Recipes

Sweet Tea Moon Pies

40 min

Get ready to celebrate Pie Day on 3.14 with Sweet Tea Moon Pies! Inspired by our Southern roots, this recipe is steeped in childhood nostalgia. For those of you who've never had the pleasure, Moon Pies are a graham cracker cookie sandwich filled with marshmallow and dipped in chocolate. What more could one ask for? This treat is heaven for any sweet tooth and has been a down home signature treat since 1917. For this batch, we added lemon zest to the cookie and flavored the marshmallow fluff with Irish Breakfast Tea, giving the Moon Pies the bold malty flavor of a Southern sweet tea with a twist.

Grandma's Applesauce Fruitcake

This recipe has been in our family for decades. The base of this Applesauce Cake is extremely versatile and can be modified to any taste. We decided to add candied orange, dried cherries and Gingerbread Spice. This will have any fruitcake-hater second guessing themselves. We've seen it happen many times at the dinner table! This fruitcake is a staple in our household during the holiday season and sporadically throughout the year. Half the fun of cooking and baking is getting creative, so make a few tweaks where wanted and have fun with it!

Blueberry Butterfly Pea Flower Muffins

Who doesn't love a mini muffin? Sometimes we need the perfect little bite with our morning cup of coffee or a tasty snack to keep us going. These darling muffins are just the thing. They get their sky blue color from Butterfly Pea Flowers. We opted to make these gluten-free for everyone's enjoyment. Little pops of sweet blueberries complement the muffins' excellent green tea-like flavor. They're really enjoyable and won't weigh you down like a traditional muffin would. Bake a batch and enjoy them throughout the week — they'll keep moist and delicious. We love using Butterfly Pea Flower as an all natural food dye! Check out our Galaxy Pops and Butterfly Horchata recipes for more blue beauties.

Caribbean Pineapple Upside Down Cake

Pineapple upside down cake has been a cherished dessert for generations, with fond memories going back before the 1950's. We decided it was about time to give the recipe a bit of a facelift while still keeping true to the its roots. What we ended up with is a cake that's fruity, bold, and more flavorful than ever. A melody of allspice and bay leaves give this upside down cake a vibrant Caribbean flair, although the true star of the show here is long pepper. The pine cone-shaped spice is gingery and has notes of cardamom and black pepper. This flavor in the gooey caramel at the bottom layer of this cake is simply other-worldly. Buttery, fluffy, fruity, spicey — this is everything you'd want wrapped up in one drool-worthy dessert!

Pink Pepper Cardamom Bars

Rhubarb is a perfect flavor combination with strawberries. To jazz it up, we added spices! Piney Cardamom Seed and lime zest accent and elevate the fruit base. Crunchy walnuts add texture and to the oat crumb topping and Pink Peppercorn give a tingly pop of flavor. These fragrant bars are citrusy and have fruity sour layers, and the spices really bring something new to the table.Rhubarb and strawberries are delightful in these bars, but you can try other fruits and berries too, like raspberries, blackberries or blueberries. The recipe is endlessly adaptable. If you're feeling decadent, top the bars with whipped cream!

Grandma's Lemon Wedges

You can never have too many lemon bar recipes, but this one is the only one that you need. This was my Grandma's recipe, and the stains on the recipe card are a testament to how often it's been made. Most lemon bars are made too sweet to cut the tartness of the lemon, but the addition of the glaze in this recipe balances out the sweet and tart lemon flavor perfectly. Sometimes I add poppy seeds to the shortbread crust or sprinkle sumac on top just for fun. These can be made in a square pan and cut into bars, but look pretty cut in wedges too. Make these and I'm sure that they will disappear as quickly as they always did in our home.

Ras El Hanout Cherry Pie

It pays to think outside the π because some unexpected combinations just work! Our house blended Ras El Hanout is a beautifully eccentric medley and it plays delightfully in fruit desserts. This rustic recipe doesn't require a pre-cook of the filling. Just toss the filling ingredients together ahead of time to allow the juice from the cherries to infuse with the Ras El Hanout, allowing the flavors to truly blossom. Vodka in the pie dough? Believe it or not, adding vodka helps the pie become more pliable and workable without becoming tougher. Unlike water, vodka doesn't encourage the formation of gluten so the crust stays flakey and light. As lovers of spice we've used a heavy hand on the flavor here, so enjoy!

Lavender Blueberry Handpies

Turnovers, or hand pies, are great for a picnic dessert or breakfast pastry. These delicious pocket pies, stuffed with fruity filling, offer creative bakers a great opportunity to showcase striking flavor combinations. For these we chose blueberry and lavender. Because there is no cutting or pre-cooking involved, blueberries are our go-to fruit for making hand pies. Here, we simply tossed them in brown sugar and lavender to make a jammy floral filling. For a bit of decadence, there's cream cheese and lemon to make the rest of the flavors pop. The soft floral notes of lavender are the perfect complement to blueberries and are a wonderful flavor for spring, but it is easy to over-do. Try a little bit of the filling during prep and gauge how strong the lavender flavor is and adjust to taste.

Valrhona Cocoa and Anardana Cookies

Bite into a chocoholic's dream. These flourless cookies are rich, chewy and have crispy edges. The secret ingredient is the Anardana, dried pomegranate seeds, which is commonly used in chutneys and Middle Eastern dishes. At first sniff, they may remind you of a sweet red wine or fruit leather, making these tangy seeds a perfect accompaniment with our Valrhona Cocoa Powder Bonus - these cookies are flourless and quick to make .