Toasted Almond Crunch Cupcakes

Ten years ago I wrote a book called Diner Desserts (Chronicle, 2000), which is a collection of recipes for some of my favorite comfort food-style desserts. I’ve been a lifelong diner fan, and over the years I’ve logged many hours hanging out in diners, eating pie, 

drinking coffee and gossiping with friends. I love the casual atmosphere and conviviality of the diner, and I love those rustic looking diner pies, the chocolate and butterscotch puddings topped with swirls of whipped cream, and the mile-high layer cakes. One 

of the cakes featured in Diner Desserts is a Toasted Almond Brittle Crunch Cake, layers of white cake frosted with an almond buttercream and sprinkled with a finely ground almond brittle crunch. It was inspired by the Good Humor Toasted Almond Ice 

Cream Bar—an iconic frozen treat and one of my top picks from the ice cream truck when I was a kid—and it’s delicious. I decided that this cake would also make a great cupcake, so I revamped the recipe a bit and turned it into a portable version of the original treat. 

The secret is to pipe the buttercream really high on the cupcakes, mimicking the look of the over-the-top-tall diner cake, and giving everyone the generous amount of frosting that they crave.

Pecan-less Pie and Lunch with Michel Richard

I first met Michel Richard, the great French chef who is the proprietor of Citronelle and many other fine restaurants in the U.S., in 1993. I was editor of Chocolatier magazine then, and we had recently named Chef Richard one of the Ten Best Pastry Chefs in America. To honor the chefs, we were holding an awards ceremony hosted by Robin Leach (remember him? You know, Mr. Lifestyles-of-the-Temporarily-Rich-and-Famous?). The event was to be held at Tatoo, a splashy restaurant in New York, and I was assigned the 

task of picking Chef Richard up from Newark airport and dropping him at his hotel, The Essex House in New York. I found him--he was hard to miss with his full frame, bushy beard and smiling eyes—and we jumped into my rundown Saab and headed toward the city. We chatted about all sorts of things along the way, mostly food, and when we reached his hotel, he invited me along to a pre-arranged lunch with Andre Renard, Pastry Chef of The Essex House, an adorable and wonderful man who was also one of our 

Ten Best Pastry Chefs. The three of us had a very pleasant, occasionally hilarious, somewhat drunken lunch at Rene Pujol, an old-time French bistro in the Theatre District with a 60-and-over customer age demographic. (It has since closed, sadly—I always feel a pang of regret when these classic restaurant dinosaurs fall prey to a tough economy. I guess I just don’t like change, in general.) Anyhow, since that day I’ve been a huge fan of M. Richard. He is one of the few great chefs who was originally a 

pastry chef and, consequently, he has mastered the precision and technique of the unforgiving discipline of pastry as well as the shoot-from-the-hip, unfettered creativity of the savory side. He moves seamlessy between the worlds of sweet and savory. His book Happy in the Kitchen, which came out in 2006, is one of my favorites—it is pure genius. Over-sized and full of page after page of lush photos, Happy in the Kitchen is also full of wonderful recipes, the kind that you’ll turn to time and time again. Among my 

favorites are his Crisp and Creamy Bacon-Onion Tart made with crepe batter, and his vegetarian take on Steak Tartare, Leek Tartare. Another is a macadamia tart made in the style of a pecan pie, but with maple syrup instead of corn syrup, and a little bit of almond meal to add another dimension to its nutty profile. Chef Richard calls it Pecan-less Pie. I call it perfection. Serve it with a nice scoop of vanilla ice cream or some whipped cream on top—it’s a certified winner. Just like Chef Michel Richard.

Makin’ Whoopie

Though the whoopie pie has not yet achieved the same popular status as the cupcake in this country, it certainly has a lot in common with it. Both the whoopie pie and the cupcake are made

of cake and frosting in individual portions, the cupcake with the frosting slathered on top, and the whoopie with it sandwiched in between two discs of cake. They are both uniquely American. And

kids—and adults like me—adore both. The classic whoopie is devil’s food cake filled with an American vanilla buttercream frosting, though you can find them in all sorts of delightful flavors, 

including pumpkin, lemon, vanilla and banana. Chocolate whoopie pies have always reminded me of devil dogs, one of my favorite childhood snacks. Obviously, though, they are far superior to that

pinnacle of commercially-produced, chemically enhanced treats (sorry, I’m just not a Twinkie girl). So, when you get the urge, go ahead and make some whoopie. Life is too short not to.

Buttery Cinnamon Rolls

“You never make me cinnamon rolls,” my husband announced recently. He was right, of course. Common sense told me that it probably wasn’t a great idea to make a batch of delicious, gooey, buttery, glazed cinnamon rolls for two adults to ingest over the course of a weekend. Seemed more like a thing to make when a 

group was coming by for brunch, for example. But the guilt had already set in, and there was no turning back. Soon I was fervently kneading a batch of sweet dough and slathering it with butter, brown sugar and cinnamon. Though it does require attention, making the sweet yeast dough for these rolls is a therapeutic 

process and the results are extremely satisfying. Baking the rolls fills the house with a heady scent, and the warm, freshly glazed cinnamon rolls are amazing, and naturally delicious—they don’t contain any of the bad additives that the ones from that popular cinnamon bun chain do. 

Now, let me tell you about this recipe: Over my years as editor of Chocolatier magazine, I had many interns. Most of them were great, but a few were really exceptional. One of the exceptional ones was a woman named Nicole Rees. Nicole was beautiful (in a Katherine Hepburn way), smart, perky and was—and is—a truly 

gifted recipe developer. She was a go-getter who relished a challenge. I remember her saying one day that she had woken up at 5 in the morning in order to make her husband waffles before work. I had enough trouble rolling myself out of bed at 7 in order to stagger into work by 9, so this got my attention. Anyhow, after her days at Chocolatier, Nicole went on to become a successful recipe developer working for various magazines and newspapers, and she recently released her own cookbook, Baking Unplugged (Wiley, 2009). It’s a wonderful book, full of foolproof, unfussy recipes that you’ll turn to again and again. Here is Nicole’s recipe for Cinnamon Rolls, straight out of Baking Unplugged. I changed the glaze (Nicole used a cream cheese spread for hers), but the rest is vintage Nicole, perfect in every way.