Triple Sec

You'll never believe these buttery, crisp cookies with a soft chocolate filling are nut-and gluten-free!

My criteria when it comes to recipes are these: Is it tasty enough that I will crave it over and over? Is it easy? And does it look pretty? This recipe hits those marks. It is moistest, richest, most flavorful pound cake I have ever made.

This fresh take on fruit salad combines spring's favorite sweet-and-sour duo, plus hazelnuts and mint to round things out.

Region: Emilia-Romagna and popular throughout nothern Italy This cake, which looks like a bouquet of mimosa flowers, is eaten on March 8th in celebration of International Women's Day—Festa della Donna—a sort of BFF day celebrating womanhood and female friendships. The cake is made from two basic recipes: sponge cake and pastry cream. Each is worth learning, as with them you can make myriad classic Italian desserts. This lovely cake is better if eaten a day or two after its made. It keeps nicely for up to a week and freezes perfectly.

Most chocolate mousses are high in calories, but it's quite easy to make a delicious chocolate mousse that contains a fraction of the original calories and fat. The secret is to use high-quality bittersweet chocolate. It packs a strong, lively chocolate flavor and makes up for the fact that the mousse doesn’t have a quart of whipped cream in it.

This lightly spiced sangria is packed with green apple and citrus flavor.

The tequila sunrise and the margarita come together in this frozen drink recipe that's bursting with citrus notes and a refreshing tang.

Bartender's Notes: As you read through this recipe, you'll notice that it mirrors pretty classic margarita proportions … with the addition of orange bitters. Bitters work their magic here, as they do in many drinks, by adding depth, complexity and balance to otherwise pretty simple ingredients. And when you're mixing a drink with mezcal, that depth, complexity and balance are the hardest parts to achieve.

White chocolate and apricot complement each other perfectly. The addition of apricot brandy or Cointreau gives these truffles a special zip.

Like a creamy orange ice-cream pop, this cocktail marries vanilla and orange. But the drink includes two liqueurs, so it’s for adults only.

As a grilled-food guy, R. B. loves red Zinfandel and Côtes du Rhone. Mixed with fresh fruit and carbonation, these barbecue-friendly reds really come to life. Sweeten with sugar if you like.

Cava is cheap but good Spanish sparkling wine. It makes a festive version of sangria.

Back in the day when Min and her pal Philip Bernard attended Virginia Tech football pregame tailgate parties with fervent religiosity, a touch of special cider was often the incentive for warming up some team spirit. In truth, there is absolutely nothing Hokie about this fine cider punch, what with the assistance of the special team’s Tennessee whiskey and all.

On the curve of Palermo’s Via Papireto, just before the entrance to il mercato delle pulci—the flea market—there sits a watermelon stand and a hand-wrought sign: ICED, SWEET WATERMELON, DAY AND NIGHT. We passed the little place several times each day on our excursions through the great honkings and snarlings of the city traffic. Drawn by its promise, we meant always to stop but never found quite the right convergence of appetite, time, and space in which to park the car. But one Saturday evening, after a long, winy dinner and a dry search for a still-open gelateria, we thought to soothe ourselves with a visit to the watermelon man. Though it was well after midnight, he was there, waiting midst the walls of precisely laid, smooth-skinned fruit, his old Arab eyes illuminated by festoons of pink and green lights. He bid us sit at his one and only tiny, oilcloth-covered table, tucked in the corner farthest from the street. Speaking only in smiles—it was hardly necessary to tell him what we desired—we watched as he chose a melon from those he kept in a basin of iced water and then cleaved it open with a single heft of some ancient tool. Each half he stuck with fork and spoon and, resting the juice-dripping melons on wooden boards, he presented them. He brought a little tin plate in which we might deposit the seeds and two beautifully ironed kitchen-towel napkins. The red flesh was crisp under our spoons and each new excavation brought up a yet sweeter, colder mouthful of it. We ate slowly under the pink and green lights, finally resting our spoons against the great, hollowed shells, triumphant, certain we’d spent well that hour of our lives, certain, too, how perfect, how divine was that food. Lacking a faithful watermelon man, here follows a way to work with a well-ripened, even if not exquisitely fleshed, melon. Perfumed with cinnamon and studded with bitter chocolate and pistachios, it is the traditional ice of ferragosto—the official high summer Italian festival. The gelo is best eaten long after midnight.

Once used only to bake the fanciful soldiers on horseback given to children on the festival of San Martino, the short, buttery dough, in less fantastical shapes and forms, is a daily offering now in every pasticceria, luscious even with the slurring of its namesake.

Il Pane della Ninna Nanna (Lullaby Bread). Neither very sweet nor pizzalike in the flat, savory pie sort of way, this is a gold-fleshed, orange-perfumed cakelike bread that, if baked with care, will be tall and elegant, its crumb coarse yet light and full of the consoling scents of yeast and butter. Fabriziana is one of the several “middle” names of the Roman countess with whom I learned to bake the confection in the cavernous old kitchen of her villa that looks to the gardens of the Borghese. Ours were clandestine appointments, with our yeast and our candied orange peels and the tattered recipe book of her mother’s cook. You see, Fabriziana had never cooked or baked in her life, had never made anything from a pile of flour and a few crumbles of yeast. Forbidden in the kitchen as a girl, her adulthood has been always too fraught with obligations to permit interludes in front of the flames. But in the years we have been friends, she has always demonstrated more than a kind interest in my cooking, sitting once in a while, rapt as a fox, on an old wrought-iron chair in my kitchen as I dance about. And one day when I told her I was searching for a formula for an ancient, orange-perfumed Roman bread, she knew precisely where to find the recipe. Trailing off in some Proustian dream, she said she hadn’t thought of the bread in too many years, it having been her favorite sweet at Christmas and Easter. Once she even requested that it—rather than some grand, creamy torta—be her birthday cake. She told of poaching slices of it from a silver tray during parties and receptions, stuffing them deep into the pockets of her silk dresses to eat later in bed, after her sister was safely asleep, so she might share them only with her puppy. So it was that we decided to make the bread together. Wishing to avoid the chiding of her family and, most of all, her cook, we chose to do the deed on mornings when the house would be safe from them. It was wonderful to see Fabriziana at play. Flour and butter were forced under her long, mother-of-pearled nails, and her blond-streaked coif, mounted to resist tempests, soon fell into girlish ringlets over her noble brow. With a few mornings’ worth of trial, we baked Fabriziana’s lullaby bread, the bread of her memories. And once, on a birthday of mine, the countess came fairly racing through my doorway proffering a curiously wrapped parcel that gave up the telltale perfumes of our bread. The countess had learned to bake indeed.