Often, when chocolate cookies are strutting around a bakery case, sending out their sexy, glossy vibes, the humble oatmeal cookie is completely overlooked. Small and round, filled with dried fruit and a handful of spices, this unassuming cookie doesn’t always make a big splash. Its charm is subtle; it hums quietly while other confections roar. But, in all honestly, I’m fine with the majority of people passing by these raisin-filled circles because it means there are more for me. Main Ingredients for Oatmeal Raisin Cookies Rolled vs Quick Oats: I find either kind of oat works well in this cook ..read more

What Makes This Blueberry Muffin Recipe Different? My blueberry muffin experience started with a blue boxed mix, complete with tiny dried blueberries. My mom would often make them to accompany dinner, and we would devour them slathered in too much butter. I started baking them from scratch while working at the Blue Heron Coffeehouse; I always loved that their recipe added nutmeg and I took that little trick with me when I left. This recipe is revamped from my first book and now included in my latest cookbook, 100 Morning Treats; I found adding almond flour keeps the crumb tender and light, an ..read more

Shortbread has many aficionados, but like all intense passions, there is a great divide among enthusiasts about principle and purpose. Many fanatics argue over whether to work the butter into the flour toward the end of mixing, or cream butter and sugar together initially. In this version I use the latter method, and bake my shortbread in a pan for crisp, golden shortbread rectangles, or fingers as they are sometimes called. How this recipe differs from others: I like my shortbread crisp, so I use a 9 by 13 in [23 by 33 cm] baking pan. The shortbread bakes up thinner. If you like a thicker sh ..read more

Almost every coffeehouse I worked at in the late 90’s made sure to offer four kinds of cookies: chocolate chip (of course), peanut butter, oatmeal raisin, and the very fancy (at least for suburban Minnesota) white chocolate macadamia nut. Chocolate chip was my number one pick each time, and I never was a huge fan of the latter: the white chocolate was overly sweet, and the macadamia nuts were left in huge pieces that could crack a tooth. Years later when I was developing cookie recipes I finally found a white chocolate that I liked, and discovered that using that good chocolate and finely cho ..read more

These Red Velvet Pan-Banging Cookies are a variation of both the Pan-Banging Sugar Cookie and the Pan-Banging Ginger Molasses Cookie with Rum Butter Glaze, which are all also off-shoots of my Pan-Banging Chocolate Chip Cookies. These delicious cookies have buttery, rippled edges and a chewy center as a result of using the pan-banging cookie technique. They also mimic the famous red velvet cake (like my Red Velvet Cream Cheese Sugar Cookies), with both red food coloring and a little bit of cocoa powder in the dough to create the beautiful burgundy hue, and a partial dip in cream chee ..read more

Both of my children have cold weather birthdays, one in the later days of Autumn, and the other very close to Christmas. While in their early years they begged for chocolate cakes covered in sprinkles, middle school brought on new requests for birthday celebrating, in the form of either Maple Oatmeal Scones or Pillowy Soft Cinnamon Rolls (that are also a reader favorite). But as our family has grown, both with more people and also in size (growing teenagers + grocery shopping = wow), we have discovered that one pan of cinnamon rolls doesn’t cover everyone equally. At our family birthday gathe ..read more

A lot of you have been making my Apple Cider Pull-Apart Bread, so I decided to come up with a pumpkin flavored one since we have now moved into November. I use a Pumpkin Caramel recipe from my book, 100 Morning Treats, which is incredible paired with the fluffy, soft bread that’s also fun to eat, pulling apart each delicious slice. The sugar filling for the dough has cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg giving it warm flavor throughout. Easy Pumpkin Caramel This caramel topping for the pull-apart bread is easy to make, and there is no thermometer involved! Most of the ingredients are combined togethe ..read more

These are the Half-n-Half Chocolate Chip Cookies I’ll be making for the Bake a Difference event on Nov. 5 from 1 to 3 p.m. with my friend Zoe Francois (I hope you’ll join even if you’re not in the Twin Cities)! They’re part double chocolate cookies, part gooey chocolate chip cookie, based off my Chocolate Chip Cookie 2.0 recipe that so many of you love. We’ll be baking some amazing desserts( Zoe will be making Basque Cheesecake with Roasted Pumpkin!) and raising money for Jose Andres’s World Central Kitchen. From environmental catastrophes to upheaval around the globe, every pe ..read more

You have my permission to give me any and all side-eye for suggesting cookies for breakfast, but, hear me out: what if sometimes, just occasionally, we had them for that first morning meal? Because while I don’t eat cookies every day first thing, I pretty much want to. And if I was eating cookies for breakfast, these would be the ones I choose. They are included in my cookbook 100 Morning Treats, and are inspired by the the rye-cranberry chocolate chunk cookies in Dorie Greenspan’s excellent book Baking with Dorie (which she graciously allowed me to feature on my website). Her cookie recipe i ..read more

I have been a fan of Bundt cakes for decades, as their elegant shape and endless flavor possibilities have always been intriguing to me. The first Bundt cake I ever made was at The Blue Heron Coffeehouse in Winona, MN; I was working an evening shift and it was painfully slow, so I bopped into the kitchen and decided to get a jump-start on the morning baking. Bundt cakes had always been a big seller in the morning hours, and the fact that they often tasted better the next day made them a good place to start. Two hours and one flip later, my Bundt cake was out of the oven, and even though part ..read more