Birthday
158 recipes found
Vanilla Citrus Soufflés
The friendliest dishes are oftentimes accused of being fussy or complicated. Soufflé has this reputation even though it’s nearly rustic in its ingredients. There are three components to consider when making any good soufflé: flavor, structure and heavenly levity. That airiness is typically what intimidates, but remember that, no matter how close to the heavens you might aspire, even a slightly flat soufflé is a delicious soufflé, and you’ll only get closer next time. The flavor of these vanilla citrus soufflés is both delicate and bright, and while they are light, they provide quite a satisfying bite. The black pepper brings a nice surprise dimension to the vanilla and grapefruit. Rooted in Appalachian traditions, black pepper in dessert is quite special and adds to the mystique dessert.
Pancit
Often served for special occasions like Noche Buena or birthdays, pancit is a Filipino dish of stir-fried noodles, meat and vegetables coated in a savory-sweet sauce. Pancit, which means “noodles”, has many delicious variations. This one, made with tender vermicelli rice noodles, carrots, cabbage, and chicken or pork, is known specifically as pancit bihon. Feel free to add other vegetables like green beans or snow peas. You can top the noodles with lechon kawali, crispy and juicy fried pork belly, and use the stock from that dish instead of chicken stock. (Just be sure to adjust the salt as necessary.) Pancit can be prepared in large batches, but however it’s served, include wedges of calamansi, if available. It’s a citrus fruit native to the Philippines that will brighten up the entire dish.
Rainbow Rave Cookies
This recipe is adapted from “Start Here: Instructions for Becoming a Better Cook” by Sohla El-Waylly and is originally titled Lisa Frank Cookies. It earns that name by being a big sucker punch of sugary nostalgia. A trio of extracts (pure vanilla, imitation vanilla and almond) is key to giving these cookies the aura of that prepackaged baked good you might’ve tucked into your lunchbox as a kid, but they’re better because you’re making them fresh. Best of all, they come together in a snap, stirred up in one bowl and baked on the same day. You can throw a rainbow rave for your mouth almost instantly.
Vanilla Cake
This fluffy vanilla cake makes an ideal base for layer cakes of all kinds. Buttermilk gives the cake a bit of tang and a tender crumb, and a full tablespoon of vanilla extract in the batter ensures it’s anything but plain. Layer diced fresh fruit between the cakes and top with powdered sugar, or decorate with a double batch of buttercream frosting and sprinkles for a classic birthday cake.
Baked Alaska
The creation of baked alaska is commonly attributed to Charles Ranhofer, the chef at Delmonico’s restaurant in New York who served the dessert as a commentary on the United States’ purchase of the Alaska territory in 1867. He called it ‘Alaska, Florida’ — the contrast between frozen ice cream and torched meringue represented the difference in the country’s climates. Consisting of a cake base in addition to the ice cream and meringue, it sounds complicated, but with a little patience, baked alaska is surprisingly simple to make at home. It takes time to let each layer freeze, but that makes it an ideal dessert to prepare in advance. Chocolate and cherry ice cream are just suggestions; feel free to choose your own favorites, keeping in mind that contrasting colors will make for a particularly beautiful dessert.
Lemon Cupcakes
These little cupcakes are light, fluffy and packed with bright lemon flavor. Topped with a not-too-sweet cream cheese frosting, they are both well-balanced and indulgent — and easy to prepare in one bowl. While you will need two to three lemons to yield enough zest for the cakes, you may not need to cut so many open for ¼ cup of juice. To save the remaining zested lemons for another recipe, be sure to wrap them in plastic wrap. Without the zest, bald lemons tend to harden in the fridge fast. The frosted cupcakes are best the day they’re made, but you can make the cakes in advance and freeze them for up to 1 month in an airtight container. Thaw at room temperature to frost and serve.
Sugar Cookies
What sets drop-style sugar cookies apart from classic cut-outs is that you don’t need to roll out the dough or dig deep into drawers in search of cookie cutters. Simply scoop and roll the dough into balls, then slightly flatten and bake. The dough needs to chill in the fridge for at least an hour so the cookies don’t spread too much during baking, but this can be done up to a day in advance. Follow this approach and the cookies will be irresistibly soft, yet chewy in the middle and a little crisp around the edges. They are fantastic as is, but you can top with extra sugar or sprinkles, or exchange the vanilla for a little almond or lemon extract to play around with the flavor.
Carrot Cake Cupcakes
These simple, fuss-free cupcakes cram all of the beloved flavors of classic carrot cake into nostalgic, portable treats. The batter is made with melted butter, allowing you to quickly mix it in one bowl. It’s flavored with a generous amount of ground cinnamon and shredded carrots to add an earthy flavor and unbeatable moistness. An optional add-in of chopped nuts or raisins lets you customize the batter to produce your ideal version of carrot cake. Finishing the cupcakes with a swoosh of fluffy, just-sweet-enough cream cheese frosting makes them fit for any celebration.
Bolo de Cenoura (Carrot Cake)
Bolo de cenoura, a carrot cake often found in Portuguese and Brazilian bakeries, is thrilling in its simplicity. A few key ingredients (carrots, flour, sugar, eggs and oil) and a blender or food processor are all you need to bring together the batter. The carrots give the cake its tender orange-amber crumb, which is finished with a brigadeiro frosting, anchored by a condensed milk and cocoa powder, that’s made while the cake cools. A spoonful of sour cream, a nontraditional addition to the batter, adds a slight tang here, and condensed coconut milk lends a subtle nuttiness to the frosting.
Southern Caramel Cake
This traditional Southern caramel cake is perfect for when you want layer cake, and you'd like it fast. It's light and fluffy under the sweet caramel glaze, which hardens at room temperature and shatters gently with every bite. The glaze comes together quickly, thanks to the dark brown sugar, which already has that deep caramel flavor you’d get from cooking down granulated sugar. A little heat, butter and buttermilk give the icing body. The final cake is like a soft drop biscuit under a sweet caramel sauce, and it's just as good out of the refrigerator as it is warm.
Batched 50-50 Martini
Martinis are bound to kick up strong opinions that tend to intensify as more martinis are consumed. Gin versus vodka. Shaken versus stirred. Dirty? How dirty? Olives, lemon twist or both? This batched recipe makes the biggest decisions for you: Gin — the spirit of choice — is paired with vermouth in equal measure, a ratio that means you and your guests can and should pour freely. From there, the drinker has full control to dirty and garnish to their heart’s content.
3-Ingredient Macaroni & Cheese
This 3-ingredient mac and cheese recipe is quick and satisfying. Think boxed mac and cheese, but even better. with starchy pasta water, butter, and cheese.
Rainbow Cake
This Technicolor cake is a project, but one you can pull off with a little elbow grease and lots of butter (nine sticks, to be exact). Most rainbow cakes call for coloring the individual layers of cake batter, but here, the frosting is tinted, creating an impressive rainbow inside each slice. The batter uses egg whites for a light, fluffy, just-sweet-enough layer cake, while the leftover egg yolks in the frosting make it smooth and creamy. We’ve included instructions for making the ombré and piped versions of the cake below, but you’ll need to make an extra half-batch of frosting for the piped version. A standard mixer cannot accommodate more than one batch of frosting at a time, so you’ll need to make the half-batch separately, then combine them before coloring and frosting.
Ken Forkish's Hawaiian Pizza
If you have a deep affection for Hawaiian pizza, this recipe will make the best and most thoughtfully balanced you’ve ever tasted. And if, instead, Hawaiian pizza makes you inexplicably angry—well, if any pie is going to change your mind, this is it. Regardless of which side of the salty-sweet chasm you find yourself on, any homemade pizza can benefit from Forkish’s technique—and the sneaky-genius trick of tucking a thin layer of bacon grease below the sauce. You won’t taste bacon, you will just taste *good*. Adapted slightly from The Elements of Pizza (Ten Speed Press, 2016).
Fabrizia Lanza’s Sicilian Pizza (Sfincione)
Palermo, the capital of Sicily, is street-food paradise, and among its many offerings is sfincione, a hearty pizza that’s baked in a rimmed sheet pan, allowing the dough to rise to a chewy thickness, and cut into large square slices. Sfincione is smeared with a frugal tomato sauce enhanced with umami from sheep’s milk cheese, onions and anchovy, along with olive oil and a handful of bread crumbs to make the cheese go further. When baked, the top is juicy, while the bottom is crisp from the generously oiled pan. Despite its origins as a street food, it is the perfect pizza to make at home. This easy and authentic recipe is from Fabrizia Lanza, proprietor of the Anna Tasca Lanza Cooking School, on the family’s country estate near Palermo.
Olive Oil Brownies With Sea Salt
Moist in the center and crisp at the corners, these fudgy brownies are lusciously smooth but for the occasional crunch of a chocolate chip. Their bittersweet character is accentuated by the olive oil, while dark brown sugar makes them extra rich. Be sure to sprinkle the salt on top while the brownies are still warm. The heat helps the salt adhere. Use a mild oil here: Anything too grassy or sharp might overpower the chocolate.
Bittersweet Chocolate-Almond Cake With Amaretti Cookie Crumbs
Here’s a cake that comes together with the push of a button — butter, sugar, eggs and cocoa as well as dark chocolate, almonds and amaretti cookies are blended in a food processor. Although it looks like a brownie, the cake tilts toward a nut torte. It’s low and sleek, simple, sophisticated and packed with flavor. The original recipe appeared in my debut cookbook, “Sweet Times,” in 1991, and when I made it for Julia Child that year, I got her thumbs up. Over time, I haven’t fiddled much with the recipe’s basics, but these days I finish the cake with a glaze and a sprinkling of crushed amaretti for style and crunch. I prefer amaretti di Saronno by Lazzaroni for the cake, but other amaretti work well too. And don’t be distressed if the cake develops a mound during baking (it happens now and then). Press it down with a spatula — it doesn’t diminish this cake’s deliciousness.
Chocolate Cream Pie With Oreo Crust
Chocolate wafers may be standard, but a buttery Oreo crumb crust is an even better base for this chocolate cream pie. A store-bought cookie crust filled with from-scratch custard is the perfect combination of simple and sophisticated, with a bit of nostalgia for good measure. Depending on the size of your pie plate, you may have some custard left over after filling the crust: It’s a perfect baker’s treat.
Dori Sanders’ No-Churn Fresh Lemon Ice Cream
When it’s too hot to make a custard, it’s nice to know that you can still have sweet-tart, bracing no churn lemon ice cream all the same. This recipe is perfect!
Lemon-Pistachio Baked Alaska
Baked alaska is a real toil, no doubt — you have to attend to the cake, the ice cream and the meringue, in the same way a mason lays stone. But there is plenty of opportunity for fun and flourish once the foundation is secure: You can divide the meringue among several pastry bags with varying sized tips to make dramatic and interesting variegated patterns of piped meringue. You can play with the shape of the cake by freezing the semifreddo in a coffee drip cone or a large-format flexible ice cube tray. And when you toast the meringue with a kitchen torch, you can hold the flame near and far, lingering in spots and moving briskly in others, to create extra drama and eye appeal. Try spooning flaming kirsch down its slopes. If you want to go even further, try replacing the white sugar with brown sugar in the meringue for a sophisticated pale-beige meringue that contrasts beautifully when toasted just to golden. Or see what you think of the results using other decorative colored sugars — keeping in mind, though, that after all that work down on your knees laying stone, you want to look up at a cathedral, not Fudgie the Whale!
Classic Lasagna
While not a 30-minute meal, this lasagna is quicker and more straightforward than most. If you’re in a real time crunch, use your favorite jarred red sauce. For greater success with the lasagna noodles, which have a tendency to stick together, boil them in the largest pot possible or work in batches — they need as much water as possible to move freely so they don’t clump. This lasagna can be assembled, baked and refrigerated up to five days ahead, or frozen up to a month ahead if wrapped tightly.
Classic Birthday Cake
A birthday cake needn't be elaborate. A few layers of tender yellow cake and creamy chocolate frosting will do the trick. In this version of the classic pairing, brown sugar and buttermilk provide a sophisticated flavor to the cake, and sour cream adds a slight tang to the chocolate frosting. It’s worth noting that both the cake and frosting can be made ahead. Just make sure you bring the frosting to room temperature before assembly so that it spreads easily. One note: The buttermilk and brown sugar in the batter means that the cake might appear slightly darker on the outside after baking than your typical yellow cake, but don't worry. The inside will be tender and moist.
Ambrosia Cake
If you love the combination of oranges, coconut and marshmallows found in a traditional ambrosia — the salad or dessert that often also contains pineapple, bananas, cherries and some kind of creamy dressing such as whipped cream or sour cream — you’ll adore this cake. The coconut is baked into the cake layers and used as a sweet, shaggy garnish, while the oranges (in this case, diminutive, seedless clementines) are juiced into curd and sliced fresh for the filling. Then, as a final, fluffy touch, a homemade marshmallow frosting tops it off. It may be a lot of work, but it’s an impressive result. And you can make the curd and cake a few days ahead. Just be sure to make the frosting and assemble everything within 8 hours of serving. Otherwise the fruit starts to break down and the icing may crystallize.
Whole Roasted Breast of Veal
A whole breast of veal is a succulent, fatty, tender magnificence to enjoy, at any time, but especially so when you have holiday turkey and ham fatigue. It doesn’t make immediate sense that I consider the veal — with its fat and cartilage and bone and sinew and silver skin — a light meal, but in my experience, the few bites of sticky tender meat you end up with are so outrageously succulent and hit the spot so hard you don’t need more. The long, slow, low overnight cooking is perfect for both the meat and your schedule if you are trying to pull off a real, civilian party — and sit down at it.