In our experience, most recipes for scalloped potatoes take hours of work yet still produce unevenly cooked potatoes in a heavy, curdled sauce. This version is faster than most and produces layer upon layer of thinly sliced, tender potatoes, creamy sauce, and nicely browned, cheesy crust.
Perhaps the most famous holiday cake is the Yule Log, which, for good reason, gets trotted out every holiday season. There’s much to be said for this classic, but we wanted to develop a unique variation for the holidays with a pumpkin jelly roll cake encasing a simple filling.
This bistro classic is as refined as it is rich. We kept the filling onion-forward by cooking the strands in rendered bacon fat and stirring them into a light custard. Use yellow or white onions here; sweet onions will make the tart too sweet. Use a 9-inch tinned-steel tart pan.
FRENCH ONION AND BACON TART
Servings: 6-8
Start to finish: 2 hours, 15 minutes
Don’t overlook the benefits of a good meatloaf; though humble, it can be just the thing for a comforting meal, and leftovers make great sandwiches.
For a creamy cauliflower soup without cream, we relied on cauliflower’s low insoluble fiber content to produce a velvety smooth puree.
To ensure that cauliflower flavour remained at the forefront, we cooked the cauliflower in seasoned water (instead of broth), skipped the spice rack entirely, and bolstered the soup with sauteed onion and leek.
We had our hearts set on a one-pot pasta loaded with tender bites of browned sausage, hearty kale, and creamy cannellini beans.
To streamline the recipe, rather than boil the pasta separately or remove the sausage from the pot once it had browned, we built flavour in layers, allowing the addition of each component to form a creamy sauce that tied the dish together.
What the Brits call a “pudding” is not pudding by American standards. Rather, it’s a rich, spongy date cake that’s steamed to give it a dense, moist texture. What makes these individual-size cakes special is the sauce that they get smothered in after steaming: an unapologetically sweet, butterscotch-like sauce made from butter, cream and sugar.
This velvety pumpkin soup is surprisingly easy and fast thanks to canned pumpkin. The trick is getting rich, balanced pumpkin flavour out of a can.
The essence of crumb cake is the balance between the buttery cake and the thick, lightly spiced topping.
Starting with our favourite yellow cake recipe, we realized we needed to reduce the amount of butter or the richness would be overwhelming. We also wanted our crumb topping to be soft and cookie-like, not a crunchy streusel.
In our opinion, gingerbread is only worth eating if its flavour is unmistakably bold and spicy. For our gingerbread bundt cake, the standard liquid combination of mild molasses and water seemed lacklustre.
