Berry

Making parfaits is easy, and they are such a healthful, elegant dessert or snack. Make sure to use lush, ripe fruit and a good, creamy low-fat yogurt. I prefer vanilla, but if you’d like, experiment with lemon- or orange-flavored yogurts. I also like to use two different fruits for the visual appeal, but if you’d like to stick with one, that works as well. Try your own fruit combinations in addition to the ones given here.

The rosemary adds a sophisticated taste to this old favorite. It’s great in the summertime when blackberries are at their peak.

Lemon and blueberry are a perfect pair, like Bert and Ernie. You will need a 10 1/2-inch tart pan with a removable bottom. Serve this year round.

Here is a fantastic coffee cake that tastes like gingerbread: perfect for cold days or nights.

This tart treat is welcome on any Thanksgiving table.

These are scones, not stones, the hard, crumbly things you may be used to. Avoid using frozen blueberries because the color bleeds too much into the dough and spoils the look of the scone. This is a side note to all the guys out there. If you bring your woman warm blueberry scones for breakfast in bed, you’ll thank me later.

Perfect for autumn holiday meals, this pie is best served warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

This is a basic recipe for a simple-to-make jelly roll. Instead of spreading the cake with jelly, you can spread it with whipped cream and sprinkle with fresh berries before you roll up the cake. Another option is to substitute a rich chocolate ganache and roll up the cake before the ganache sets.

Eggs, sugar, and flour in equal measure are the basis of this simple cake, which bakes in just 20 minutes and can be filled with fruit or berries in season.

This will impress your guests when you want something extra special to serve for brunch on a summer morning during blueberry season. I sometimes make an extra cake just for backup and keep it well wrapped in a round metal tin in the freezer.

Muffins used to be a healthy breakfast option, but in recent years they have become jumbo sources of fats and sugar. There’s no reason why a medium muffin shouldn’t be a reliable breakfast staple. Here’s a basic recipe that’s relatively low in butter and sugar but still completely satisfying. Once you master (and memorize) the basic formula, you can create anything you desire. Six variations follow. Rather than reduce the oven temperature here, I prefer to keep it the same as in the conventional oven, but reduce the baking time so you can bake them even on a workday morning.

This old-time dessert is still a favorite today. It’s really a streusel apple pie baked without a crust.

Semolina cooked in cream becomes a thick, delicious porridge, with an almost puddinglike consistency, that can be enjoyed many ways. In Sardinia I have had it as an appetizer with honey drizzled on top, and as a dessert with a sauce of mirto, or myrtle. I loved both! And I’ve made it as a warm breakfast treat, too. Here I give you mazzafrissa as a dessert, with a lovely blueberry sauce (strawberries or cherries or other seasonal berries would be good, too). Scoop the warm cereal into serving bowls and top with the blueberry sauce, or serve the sauce on the side and let your guests help themselves.

Here’s a beautiful and special dessert: ivory canederli, sitting in a crimson pool of fresh strawberry sauce. Whereas the savory Canederli al Cumino (page 9) are fried, these delicate morsels are poached and have a very light texture. They are formed from a dough of ricotta, eggs, and flour instead of reconstituted bread. These are best when cooked just before you serve them (although the sauce can be made ahead), and in the recipe I give you a sequence of steps to streamline the procedure. Cook the strawberry sauce first, if you haven’t already, then proceed to make the canederli. Follow my instructions for poaching them—it’s important to cook them all the way through—and you’ll have perfect canederli in minutes. Once your guests taste them, I know they will tell you that this dessert was worth waiting for.

These cookies are also delicious made with dried cherries instead of cranberries.

A cobbler is the easiest way to get to something similar to a pie—meltingly tender and juicy fruit with a crusty topping—without having to make, roll out, and crimp pie dough. Biscuit dough, in general, is easy and fast to assemble, but the cream dough below is a real cinch because you don't even have to blend butter into the flour mixture; you just pour in heavy cream and stir, then pat it out with your hands. A round cutter is your default shape but feel free to rummage through your cookie cutter collection for something fun, such as a leaf or diamond.

When you've got a native berry that's the foundation for a must-have sauce on every Thanksgiving dinner table across the country, you can count on lots of variations. Just check the Internet. This cranberry chutney is essentially a classic sauce, jazzed up with the more vibrant flavors of pineapple juice, pepper flakes, and clove. The good news is that while it's supermarket-friendly—not hard to find ingredients—it tastes remarkably more complex and nuanced than the short ingredient list would lead you to believe. Aim to make it several days ahead so that the flavors have time to mingle and mellow.

Berries and orange juice are top sources for vitamin C, which may help you blast up to 30 percent more fat during exercise. Suh-weet!

We found this recipe in Jerry Thomas's 1862 How to Mix Drinks or the Bon Vivant's Companion, in a recipe for a single serving. It called for Holland gin—or genever, as we know it today—and was probably a very popular drink. The back story is that when planning our first End of Prohibition party we were searching for punch recipes that could be served in teacups. So we started going through books and shot a few ideas back and forth until we found papa Jerry's recipe. We replaced the genever with Plymouth gin, and with a few more tweaks we got it perfect. The decorative ice block adds a great visual effect.