Cardamom

We helped our snickerdoodles get party-ready by upping the spices and adding texture with toffee, cornflakes, and a sparkly finish.

These Swedish morning buns, also known as Kardemummabullar, are traditionally paired with coffee and have an amazing floral and delicately peppery flavor.

Cardamom, pistachios, and lemon add a vibrant twist to this seasonal, jewel-toned dessert.

Sharbats are sweet boiled fruit syrups served across Central Asia and Northern Africa, though flavor combinations vary widely. This one is infused with bright, floral, citrusy cardamom that complements the lemon perfectly.

Using dates as the primary sweetener here means a lot less sugar in the ice cream, making it ideal for those who need to cut down on sugar but still want something sweet.

Hemp milk makes the fastest, creamiest alt-milk with very little waste, but any nondairy milk works.

If you’d like an even more pronounced molasses flavor, use a robust instead of mild molasses. Just don’t use blackstrap in these cookies; not only will it be too strong and bitter, but it will overwhelm the spices.

This dough recipe produces a finely textured, surprisingly flavorful cookie that holds its shape well. Use it for our Honey-Vanilla Linzer Cookies and Pistachio Thumbprints.

Plums have a sweet but brightly acidic flavor, which suits them well as a topping for this savory porridge.

This simple berry-studded cake recipe is a real keeper.

This is the time to celebrate peaches. Look for standout varieties such as July Flame, Suncrest, or O’Henry for this salad recipe.

Too many morning buns for your crowd? This recipe halves easily.

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.

Also known as advieh, this aromatic blend comes from Persian cuisine. It’s fragrant, a little sweet, and gently warming. It is delicious mixed with sugar and sprinkled over baked goods, donuts, and rice pudding or added to dried fruits that are cooking into jam. It straddles the sweet and savory world because it’s also great for flavoring rice pilaf with toasted nuts, lentil soup, lamb meatballs, braised chicken, or vegetable stew. It’s a blend that is shared by chefs and pastry chefs. Use it to make Persian-Style Carrots and Black-Eyed Peas.

One of my favorite crops from my husband’s farm are his fall carrots. I prefer the fall carrots because as the weather gets colder the vegetable sugars concentrate, yielding the sweetest carrots of the year. We use lots of carrots in this recipe, so that it’s more about the carrots than anything else. For the best flavor, serve it cold the day after you make it. You can substitute chickpeas for the black-eyed peas, if you prefer to use another type of bean.

Medrich's version of these golden orange yam and coconut cookies from Spain is delicate and flavorful.