This simple glaze gives a sweet and tangy note to loaf cakes such as pound cake and carrot cake.

Amateur bakers immediately assume that any dessert requiring a pastry bag is too difficult and just, well, too "professional". While it’s true that much of the elaborate decorations accomplished with a pastry bag takes some practice, a pastry bag makes certain very basic tasks a lot ..

Buy the best-quality oil and vinegar you can afford, because you can't put in flavor that isn't already there. And make up a big bottle, so that you use it all the time. I would be a very happy man if every British family had a bottle of Giorgio's homemade vinaigrette in the fridge.

The most famous of these dishes is risotto Milanese (saffron risotto) with osso buco, but stuffed cabbage is another that I have always loved. When my grandmother made this dish, the smell would fill the whole house. When I came home from school, I knew what was cooking as soon as I opened the ..

You can use any combination of cake layers and fillings to make a multilayered cake and then cover it with rolled fondant, but a sponge cake such as a genoise is ideal. Fill, frost, and refrigerate a 9-inch round cake about 5 inches high. Half of the recipe for rolled fondant is sufficient for a ..

To decorate a cake as as shown here, first cover it with a sheet of rolled fondant as described below. To make the dots and strip, start with 4 ounces of fondant, divide it into four parts and color each piece. To color fondant, add food coloring a little at a time, kneading it in. When you have the ..

Many recipes for savory tarts, such as quiches, or for dessert tarts or pies with very sweet fillings call for unsweetened pastry. And if the filling is rich you may want to use a minimum amount of butter in your crust. Traditional recipes for this basic pastry called pâte brisée in French, call ..

Cream cheese pastry dough creates a delicious counterpoint to cookedfruit. Use it to line tarts or pies made with cooked berries, or tarts filled with lemon or otherfruit curds. This dough is made in the same way as the basic pie and tart pastry dough, except that the butter is augmented with cream ..

Those of us who like the flavor of butter, which makes pastry crumbly but also like our pastryflaky as though made with lard or shortening, have to fold the pastry dough over itself a few times to create layers and hence flakes. You can make virtually any pastry flaky by rolling out the dough, ..

The traditional French sweet pastry dough called pâte sucrée, used for fruit tarts with tart fillings (in both senses of the word) such as lemon curd, is made differently from most pie and tart pastry dough. The butter is not cut into small pieces with the flour; instead, it is creamed with sugar ..