of red pepper flakes, and omitting the maple syrup and brown sugar.”

During the holiday season we can barely keep packages of these  ginger cookies on our shelves, and they remain  a favourite throughout  the year. In fact, one of our parents  keeps their bag in the freezer in an attempt  to eat only one cookie at a time, a tactic that more often than not fails miserably. What makes this a particularly delicious ginger cookie is the balance of spices and the slightly chewy texture. While ginger is the predominant spice, the addition of cinnamon and cloves results in a more complex and robust flavour, while the molasses adds sweetness and chewy texture.

Chocolate, chocolate cheesecake, and chocolate chip cookie dough all together in one square pretty much confirms my chocolate addiction.