Recipes By Margaux Laskey
40 recipes found
Italian Rainbow Cookies
Also known as Venetians, Neapolitans or tricolore cookies, these classic Italian-American treats are not really cookies at all, but thin, dense layers of brightly hued almond cake stacked with apricot jam, and coated with glossy chocolate. The layers are traditionally red, white and green to resemble the Italian flag, but, of course, you can play around with the colors depending on the holiday and what you have on hand. This version is adapted from Mary Carpino, from Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., who made them every Christmas for years. One of her granddaughters, Nicole Carpino Frasco, passed along the recipe to us. We increased the chocolate and salt slightly, but the festive spirit of the recipe remains. Mrs. Carpino stored them in her chilly winter attic, but if you don’t have one of those, store them in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks, or in the freezer for up to 5 months.
Broccoli Salad With Cheddar and Warm Bacon Vinaigrette
Broccoli salads are a dime a dozen, but this one, which is adapted from Ashley Christensen's cookbook, "Poole's: Recipes From a Modern Diner," is a game-changing celebration of flavors, colors and textures: broccoli, toasted pecans and red grapes are cloaked in a warm bacon-scallion vinaigrette, then sprinkled with small chunks of sharp white Cheddar. Ms. Christensen's recipe, which uses the florets as well as the stalks, asks you to blanch the broccoli (cooking it for a few minutes in generously salted boiling water, then shocking it with salted iced water). It takes a little extra time, but the crisp-tender, bright green broccoli, seasoned inside and out, is your just reward. Try not to eat the entire bowl yourself.
Salted Dark Chocolate Cake With Ganache Frosting
Layer cakes are pretty, but for many, they require far too much work to make on a regular basis. This cake, adapted from “Modern Baking: Cakes, Cookies and Everything in Between” by Donna Hay, may find a place in your recipe repertoire. It requires just two bowls — one for the cake and one for the frosting — and there’s no need to separate wet and dry ingredients. You just toss everything into a bowl and stir. The end result is a tender, sophisticated cake slathered with a glossy milk chocolate-sour cream ganache. Ms. Hay sprinkled black sea salt around the edges of her cake with stunning effect, but traditional white sea salt looks beautiful, too.
Chocolate Tres Leches Cake
This recipe looks hard, but it’s not. Promise. A very easy chocolate cake is transformed into a version of tres leches cake, the classic Latin American dessert, by drenching it with evaporated milk, condensed milk and heavy cream and topping it with a lightly sweetened whipped cream. Each component of this recipe — the cake, the tres leches and the whipped cream — are all adapted from “Simple Cake: All You Need to Keep Your Friends and Family in Cake” by Odette Williams, a choose-your-own-adventure cookbook that provides you with several cake and toppings recipes that you can combine as you wish. Ms. Williams’s recipe doesn’t call for it, but adding a teaspoon of ground cinnamon to the whipped cream is a lovely addition.
Baked White Beans and Sausage With Sage
This incredibly easy one-pan dinner is from the cookbook “The Silver Spoon for Children,” with more than 40 traditional recipes adapted from “The Silver Spoon,” a book that appears in many home kitchens in Italy. Older children with some experience can follow this recipe as is, but if you’ve got little ones who want to help, they can stir the sage, beans and apple juice together in a large bowl while the sausages bake, then you can pour the mixture into the hot pan. If you like your beans on the saucy side, add 1/4 cup more apple juice. Serve with buttered crusty rolls and something leafy and green.
Huli Huli Chicken
In 1955, Ernest Morgado, a Honolulu businessman, served a group of farmers grilled chicken that had been marinated in his mother’s teriyaki-style sauce. It was such a hit that he decided to market it with the name “huli huli.” Huli means “turn” in Hawaiian and refers to how it’s prepared: grilled between two racks and turned halfway through cooking. This simplified version calls for chicken pieces and a standard grill. The original recipe is a trade secret, but you can find many slightly different variations on the internet, typically including ginger, garlic, soy sauce, something sweet (honey, brown sugar or maple syrup) and something acidic (vinegar, white wine, lime juice or pineapple juice). This recipe is adapted from “Aloha Kitchen: Recipes from Hawai‘i” by Alana Kysar (Ten Speed, March 2019). It also works beautifully with boneless chicken thighs, but adjust your cooking time accordingly.
Cranberry Sauce Salsa
Don't toss that little bit of cranberry sauce leftover from Thanksgiving dinner. This recipe, which we developed for a special kids' edition of The New York Times, calls for making it into a savory-sweet salsa that everyone will love. Just add some chopped fresh tomatoes, onion, garlic, cilantro and jalapeño to prepared whole cranberry sauce (not the jellied stuff). Stir in some lime zest and juice, and a sprinkling of chile powder, cumin and cayenne. Serve with enchilada pie or tortilla chips, and consider stocking canned cranberry sauce in your cabinet all year long.
Maida Heatter’s Chocolate Mousse Torte
Maida Heatter, the legendary dessert-cookbook author, tested this recipe 20 times before deeming it good enough for publication in The Times in May 1972. Her toil was worth the trouble: Eight months later, it was named the paper’s most requested dessert recipe of the year. This is an adaptation of the version that appears in Ms. Heatter’s book “Happiness is Baking” (Little, Brown, 2019). It begins with a big batch of chocolate mousse, half of which is baked in a pie plate. As it cools, it sinks in the middle, creating a dense, fudgy cake with a bit of an elevated edge. The remaining mousse is piled in the center, then topped with snowy whipped cream and chocolate shavings. One note: Like most traditional mousses, this one contains raw eggs. Use the best pasteurized eggs you can find. If that worries you, try another Maida Heatter dessert instead.
Easy Baklava
Einat Admony, the chef at Balaboosta, Taïm and Bar Bolonat, came up with a simplified version of baklava that was featured in “Food52 Genius Desserts: 100 Recipes That Will Change the Way You Bake.” Instead of stacking individual layers of phyllo dough, Ms. Admony calls for rolling up the nut filling in the phyllo and slicing it into discs as you would cinnamon rolls, then baking and drizzling the slices with syrup. Like traditional baklava, they are shatteringly crisp, gooey and sweet in all the right places, but much less work. Her original recipe calls for raw peanuts, but roasted work just fine.
Vegetable Dumplings
The Polish have pierogi, the Japanese have gyoza: Many of the world’s cultures have some version of dumplings, whether they’re filled with meat, cheese or vegetables, and baked, steamed, fried or boiled. This recipe is adapted from the children’s cookbook “Around the World: Delicious Dishes from Across the Globe,” from the American Girl cookbook series, and was inspired by the dumplings you might get at your local Chinese takeout spot. They’re not necessarily authentic, but they are delicious, and folding and frying them is a fun weekend project for kids of all ages. You can use round or square wonton wrappers for this project, but don’t forget the sauce: It’s what makes these dumplings great.
Chocolate Mug Cake
If you Google “mug cake,” you’ll get more than 100 million results for the one-serving cake that’s baked in a mug in the microwave. Yet finding the right recipe — not too dense, not too sweet — is harder than one might hope. This version, adapted from “Baking Class: 50 Fun Recipes Kids Will Love to Bake!” by Deanna F. Cook, is great, and requires just a few pantry staples. For a molten chocolate mug cake, sprinkle the top with some mini chocolate chips before popping it into the microwave, then remove it a few seconds early. This cute little cake may have been developed for children, but everyone loves it.
Brown-Edge Cookies
These one-bowl cookies, sometimes known as crispies, are buttery like the Danish cookies in blue tins, tender in the middle like snickerdoodles and snappy like Scottish shortbread. But there’s nothing else quite like them, and they go with everything. No one knows the exact provenance of the recipe, but Nabisco sold a similar cookie called brown-edge wafers until they discontinued production in 1996. This all-butter version is adapted from Millie Shea of Traverse City, Mich., who learned it from her mother in the 1930s. For best results, be sure to cream the butter and sugar until fluffy, and don’t overbake.
Chocolate-Chip Cookie Pizza
You like chocolate chip cookies. You like pizza. What could be better than a giant chocolate chip pizza cookie? If your answer is, “pretty much nothing,” we’d say you’re 100% right. This Instagram-worthy treat starts with a batch of our famous chocolate chip cookie dough (with a smidge of cornstarch to keep the cookie soft and gooey in the center), but from there, it’s all yours. When we took it out of the oven, we spread on cherry jam “pizza sauce,” drizzled on melted white chocolate “mozzarella,” and added rounds of raspberry fruit leather “pepperoni.” But warmed Nutella and blobs of marshmallow fluff are a pretty awesome combination, too. We developed this recipe for a special print-only edition of The New York Times for Kids, but our sources tell us grown-up sweet tooths can't resist this oversized treat either. For a more sophisticated dinner party-worthy variation, leave off the toppings and serve generous wedges with scoops of vanilla ice cream and salted caramel sauce.
Thanksgiving Leftovers Enchilada Pie
This recipe was developed for a special kids’ edition of The New York Times, but we’ve found that people of all ages love it. It sounds a little strange, but we promise you, it’s surprisingly delicious. It’s easy to make, and anything you don't already have on hand can be picked up from the corner store. We used leftover turkey, braised greens and mashed sweet potatoes, but feel free to experiment with savory dishes like sautéed brussels sprouts, cornbread stuffing or mashed potatoes. Top your slice with cranberry sauce salsa, a dollop of sour cream and a scattering of roasted pumpkin seeds. (We used a mix of Velveeta, Cheddar and Monterey Jack cheeses because the Velveeta helps prevent clumping, but, if processed cheese bothers you, leave it out and add a half-cup more Cheddar or Monterey Jack.)
Peanut Butter-Paprika Cookies
This recipe comes from Sister Pie, a Detroit bakery specializing in pies and baked goods, like blueberry plum balsamic pie, buttered corn scones and rhubarb blondies, that are “comforting with a side of adventure.” These oversize cookies embody that ethos. They’re tender, sweet and peanut buttery, but gussied up with a sprinkle of flaky sea salt and a hint of smoked paprika.
Make-It-Your-Own Udon Noodle Soup
This incredibly easy soup, which was developed for a special kids edition of The Times, is just the thing to warm you from fingertips to toes on a chilly day. It starts with a simple garlic-ginger broth, to which you add pretty much any vegetable, tofu or cooked meat that you like (meatballs are fun). Just be sure to slice any firm vegetables thinly, so they can cook quickly. Toss a tangle of cooked noodles in to the broth, and add a frenzy of toppings – halved hard-boiled eggs, roasted peanuts, sliced scallions, sprouts, nori (a type of seaweed), a drizzle of sriracha – whatever excites you. As for noodles, we like udon, because they're delightfully soft and chewy, but you can also use spaghetti, bucatini or even ramen. (Fun fact: Udon dough is traditionally kneaded with your feet.)