Say ‘Seasons Greetings’ With Chocolate

With Sweeter Cards, a greeting-card-meets-chocolate-bar, a stocking stuffer can be sweet in both taste and sentiment. Founded in January, the St. Louis-based company includes Hanukkah and Christmas greetings among its offerings. Each card comes with the same type of Fair Trade-certified chocolate: dark, sprinkled with sea salt and a ribbon of caramel. The company will…

Italian Cookies for the Holidays

Ciao, Gloria in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, is a new source for abundant platters of classic Italian cookies like rainbow squares, craggy brutti ma buoni and white chocolate-dipped cantucci. The cafe is owned by Renato Poliafito, who was a founder of Baked. The pastry chef, Ginger Fisher Baldwin, also from Baked, is creating the cookies with…

Call It a Crime of Pasta

BARI DISPATCH The famous pasta-making women of Bari, Italy, are worried that a crackdown on contraband orecchiette pasta could threaten their way of life. ImageAngela Lastella placing her home-made orecchiette outside her home in Bari, Italy.Credit…Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times BARI, Italy — The grandmothers set up shop early. Out of ground-floor kitchens…

Cheesy and Spicy

Hi and welcome to Five Weeknight Dishes. The word at NYT Cooking headquarters this week is cookies: We have just published our holiday spectacular, which we have so humbly titled “12 Stunning Cookies That Will Impress Everyone You Know.” And yet, unless you know only professional pastry chefs, I really do believe this is truth.…

The Most Incredible Holiday Cookies Ever

Good morning. Susan Spungen gave us a Christmas gift this week, gave it to the whole world: a package of modern cookie recipes, starring the fantastic sugar cookies you see can see above these words. Susan’s an artist and food stylist, a recipe developer and former lieutenant at Martha Stewart Living. She is also a…

You’ll Never Buy Caramel Corn Again

Can a person have too many popcorn epiphanies? I had my first last year, when the Los Angeles chef Jessica Koslow taught me that using more oil than corn kernels yielded the best-textured, crunchiest popcorn. But my latest revelation came a few months ago, when I sampled a caramel popcorn superior — lighter, crisper, more…