What’s better than box cake, you might ask? Nothing, actually. All I really want for breakfast, lunch, or dinner is box cake and its amazing wealth of by-products. I typically allow this 24-hour splurge only on my birthday. The one thing that always eluded me, though, was how the hell do they get box cake to taste like that?! I have made coffee cake, soup, cookies, clusters, and cereal out of it. So we undertook the recipe development task of re-creating my favorite, and the ultimate birthday box cake, Funfetti, from scratch. It took us four months to get there. And we still don’t make our own rainbow sprinkles (which Wylie Dufresne calls “cheating”). But I couldn’t be happier with the results: the crumbs, Birthday Cake (page 105), Birthday Cake Frosting (page 107), and Confetti Cookies (page 100). My dream come true.
This classic 15-minute sauce is your secret weapon for homemade mac and cheese, chowder, lasagna, and more.
Turn humble onions into this thrifty yet luxe pasta dinner.
Round out these autumn greens with tart pomegranate seeds, crunchy pepitas, and a shower of Parmesan.
The silky French vanilla sauce that goes with everything.
Caramelized onions, melty Gruyère, and a deeply savory broth deliver the kind of comfort that doesn’t need improving.
An extra-silky filling (no water bath needed!) and a smooth sour cream topping make this the ultimate cheesecake.
This pasta has some really big energy about it. It’s so extra, it’s the type of thing you should be eating in your bikini while drinking a magnum of rosé, not in Hebden Bridge (or wherever you live), but on a beach on Mykonos.
Crispy tots topped with savory-sweet sauce, mayonnaise, furikake, scallion, and katsuobushi.