Birthday
158 recipes found
Salty Peanut-Pretzel Ice Cream Cake
Grab a couple quarts of your favorite vanilla ice cream, crush up some peanuts and pretzels, and invite the neighborhood over for this sweet, salty, satisfying summer treat. For the most robust peanut flavor, use well-stirred natural, unsweetened peanut butter. You can also use a sweetened variety, if that’s what you have on hand, but bear in mind that the ice cream and honey lend this cake enough sweetness. The savory dry-roasted peanuts add a wonderful depth of flavor, but make sure to look for a brand without onion or garlic powder listed among the ingredients.
Banana-Coconut Layer Cake
Don’t mistake this impressive layer cake for a modest banana bread. It’s a billowing, head-turning dessert covered in white swirls of coconut frosting. Roasting the bananas before mashing them into the batter intensifies their flavor, while the toasted coconut adds sweetness and crunch. It’s best served the day it is made, but will keep, lightly covered and refrigerated, for up to two days.
Blondies With a Strawberry-Balsamic Swirl
Most blond brownie recipes rely on copious amounts of brown sugar for flavor, without calling for any chocolate. These, from "Marbled, Swirled and Layered" by Irvin Lin, are an excellent exception. Using white chocolate that has been roasted and caramelized, they have a rich, buttery character with a peppery undertone from a bit of extra-virgin olive oil whisked into the batter. A swirl of homemade balsamic strawberry compote gives them a vein of jammy fruit amid all the sweet, gooey cake. Stored in an airtight container at room temperature, they keep for up to 3 days.
Fresh-Fig Cake With Honey Cream-Cheese Frosting
This dense and deeply figgy cake, adapted from Eli's Table in Manhattan, gets its complex flavor from a combination of fresh figs and fig jam, seasoned generously with cinnamon, cardamom and ginger. It’s then filled and topped with cream cheese frosting that is sweetened with a combination of confectioners’ sugar for lightness and honey for richness. Over all, it’s a bit like carrot cake, except softer and sweeter. You can make the cake two to three days ahead and store it, well wrapped or under a cake dome, in the refrigerator. It gets even moister as it sits. If you can’t get fresh figs, chopped peeled apple works nicely as a substitute.
Granny’s Chocolate Cake
This cake recipe was adapted from the chef Larry Forgione, who served his grandmother's cake recipe at his restaurant An American Place. The dessert proved so popular that every time he tried to take it off of the menu, he said his customers threatened to riot. It's a perfect proportion of crumb to buttercream, ideal for birthdays or other celebrations where layer cake is required.
Mini Almond Cakes With Chocolate or Cherry
These moist, rich almond cakes are miniature versions of a classic flourless almond torte, embellished here with either chocolate ganache or cherry jam. The bittersweet chocolate filling is a bit more sophisticated, while the cherry jam is sweetly crowd-pleasing. Or you can split the difference and make six of each. These gluten-free treats are best eaten within eight hours of baking so plan to make them the same day as serving. You can use either natural or blanched almond flour; the blanched will give you a slightly more delicate texture.
Red Pepper Crab Croquetas With Garlic-Almond Sauce
In Spain, golden-fried croquetas are served in tapas bars to the delight of all. They may be made of any number of things, like salt, potatoes or cauliflower. Béchamel is used to bind the mixture, which gives these crab-meat croquetas a luscious center. The crisp and creamy bites are perfect for any gathering, eaten out of hand with drinks.
Chocolate Extremes (Double Chocolate Cookies)
These provocatively named cookies came to The Times in a 1999 Sunday Magazine article about Mrs. London's Bake Shop, a husband and wife owned bakery in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., known for their sweets. While the name suggests these cookies might veer into the too sweet and too rich category, they do not. Shiny and crackly on top while tender and deeply chocolaty in the center, they're like an ideal brownie in cookie form. They're kind of perfect. (One note: The recipe calls for bittersweet chocolate, but feel free to use semisweet or a combination of the two. Also, a sprinkle of flaky sea salt before baking would not be a bad idea.)
Butterscotch Budino With Caramel Sauce
This butterscotch budino from the pastry chef Dahlia Narvaez is a pudding to shame all other puddings. The budino’s simple master stroke? Over the pudding hovers a thin layer of caramel with an audaciously generous sprinkling of sea salt.
Champagne Melon Soup With Raspberry Ice Balls
Melon with port is a traditional combination in France, the wine served in half a Cavaillon melon, but I always though it could be improved. The beautiful pastel shades of the melons are lost in the deep red-purple of the wine, and port overwhelms the taste of the fruit. In this recipe, the raspberry ice cubes add color and another flavor dimension to the soup, which is quite intense: they make it taste like a kir royale. I keep raspberry cubes in the freezer for more than just this soup. You can also drop them into a glass of Champagne or a martini.
Tangerine, Ginger and Chocolate Tart
This elegant tart has a tangy citrus curd nestled in a ginger shortbread crust coated with bittersweet chocolate. The chocolate not only adds flavor, it also helps the pastry stay crisp by creating a barrier between the liquid curd and the pre-baked crust. This tart is best served the day it’s made, but can be stored for 24 hours in the refrigerator; after that, it starts to wilt. If you want to turn the leftover dough scraps into buttery cookies, see the note.
Rye Tarte Tatin
Rye flour adds an earthy flavor and soft, cakey texture to this otherwise classic tarte Tatin, which is topped with glossy, nearly candied apples cloaked in caramel. A tangy yogurt sorbet offsets the sweetness, but crème fraîche, a dollop of sour cream or a spoonful of plain Greek yogurt would also work nicely as an accompaniment. This recipe is adapted from the chef Moko Hirayama, who serves it at Mokonuts, the Paris restaurant and cafe she owns with her husband, the chef Omar Koreitem.
Pineapple-Rhubarb 'Salad' With Basil Cream
This dish is more like a compote than a soup, but unlike most compotes, the fruit is cooked as little as possible so the flavors and textures remain distinct. The rhubarb must be cut very small to retain some of the crunch, but cook all the way through. Don't be tempted to cook the pineapple at all as the dessert would lose its fresh flavor if you did.
Chocolate Frosting
Here is a buttercream frosting like your grandmother might have made. Pair it with chocolate cake for a rich birthday treat.