Cardamom

Quinoa and baked fish are well seasoned with tangy sumac, tart lime, and garlic in this Persian-inspired dinner.

A pistachio custard filling makes for an enchanting moss-green spiral inside this cardamom sponge cake Yule log.

These cardamom-scented rolls are briochelike and streaked with a sweet, buttery cinnamon filling.

There is little more nourishing than milk and rice together—easy to eat and cleansing in the best possible sense of the word. Make a double batch and reheat it with a little extra milk on the following days.

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

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.

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.

When Beatrice Ojakangas published The Great Scandinavian Baking Book in 1988, she won a lot of fans—including Julia Child—who asked Ojakangas to be on her television show. There Ojakangas demonstrated how to make this simplified version of traditional cardamom-scented Danish pastry.

Anybody who knows me knows that I have a soft spot for cupcakes and soy chai lattes, so combining these two creates my own piece of heaven. These cupcakes are moist, tender, and lightly spicy, thanks to the combination of ginger and cardamom. Go ahead and pair with a steaming hot chai latte...you won’t overdo it.

A fragrant butter—infused with cardamom, garlic, and thyme—adds layers of flavor to this stunning steak dinner.

Totally decadent. Naturally gluten-free.

Bring the taste of Persia to your Seder dinner.

Step into January with this healing, brothy Cambodian-inspired soup, perfumed with warming spices, revitalizing ginger, and spicy dried chiles.

A quick marinade infuses the salmon with sweet, herbaceous flavor and transforms it into a stunner of an entrée.