With Cinco de Mayo just over the horizon, I can’t think of a better time to celebrate the pleasures of chile paired with chocolate.

I’ve long been drawn to the mysteriously spicy undercurrents that some chiles bring to rich, dark chocolate.  The mild, fruity taste of ancho chile in particular brings out unexpected layers of flavor in even ordinary unsweetened chocolate. Here, it spices up homey brownies inspired by Mexican ingredients.

The recipe began a few years ago with a box of Mexican chocolate that had been hanging around my cupboard too long.  Even though I always plan to make hot chocolate for myself, I never seem to get around to it. So I was looking another use for this chocolate blended with sugar and cinnamon.

I chopped up the grainy disks of chocolate and stirred together a batch of brownies based on a simple, one-bowl technique.  The first samples were so good that I tinkered some more, throwing in ancho chile powder and a couple of handfuls of buttery toasted pine nuts.

After several adjustments to reduce the sugar, this version emerged.  The texture is nicely moist, hitting the sweet spot between fudgy and cakey, and the flavor is more complex and elusive than most brownie recipes.  I’m hooked.

Think of these as bi-cultural brownies.  The basic concept is quintessentially American, but the personality is definitely Latina.

I’m on a mission to bring back the hot cross bun.  When made well, this lightly sweet, yeasty bun studded with dried fruit is a highlight of the days leading up to Easter.

Good examples of the traditional British buns — which date back at least as far as Queen Elizabeth I and probably to the Saxon era — are becoming harder and harder to find, though.  Supermarket offerings are usually stale, leaden lumps overloaded with dreadful candied fruit.

Several years ago, I began experimenting with baking my own.   I tried a number of approaches, including kneading fruit and spices into frozen bread dough, mixing everything up in the bread machine, and making yeast bread by hand with three risings.  My kitchen is always pretty cool, though, and getting bread to rise is difficult (which is one reason I often start with the bread machine).

Then I ran into this recipe for Hot Cross Muffins on the King Arthur Flour web site and never looked back.   It’s not really traditional, it’s true, but somehow the texture and flavor is better than you’ll find almost anywhere in the real thing.   And it’s amazingly easy to throw together.

The secret is adding yeast as well as baking powder to the dough.   It gives the finished muffin a firmer texture and a pleasant yeasty flavor.  Although you must allow the dough to stand for about 40 minutes before scooping it into the muffin tins, it’s not expected to rise much.  No kneading or shaping in required.

A little potato flour, or dried potato flakes, keeps the dough moist.  The flour is fairly to easy to find now that so many people are eliminating gluten from their diets.

I’ve done very little fiddling with this recipe aside from adding a generous portion of lemon zest to get some of the citrus flavor associated with the customary dried citron and lemon peel.

Taste one and you’ll share the pleasure of the English, who considered spice buns such luxuries in 1592 that the London Clerk of the Markets decreed the city’s bakers could sell them only at burials, on the Friday before Easter, or at Christmas. The ban didn’t last long.

Buns with a cross incised on the top had been a fixture in England since the Saxons ate them in honor of Eostre, the goddess of light whose name was given to Easter. The Catholic church transformed the buns to Christian purpose, and some sources cite the monks of St. Albans Cathedral in Hertfordshire handing out buns stamped with the mark of the cross to the poor on Good Friday in the 14th century.

The cross is now made of icing, which adds just the right measure of sweetness to the bread.

Although these treats are usually associated with Good Friday,  you don’t have to be Christian to appreciate a good hot cross bun.  A little cross-cultural culinary exploration is good for everyone.

No form of cooking intimidates beginning cooks quite like baking.  Because the chemistry must be precise for cakes to rise and cookies to achieve the right balance between chewy and crisp, there’s very little room for error.

That doesn’t mean it has to be mysterious or terribly difficult.   All aspiring bakers really need is someone to offer a little gentle guidance in the kitchen.

Pat Sinclair does just that in the newly revised second edition of “Baking Basics and Beyond” (Surrey Books, 2011).  She breaks all the steps in baking down into easy to follow instructions.  Sprinkled among the recipes and descriptions of ingredients and techniques are little tips I wish someone had shared with me long ago.  Who knew you could test whether the sugar has dissolved properly in a meringue by rubbing a little bit of the beaten egg whites between your fingers?

This cookbook has an old-fashioned feel and the recipes are not going to inspire adventurous bakers. But Sinclair covers all the homey baked goods most of us really crave, from biscuits and cobblers to brownies and tarts.

I might quibble with a few of her instructions.  I’ve never had much success using a pastry cutter as she recommends, although I’ve known home cooks — including my mother — who would swear by them.

My luck has been a lot better since I’ve learned to use my hands to blend the butter and flour.  I cut the butter into small cubes and rub them into the flour between my thumb and fingers with a quick motion, much like snapping my fingers.  It only takes a few minutes to produce a mixture resembling crumbled feta cheese with a few pea-sized chunks scattered about. I’ve described this hands-on approach in more detail here.

Scones are one of my weaknesses and this recipe attracted my attention because it includes cornmeal in the dough, which lends a nice crunch.  I’ve added a little lemon zest because I can’t resist the combination of blueberries and lemon.

These little treats are simple to make.  You just stir them together, drop the batter on a cookie sheet and bake.  They come out of the oven with a crisp crust and fluffy interior.

Sunday brunch just got a whole lot easier.

BLUEBERRY CORNMEAL SCONES
Makes 8 scones

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup plus 2 teaspoons cornmeal, divided use
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup butter, cut into 4 or 5 pieces
Zest of 1 lemon
2/3 cup milk
1/2 cup blueberries

Heat oven to 400 degrees with rack in the middle of the oven.  Grease a large cookie sheet or line with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat.  Sprinkle with about 2 teaspoons cornmeal.

Combine flour, cornmeal, brown sugar, baking powder and salt in a medium bowl.  Using a pastry blender or your fingers, cut butter into the flour mixture until it resembles coarse crumbs with some pea-sized pieces.  Stir zest into the milk and pour into the middle of the flour, stirring with a fork until a sticky dough forms.

Add blueberries and stir gently.  Drop dough on the baking sheet in 8 mounds of about 1/3 cup each.

Bake 16 to 20 minutes or until golden brown.  Serve warm or at room temperature.

Note: If you’re substituting frozen berries for fresh, do not thaw berries before adding to the dough, and lengthen the baking time by a couple of minutes.

Adapted from “Baking Basics and Beyond,” by Pat Sinclair

Even in California, it’s tough to find a good selection of local fruit in the winter. Citrus is about the only choice at the farmers market these days and I get weary of clementines, as wonderful as they are.

The arrival of blood oranges is always cause for celebration. I can’t resist these beautiful oranges with the blushing rind and dark red flesh.  Their flavor is deeper and more complex than ordinary navels, with wine-like undertones and a lively balance of sugar and acid.

Blood oranges are great to eat out of hand but I think they’re best used in salads and desserts that capitalize on their exotic flavor.They’re an intriguing substitute for the usual lemons in this take on the old-fashioned pudding cake.

To call it a cake is really a stretch.  Think of it more as a rustic souffle floating atop a luscious sauce.  As a bonus, it’s much less temperamental than the classic souffle.  It puffs up in the oven and deflates a little on standing but never totally collapses.

This is a homey dessert.  With the exception of the oranges, all the ingredients are probably sitting in your pantry and fridge.  Stir up the batter, beat the egg whites, fold them in, and spoon it all in a buttered dish to bake while you fix dinner.

As the batter bakes, it separates.  An airy cake rises to the top of the dish and a tangy, pale pink sauce forms on the bottom.  The sauce tends to be fairly thin but incredibly tasty.

Of course, if you can’t find blood oranges, lemons will make a very nice pudding cake.  Meyer lemons would be even better.

Hazelnuts and chocolate were meant for each other.   The rich, browned butter flavor of the nuts fairly cries out for the embrace of dark, dusky chocolate.  Together, they’re unbeatable.

I find the combination as inspiring as it is addictive.   (No jar of Nutella, or the organic alternative, Nocciolata, is safe around me.)

So it’s no surprise that I would be obsessed by the idea of a hazelnut cookie dipped in bittersweet chocolate for Valentine’s Day.  The cookie of my dreams would have a great sandy texture with just enough crunch to contrast with a smooth, dense coat of very good chocolate.   It should be elegant enough to pair with a flute of champagne but substantial enough to satisfy a serious sweet tooth.

The search led me to the classic Linzer, which usually sandwiches jam between spicy, buttery cookies.  I played with proportions, left out the spices to focus attention on the nuts and baked up a cookie worthy of a Valentine.  Dressed up in a velvet cloak of chocolate, it had my number.

Usually, a cookie with so much butter is as hard to handle as it is good to eat.  Right out of the refrigerator, the dough is difficult to roll. But after a few minutes, it’s too soft to cut into shapes.

Dorrie Greenspan, the baking genius, offers a clever solution in “Baking: From My Home to Yours” (Houghton Mifflin, 2006):  Roll the dough out between sheets of waxed paper before you chill it, then cut out the hearts and transfer them to a baking sheet while the dough is very cold.  It’s just short of a miracle.

To temper the chocolate, I used a microwave shortcut rather than the traditional method I used for chocolate bark (with hazelnuts, of course) in an earlier Valentine’s Day post.  I don’t think I would use it for candy, but it worked very well for cookies dipped not long before eating.

The chocolate was Callebaut, which is selling its couverture pieces at my local market now.  E. Guittard chocolate wafers are another good choice and any high-quality chocolate will suffice if you chop it roughly first.

You could bake the cookies ahead and freeze them if you wish. For the best results, though, dip within a day or so of serving.  The cookies soften if they’re stored too long after dipping.

That shouldn’t be a problem. Cookies this good don’t last long.

Pour an extraordinary cocktail, set out some irresistible nibbles, and you’re ready for a celebration.

My search for the perfect New Year’s Eve libation this year led me to the “PDT Cocktail Book,”: by Jim Meehan (Sterling Epicure, 2011).  Illustrated with Chris Gall’s colorful woodcut engravings, the book is an engaging and often esoteric guide to the artisan cocktails created for the speakeasy-style Manhattan bar, Please Don’t Tell.  It’s such a hit that I couldn’t find a hardback version anywhere so I downloaded the e-book version.

Meehan is known as one of the most innovative mixologists in a new generation of gourmet bartenders.  He builds his drinks from an impressive stock of unusual and hard-to-find ingredients. Just hunting down all the components is a challenge, as writer Jeff Gordiner recounted in the New York Times earlier this month.

We couldn’t track down many of the special spirits and mixers Meehan specifies for his cocktails but we substituted the best ingredients available in local stores.  The results, if not absolutely authentic, were always impressive, with a complexity of flavor rarely found in home-mixed drinks.

The cosmopolitan made with Hangar One Buddha’s Hand Vodka, which is distilled nearby in Alameda, was a perfect balance of citrus and tart cranberry flavors with just a touch of sweetness. Meehan gives credit to Cheryl Cooke of Miami, Fla. who is believed to have created the first cosmo in the mid-1980s.

To complement the cosmo, I’ve been playing around with a new cracker recipe combining the Southern classics of pimento cheese spread and cheese straws.  I’ve added minced pimentos to the usual sharp cheddar and ditched the cookie press in favor of a simpler slice-and-bake shaping technique.  The dough can be stored in the freezer and baked off at the last minute.

With this cocktail in your glass and these crackers on your plate, the prospects for 2012 will look very good indeed.

No matter how much I plan ahead for the holidays, it seems life starts spinning out of control about this time every year.

Here it is less than two weeks ’til Christmas and I still haven’t made any of the usual decorated cookies.  Maybe sometime next week.  Who knows?

With these buttery shortbread cookies in the house, I’m not too worried.  They’re so good in their natural state, one bite banishes all thought of frosting and sprinkles.

The beauty of these cookies is they’re so simple to make.  No rolling, no cutting into cutesy shapes, no decorating.   Just press the dough evenly into a fluted tart pan and bake.

Over the course of refining this classic recipe and it’s variations, though, I picked up a few tips to make Scottish-style shortbread even better:  Use the best butter, handle the dough as little as possible, and chill well before baking to let the flavors develop.

Butter is the heart and soul of shortbread, so you really don’t want to cut corners here.  I used some pricey vat-cultured butter from Sierra Nevada Cheese Company in one batch and the cookies were wonderful.  However, the Straus organic European-style butter at 85 percent butterfat also was incredibly good and a little less expensive.

Although most recipes call for letting the butter soften to room temperature first, I’ve had better results starting with cold butter, cutting it into small chunks and whirling it in the food processor.  If the butter is too soft and you beat it too long in an electric mixer, myriad tiny bubbles form in the dough, leading to unwanted rising and bubbling in the oven.

For the most tender results, you want the dough to be crumbly and loose before you press it into the pan.  Like pie dough, it shouldn’t be overworked.  It will continue to hydrate in the refrigerator and come together when the butter melts in the oven.

The vanilla bean shortbread should be a pale yellow when it emerges from the oven.  The equally delicious brown sugar variation is a little darker, hinting at its intriguing caramel flavor.

In deference to chocoholics, I’ve also developed a variation with cocoa and cacao nibs. Those chunky little bits of roasted cacao beans bring an extra layer of flavor to these cookies and it continues to develop as they’re stored after baking.  Scharffen Berger makes the nibs, which are readily found at most supermarkets.

After baking, cool the shortbread completely in the pan before cutting into the wedges known at petticoat tails in Scotland.

If you really must decorate, you could drizzle these cookies with melted chocolate.  But I wouldn’t.  They’re perfect just out of the pan.

Thanksgiving just wouldn’t be the same without pumpkin pie.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean it has to be the very same recipe your mother took off the back of the pumpkin can decades ago.  Sometimes it’s good to mix things up a bit and dessert is the one place on the menu where even hidebound traditionalists usually are willing to experiment a bit.

This year I’m making pumpkin pie bars to cap off the big feast.  They combine all the best parts of a nutty shortbread cookie, pumpkin cheesecake and pecan pie in one great package and the crust never gets soggy.   Because they’re baked in a 9-inch by 13-inch pan, a single batch will serve a crowd with some left over for the next day.

The inspiration comes from a recipe in the “Greyston Bakery Cookbook,” by Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan (Rodale, 2007), but the bars have evolved over time.  There’s more spice and  less sugar now. The praline topping is riff on the Thanksgiving Twofer pie in Dorie Greenspan’s charming new iPad app, “Baking with Dorie.”

This dessert may not be served in wedges, but your mouth won’t know the difference.  This is one of the best pumpkin pies I’ve ever eaten.

Pie season is upon us.  For the next couple of months, even cooks who live in fear of pastry will be putting holiday pies on the table to satisfy their families’ taste for tradition.  Far too many of those pies will be baked in crusts that come from the supermarket freezer.

As a recovering pastry phobe myself, I’m going to share a secret here.  Homemade pie crust is truly a snap if you let the food processor do most of the work.  I rely on a foolproof recipe we found in an old cookbook dating back to the early days of those amazing machines.  It’s been used so many times, the book’s broken spine automatically falls open to “Easy-As-Pie Crust.”

This dough is a miracle.  It’s simple to throw together, rolls out with very little fuss and bakes into a buttery crust that works for every kind of pie from apple to pumpkin.  I used it to make the cranberry-apple turnovers in the photo.

This crust is so good that my mother-in-law, who was legendary for her apple pies, always asked us to make it for her when she visited.  She filled each crust with a mountain of sliced tart apples and folded the sides up over the top like a galette.

The  key to the recipe is an  egg and a little lemon juice.  The egg binds the ingredients together for strength, which is important for these hand-held pies, and acid in the lemon juice keeps the crust tender and makes it easier to handle.  Although many cooks swear by shortening for a really flaky pie crust, I gladly sacrifice a little flakiness to get real butter flavor.

Just be sure to keep your ingredients cold and don’t process the dough too long.  As soon as it begins to clump together in a shaggy ball, it’s ready.

Since this crust isn’t that delicate, you don’t have to worry too much about overworking the dough when you roll it out.  Let it warm up a little after you take it out of the refrigerator, lightly flour a pastry board or counter and roll out from the center to about 1/8-inch thick.  It’s easiest to roll the pastry over the pin in order to lift it into the pie pan.

For these turnovers, I piled raw fresh cranberries and little cubes of  tart Newtown Pippin apples onto one side of a pastry circle, folded the crust over the top and sealed it before brushing with a little milk.  They puffed up and turned golden brown in the oven.

With the right crust, any form of pie is easier than you might think.

I can’t believe I nearly missed the best figs of the year.  I was out of town on family business during the height of the fabulous fruits’ late summer season in September. When I got back, the local harvest was almost over.

With any luck, however, luscious fresh figs should be available for another week or so in farmers markets and through the fall at specialty grocers. Let’s hope this week’s rains don’t wipe them out.  It would be a shame to miss at least one more opportunity to enjoy this easy fig tartlette.

The little tart is so simple that it hardly requires a recipe. The combination of buttery puff pastry, jammy figs and salty Gorgonzola is irresistible and works as well as an appetizer as dessert.  The figs soften and become even sweeter in the heat of the oven, so no sugar is required, although a little drizzle of honey after baking is a nice touch.

I’ve made these tartlettes with an almond cookie crust, which is quite nice, but frozen puff pastry is very good, too.  It’s also a frugal choice right now, when Trader Joe’s is selling boxes of all-butter pastry again for $3.99.

Just roll the sheet of pastry out, cut into squares and line a little tart tin or large muffin cup. Add quartered figs, crumbled blue cheese and a little cream, then bake.  That’s it.  No one will believe it was so easy.

Black mission figs

I’m such a big fan of figs now, it’s hard to believe there was a time when I wouldn’t even taste one.  My loathing stemmed from the squishy, sticky orbs we found rotting on the ground in a friend’s family orchard every summer when I was a child.  They were far better suited for missiles than for food.

As an adult, though, I finally screwed up my courage and took that first bite.   I was stunned by the soft, yielding texture and delicately sweet flavor with hints of honey and vanilla.  It was depressing to realize what I had been missing all those years due to my childish stubbornness.

More than most fruits, figs must be perfectly ripe or they  aren’t worth eating.  The fruit should be soft, moist and heavy for its size and feel a bit like a water balloon in your palm. Some cracking along the sides, slight wrinkling at the neck and a drop of syrupy juice at the blossom end are good signs.

Figs of every variety have two seasons.  The first small crop in late spring grows on branches that sprouted the previous year.  The main crop ripens in the long, hot days of August and September, producing more voluptuous fruit with richer flavors.

If you can’t find fresh figs for this tart, you might try making it with pears, which will be around for months.  The flavor will be more subtle but delightful nonetheless. Every fruit is best in its season.