Luisa Weiss

Make this traditional German Kranzkuchen for a festive sweet treat to serve on Christmas morning.

For a German apple cake full of sweet, tart flavor, cookbook author Luisa Weiss swaps out raisins for fresh cranberries and skips the sugar in the filling.

I like to make a batch of Lebkuchen Spice Mix—a mixture of all the “usual suspects” in wintertime baking—in early fall so that I’m ready for the Christmas baking season. The mixture below is a great all-purpose one. But you can also tinker with the amounts if you want to highlight one flavor or another.

Making Stollen is not for the faint of heart. Avoiding it altogether because excellent store-bought Stollen abounds is further abetted by the invention of Stollenkonfekt, bite-size chunks of spiced, tender Quark dough studded with almonds and raisins and thickly cloaked in vanilla-scented confectioners’ sugar. They may be a relatively recent development in the world of Christstollen, which dates back to the Middle Ages, but they more than make up for their youth. In other words, want the rich, buttery, spicy flavor of Stollen without the work of a yeasted dough and the weeks of impatiently waiting for the loaves to be ready? If so, Stollenkonfekt is the thing for you.

I like spreading Quark on my morning slice of bread and topping it with jam, but you can also mix it with salt and herbs and dollop it next to boiled potatoes for a light meal. Using buttermilk will result in skim Quark, which is best for baking recipes. If you want a creamier Quark to eat as is, simply stir a little heavy cream into the Quark to loosen and enrich it. (Mixed with high-quality fruit preserves, this makes for a luxurious little snack.)

While you can make a very nice vanilla sugar by simply plunging a vanilla bean into a jar of sugar and leaving it there (for a really, really long time), I actually like to make a slightly fancier version by processing vanilla and sugar together until the bean is all broken down and the sugar is speckled with countless tiny beans and specks of pod. The sugar is more intensely flavored than regular vanilla sugar. Packaged in a pretty glass jar, it also makes for a great gift.