[Photograph: Carrie Vasios]

What is an easy recipe? I've found it varies from person to person. For me, it's something that involves prep work of less than 25 minutes. That's because I'll often make recipes that require all sorts of resting and kneading and careful watching—a lot of people would only consider an "easy" recipe something that takes about 15 minutes from start to finish.

Then there's the issue of an "easy" recipe versus a recipe that's simply a shortcut. Is the recipe inherently easy or is it a fast version of a more complicated dish? I've seen "easy" applied to both. I'm bringing this up because if you look through cookbooks or snoop around the internet for an easy danish recipe what you'll find are recipes that give you shortcuts for the dough.

Traditional danishes are a viennoiserie pastry made with a buttery dough that's layered to achieve a flakey effect similar to a croissant. Easy versions all seem to replace the homemade dough, which is indeed time intensive, with store-bought puff pastry or, just as frequently, with Pillsbury Crescent Rolls. I experimented with both.

This is the version that uses PCR, which, if you'll believe it, I'd never had before. The first thing I realized is that Crescent Rolls aren't really croissants—duh—being more on the bready side than particularly flakey. But I find their slight dryness to be advantageous when making a fruit danish. The strawberries give off some juice, and the Crescent dough was better able to handle it without getting soggy.

The interior of the danish is where it's at, anyway. The sweetened cream cheese-based filling tastes just like the coffee shop danishes of my youth, with sliced strawberries adding a little fruity kick. Do not dispense with the icing, which takes about two minutes to make and adds that extra sugary drizzle to tie it all together.

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Easy Strawberry Danish »

About the author: Carrie Vasios is the editor of Serious Eats: Sweets. She likes to peruse her large collection of cookbooks while eating jam from the jar. You can follow her on Twitter @carrievasios

[Photograph: Carrie Vasios]

Stone fruit is really the only category of fruit that I tend to eat more in baked form than raw. It's not that I don't love a ripe, juicy peach—honestly what's better?—but so often I get tart, hard specimens instead. That's especially true with the season's first member of the stone fruits: apricots.

Baking is an easy way to improve an apricot's taste and texture. While they're in season, I like to use them in this easy breakfast. Simply split open apricots, throw away the pit, and layer them in a baking dish. In a small bowl, make a streusel by combining brown sugar, oats, sliced almonds, cinnamon, ground ginger, and a pinch of salt in a bowl. Add melted butter and mix it into clumps, then top each apricot half. I bake them until the apricots are soft and the streusel is golden. The butter melts into the fruit and basically bastes it.

I like to serve the hot from the oven apricots with yogurt, either just nestling the whole fruit on top or, for more ease, chopping it all up. Another bonus is that this breakfast scales as well for one as it does for 10.

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Baked Apricots with Brown Sugar Oat Streusel »

About the author: Carrie Vasios is the editor of Serious Eats: Sweets. She likes to peruse her large collection of cookbooks while eating jam from the jar. You can follow her on Twitter @carrievasios

[Photograph: Carrie Vasios]

Every year I look forward to summer, specifically to those days when I can gorge myself on fruit crumbles. Blueberries, blackberries, peaches, plums—you name it and I'll put it in a baking dish, cover it with buttery crumbs, and bake it until it's hot and bubbling and oh so delicious. The fruit isn't quite there yet. Things are getting better, especially here in California, but the berries are still like baby fawns. Knock-kneed and not quite ready to carry a dish on their own.

The solution is a crumb cake, which, it occurred to me after I took my first bite, I make far too few of. The coffee cake layer is soft and sweet, full of that unmistakable taste of real, fresh berries mingling with sugar and butter. Sour cream is the secret ingredient to keeping the cake pillowy. The top has big crumbs made from brown sugar, butter, and flour, with cinnamon and ground ginger for a little zing.

Crumbtastic

Despite the dual layers, this cake isn't actually too aggressive to eat for breakfast. (You can ask my fiancé who did just that for a week.) The first flavor is blackberries, the second vanilla, and finally the buttery brown sugar crumbs. A slice goes down mighty easy, though that's not to say you can't have another for dessert.

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Blackberry Crumb Cake »

About the author: Carrie Vasios is the editor of Serious Eats: Sweets. She likes to peruse her large collection of cookbooks while eating jam from the jar. You can follow her on Twitter @carrievasios

[Photograph: Carrie Vasios]

Now that the sun is staying out late and the weather is warming, I've allowed myself the occasional pre-summer purchase. (I also blame this on flash sites that seem to know my weakness for kitchen gear decorated with shellfish and other sea creatures.) Most recently I bought a set of corn holders shaped like lobsters. Obviously something a well-stocked kitchen can't be without.

While there is no replacement for fresh, sweet summer corn, I want to take this moment to say, hey, thanks frozen corn. You're not half bad. With the right preparation—thrown into a black bean salad, say, or some succotash—it can provide a dish with just the right amount of natural sweetness. And like frozen peas, the texture of properly cooked frozen corn stays al dente enough to mesh with fresh vegetables.

A great way to use frozen corn—especially if you have a quarter bag lingering in your freezer—is to add it to corn muffins. I took this to heart and made mini muffins, which make an awesome substitute for your regular dinner bread basket. Both the corn meal in the dough and the whole corn kernels are naturally sweet, so I found that I didn't need any extra sugar at all. Dill immediately sprang to mind as the complimentary herb as it too has a licorice-y sweetness. Sour cream keeps the muffins moist, though feel free to sub in Greek yogurt if that's what you have on hand.

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Corn Dill Mini Muffins »

About the author: Carrie Vasios is the editor of Serious Eats: Sweets. She likes to peruse her large collection of cookbooks while eating jam from the jar. You can follow her on Twitter @carrievasios

[Photograph: Carrie Vasios]

During the berry off-season, I try to avoid buying imported fruit. Though the berries inside the plastic clamshells look bright and juicy, they're often disappointing (and always expensive). But this year, the blackberries I've tried have been fantastic. Sweet, plump, almost grape-y, they remind me why this deep purple berry is one of my favorite fruit.

In fact they've been edging out the local strawberries in flavor, though hopefully in the next week I can start gorging myself on those green pints of tiny red fruit from the farmer's market. But before I make the switch, I decided to pair the blackberries with a different seasonal item: rhubarb.

I cooked down the blackberries and chopped rhubarb with maple syrup for sweetness, vanilla for depth of flavor, and orange juice for brightness and acidity. The chunky compote is purposefully sweet-tart in order to cut against the buttery crepes. If you're more likely to eat sweets after dinner than before lunch, a scoop of vanilla ice cream is an easy way to bring this dish into full blown dessert territory.

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Crepes with Blackberry-Rhubarb Compote »

About the author: Carrie Vasios is the editor of Serious Eats: Sweets. She likes to peruse her large collection of cookbooks while eating jam from the jar. You can follow her on Twitter @carrievasios

[Photograph: Carrie Vasios]

The world of phyllo pastries is wide, ranging from sweet to savory to petite bird nests to giant coils. I'm pretty sure I haven't found one I didn't love and I'm always excited to try a new version. The latest on my radar was m'hanncha, a pastry from Morocco in which phyllo dough is filled with almond paste and wound into a giant coil.

There are many variations—some add orange blossom water, some go halfsies with pistachios—but I wanted something that was more appropriate to breakfast than to dessert. The filling is made by grinding together almonds, confectioners' sugar, cinnamon, cardamom, eggs, and vanilla in the food processor until it becomes a paste. Butter-coated sheets of phyllo are stacked on each other, topped with the filling, then rolled jelly-roll style into a rope. Instead of one big coil, I wind these into smaller snails which can easily be portioned for breakfast.

The result? Buttery phyllo shards shattering into almonds sweetened with confectioners sugar and cinnamon, all washed down with a cup of hot, sweet mint tea. In other words, breakfast heaven.

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Moroccan Almond Phyllo Pastries »

About the author: Carrie Vasios is the editor of Serious Eats: Sweets. She likes to peruse her large collection of cookbooks while eating jam from the jar. You can follow her on Twitter @carrievasios

[Photograph: Carrie Vasios]

When it comes to making granola, I occasionally go overboard. Case in point: last year's Ultimate Tropical Granola which I was totally obsessed with but did contain oats, banana chips, macadamia nuts, coconut flakes, brazil nuts, dried mango, candied papaya, candied pineapple, pepitas, agave syrup, coconut sugar, olive oil, vanilla, and salt. Kind of a lot of work for breakfast.

This recipe is practically spartan in comparison, relying on a mix of oats, honey, orange zest, and almonds. This is the kind of granola you could actually sprinkle over your yogurt without feeling like you just pulled all 16 handles at the frozen yogurt shop. It's the kind you eat with milk, in a bowl, not carry around as trail mix.

Of course if you wanted to, you could easily add dried fruit—raisins, tart cherries, or even dried strawberries would be nice. But I'll have mine plain, with the almonds only barely chopped, and focus on waking up instead.

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Honey Almond Granola »

About the author: Carrie Vasios is the editor of Serious Eats: Sweets. She likes to peruse her large collection of cookbooks while eating jam from the jar. You can follow her on Twitter @carrievasios

[Photograph: Carrie Vasios]

I'm not Miss Manners but there are some social graces that I hate to see fall out of fashion. Door holding is one, RSVPing another. (I can see when you've open my Paperless Post invitation—why not just respond?) I was brought up with the notion that you arrive on time, you dress for the occasion, and you always, always serve dessert to dinner guests.

Yes, dessert is a non-negotiable. Even at times when I can tell that people are stuffed, I offer dessert, because that is what a good host does. My mother knows this, and while she'll serve store-bought ice cream in a pinch, there's hardly a time when she can't at least fall back on the whipped cream-cake-and-fruit routine. The good old WCCF: learn it, live it, love it.

It's surprising how delicious this combination is: a cloud of light, milky, freshly whipped cream dolloped over sliced fruit (macerated in a little sugar if out of season) and a slice of cake. Doesn't cake take a long time to make? Not pound cake—it will take you about 15 minutes to throw together and you'll have breakfast for the next morning too.

As the first strawberries arrive, I like to make this version. It's delicious on its own thanks to the combination of the almost birthday cake-like vanilla crumb and the pockets of strawberries, but add some fresh fruit and some whipped cream on top and it rocks as a WCCF.

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Strawberry Pound Cake »

About the author: Carrie Vasios is the editor of Serious Eats: Sweets. She likes to peruse her large collection of cookbooks while eating jam from the jar. You can follow her on Twitter @carrievasios

[Photograph: Carrie Vasios]

It happens every time. I leave a coffee cake out in the kitchen, and over the course of a few days I'll notice the crumb slowly start to disappear. At first it's just the pieces that might be construed as "loose". You know, no harm done, they might fall off anyway. Then the indents appear, the small pockmarks where a crumb has been pried away. Finally, I'm left with a bald cake. That, too, will get eaten, but it's never the same without the crumb.

So if we all know that the best part of a coffee cake is the crumb, why not just make a coffee cake with a ton of streusel topping? That's what I finally said to myself, and that's why I made this cake.

The base is a coffee cake made extra moist with full fat Greek yogurt. I fold in ripe diced bananas which, in my mind, make it taste distinctly like breakfast. The topping is mostly dark brown sugar and pecans—creating a crumbly, nutty, sweet topping that crowns every piece of coffee cake. It's a little rich, sure, but only when you serve the first few pieces. Over the next few days that crumb inevitably gets picked away and then, ta da, the standard ratio of cake to crumb returns.

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Banana Pecan Coffee Cake »

About the author: Carrie Vasios is the editor of Serious Eats: Sweets. She likes to peruse her large collection of cookbooks while eating jam from the jar. You can follow her on Twitter @carrievasios

[Photograph: Carrie Vasios]

I would love to say that I'm sitting here, sleeves rolled up, windows open, watching errant flower petals float in on the breeze. In reality, I'm probably sitting next to the space heater while wrapped up in this heavy tweed all purpose shmata which my mother knitted for me in December and which I've worn pretty much every day since. Spring, you're not making this easy.

There are days when I make myself tropical sweets and pretend I'm somewhere warm. And there are days when I give in and say, hey, it's still comfort food season, pass the pancakes. This was one of those days.

I also decided to embrace the last of cool weather apples and use up my rye flour in one dish. The pancakes are a mix of white and rye flours, though you can definitely detect the rye. It adds a bit of textural heft and a nuttiness which you don't normally find in pancakes. The apples are diced thin, mostly because a huge pet peeve of mine is having to use a knife to cut fruit that's served over pancakes that you could otherwise just cut with a fork. The apples are cooked until tender in butter (because it ain't bikini season yet), then I swirl in grade B maple syrup (the good stuff) and some cinnamon. It's actually a fairly light topping, sweet yet a little acidic; the right balance for the earthy pancakes.

Blueberry pancakes, you're in my sights. Until then, these are just right.

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Rye Pancakes With Apple-Maple Compote »

About the author: Carrie Vasios is the editor of Serious Eats: Sweets. She likes to peruse her large collection of cookbooks while eating jam from the jar. You can follow her on Twitter @carrievasios

[Photograph: Carrie Vasios]

According to Wikipedia, and repeated by half the internet, in 2005 the Food Network listed carrot cake as number five of the top five fad foods of the 1970s. Given my own love for carrot cake and its current out-of-fashion status, I was intrigued. Unfortunately, five extra minutes of Google searching led me nowhere closer to the original article (What was number one? Hamburger helper? Happy meals? I'm dying to know) and I didn't get to read about others, perhaps a whole generation, who share my love.

Easter seems to be the one time when people remember this grand old dame of cakes. Maybe it's because most fruit is still out of season and we're finally sick of lemons, maybe it's because of a certain bunny, I don't care. People are putting carrots and raisins and ginger into sweets (all at once!) and topping it with a tangy cream cheese frosting. Hurrah.

I thought I'd capitalize on the good will by sneaking carrot cake into breakfast. Scones are the obvious vehicle for the same flavors as the cake—ginger, raisins, and walnuts are already old hat—and they're even amenable to a little bit of icing without turning into a cupcake. The resulting breakfast treats are moist, thanks to a combination of buttermilk (which you can't taste) and carrots (which you can). There are a lot of add-ins, so if you like your scones less than chunky, decrease the amounts as you will. The icing is also optional, but in my mind carrot cake isn't carrot cake without that cream cheese twang.

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Carrot Cake Scones With Cream Cheese Icing »

About the author: Carrie Vasios is the editor of Serious Eats: Sweets. She likes to peruse her large collection of cookbooks while eating jam from the jar. You can follow her on Twitter @carrievasios

[Photograph: Carrie Vasios]

In Greece, this cake is baked and brought to church on August 27th, the feast of Saint Fanourios. He is the patron saint of lost things, and eating this cake is said to help you find what you are looking for. What I love is that "lost" is interpreted broadly—some people hope to retrieve literal lost objects, but equally popular is for unmarried women to eat it in hopes of finding a husband.

Though my goats are all accounted for and I don't need the cake to play matchmaker, I have been feeling, well, a little lost. I think it's a product of being semi bicoastal and being just around the age when friends start to peel off in various directions. It's a time to start to wonder about hitting life goals or, on the flip side, if maybe I should move to Cape Town or Tokyo or London before it's too late.

And so I found myself eating this cake, just one slab at a time, but insistently, for a few days until it was gone. I'd eat it standing at the counter, crumbs falling onto the blue kitchen tiles, or perched over my computer, trying to will writing inspiration to come. I found comfort in the moist crumb that tastes of fruity olive oil and orange and a hint of cinnamon. The last piece was eaten on my back deck at 5 pm, when it was still light out but cool enough to be warmed by a steaming mug of Earl Grey tea. I felt found, then, and momentarily settled. Maybe it was because I wanted the cake to work, or maybe because finding yourself can, for a moment, be as easy as eating a slice of cake and drinking some tea in the open air of oncoming twilight.

A note on the assembly: the batter for this cake is more like a dough. Just press it into the pan like and let the oven do its magic. It will bake up to the right dense yet moist consistency.

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Fanouropita (Cake For Lost Things) »

About the author: Carrie Vasios is the editor of Serious Eats: Sweets. She likes to peruse her large collection of cookbooks while eating jam from the jar. You can follow her on Twitter @carrievasios

[Photograph: Carrie Vasios]

When people think of Irish baked goods, they often think of scones and soda bread. I love both those things, but the truth is that Ireland has an awesome bread baking tradition, ranging from hearty yeasted breads to fruit-filled quick breads. I'm such a fan, in fact, that I specially ordered a coarse ground Irish flour to make this brown bread—which I loved for its rustic texture and subtle honey flavor.

This year, I wanted to make a traditional bread but I didn't have the time to preorder the special flour (the 2 pound bag of which has long since disappeared.) So I turned to my trusty friend* Darina Allen and her book Irish Traditional Cooking.

*friend as in, I think she's totally awesome and would love to buy her a cup of tea

She says that brack comes from the Irish word brac, meaning speckled. The bread is speckled with dried fruit—in her three versions that includes everything from candied orange peel to glace cherries to currants. I wanted to simplify the flavors, to make it more of a breakfast bread, so I limited the fruit to raisins (though if you want to go one step further, a mix of purple and golden raisins would make a pretty presentation.)

The key to the bead is to soak the raisins in tea overnight. In the morning, you'll see the raisins have plumped up significantly and gained a bit of extra flavor. From there, the bread couldn't be easier. Simply stir together the remaining ingredients, pour the batter into a buttered loaf pan, and bake. I added a sprinkling of oats on top, but even that can be skipped. It comes out moist and lightly spiced, with lots of juicy raisins. Darina says to serve it buttered, though I'd just as easily serve it plain or with a dollop of jam.

A final note: I made the bread a few times, most recently in regular 1 pound, 8 1/2 by 4 1/2-inch loaf pan, and more enjoyed the size/shape of the slices. The recipe gives the baking time for that pan, not the one pictured above.

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Irish Tea Brack (Tea-Soaked Raisin Bread) »

About the author: Carrie Vasios is the editor of Serious Eats: Sweets. She likes to peruse her large collection of cookbooks while eating jam from the jar. You can follow her on Twitter @carrievasios

[Photograph: Carrie Vasios]

As the editor of a sweets blog, I get a lot of sugar shipped to my door. Cakes, cookies, and chocolates are typical, and, generally speaking, I thought I had pretty much seen it all. Then one day my buzzer rang. I opened my door, found nothing, and walked down to the lobby of my building. There sat a giant box that I could barely lift, much less get back up the stairs (thanks UPS guy). I opened it up to find 30 pounds of a babka-looking bread called povitica.

I had never heard of this bread before, but when you suddenly have enough of something to feed a small army, you do a little research. Generically known as a "nut roll," povitica is an Eastern European yeasted bread made from a buttery, brioche-like dough rolled around a sugar and nut filling.

This particular povitica was incredibly rich and dense; each loaf weighed over three pounds and the fillings, in flavors like blueberry, weren't all to my taste. But I can get down with any sweet, dessert-like bread, so I put it on my list of things-to-do-one-day-when-I-have-some-free-time, and eventually, over a year later, it happened.

Here's what I learned: The key to making good povitca happens after the first rise. The dough must be rolled almost paper-thin before being covered with the filling. That way, when the loaf rises again, it gets its tight, trademark spirals. The other thing I learned from the shipment is that I personally find the plain sugar-nut and the chocolate-nut versions to be the best. I decided on a chocolate-walnut version, and using unsweetened cocoa powder adds chocolatey depth while balancing out the sugar. The walnuts are ground fine so that they don't disturb the fluffy crumb. Though this bread takes a fair amount of time to prepare, the result is pretty outstanding. The crumb is soft, sweet, and buttery. There is a high ratio of moist walnut and dark chocolate filling, making it a close cousin to rolled danishes and pastries.

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Chocolate Walnut Povitica »

About the author: Carrie Vasios is the editor of Serious Eats: Sweets. She likes to peruse her large collection of cookbooks while eating jam from the jar. You can follow her on Twitter @carrievasios

[Photograph: Carrie Vasios]

Growing up on the East Coast means growing up with Old Bay Seasoning. It's one of my earliest taste memories, intertwined with fish and lemon and oyster crackers and my mom, standing in her oversized neon pink t-shirt coverup and flip flops, manning the grill behind our cottage in Cape Cod.

I love that under ingredients, each mustard yellow tin lists "spices and herbs (including red pepper and black pepper), salt, and paprika." You know there is a ton more going on (celery? nutmeg?) but I don't begrudge the company for not sharing the details. They haven't been around since 1939 by giving away secrets, after all.

All I know is that Old Bay makes almost everything taste better—have you tried Old Bay fries?—and so when I suddenly had the urge to put them in my corn muffins, I knew I was onto something good.

Old Bay is the tiniest bit spicy, which I wanted to emphasize with an additional pinch of chili powder. To moisten the corn muffins, I always like to add some grated sharp cheddar cheese. There's no sugar in these, which means they're the ideal vessel for mopping up after scrambled eggs or grits. Though to be perfectly honest, I most recently served them at dinner, next to Old Bay seasoned cod and some slow cooked collard greens.

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Old Bay Corn Muffins »

About the author: Carrie Vasios is the editor of Serious Eats: Sweets. She likes to peruse her large collection of cookbooks while eating jam from the jar. You can follow her on Twitter @carrievasios