By Paola Briseño-González
Published Dec. 22, 2025Updated Dec. 22, 2025
The instant the door to a posada swings open, the scent of ponche Navideño finds its way out first: warm spices rising over bright citrus, piloncillo melting into burned honey sweetness, mingled with the sour notes of dried hibiscus and the soft aroma of poached ripe fruit. Posadas, holiday parties in Mexico and its diaspora, traditionally run Dec. 16 to 24, but the fragrant, steaming elixir known as ponche Navideño is poured into thick clay mugs from the first chilly day of the month until the roscas de reyes (three kings bread) appears on Jan. 6.
As complex as ponche tastes, it’s simple to put together as a welcome, warming drink for a crowd. The base starts with a tea of spices and hibiscus flowers that stain the ponche crimson. Dried fruit like prunes or raisins then infuse it with depth, along with piloncillo, an unrefined cane sugar. With this irresistible foundation, the classic version will appeal to anyone, but is especially meaningful to those who grew up sipping it.
As the chef Ricardo Muñoz Zurita writes in the great archive of Mexican cuisine, “Larousse Diccionario Enciclopédico de la Gastronomía Mexicana,” the drink’s lineage began in ancient Persia as “panch,” a rose-scented fruit punch with pomegranate, lime and orange blossom water. It traveled on colonial ships, becoming Spanish ponche before landing in New Spain. Once in Mexico, it leaned on the generosity of the tropics with the addition of pineapple, plump guavas, fresh sugar cane, tamarind pods and, the most treasured fruit of all, tejocotes. The small Mexican hawthorn fruits, faintly astringent and grainy like a crunchy pear, are prized for their dense yet creamy bite when cooked.
In Tijuana, Mexico, the chef José Figueroa highlights the classic taste with local ingredients like heirloom red-and-yellow apples from Valle de Guadalupe and dried figs from Mexicali. At his restaurant Carmelita Molino y Cocina, he serves it ice-cold and effervescent as ponche soda with a fermented ginger starter, sometimes spiked with Joto Juan, an elegant liqueur distilled from century-old orange trees. In this iteration, sweet brightens into bitter, bitter softens into sweet. The ponche feels entirely new yet it still is unmistakably rooted.
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Farther down the coast in Ensenada, Shava Cueva, the author of “Bebidas de Oaxaca,” still tastes his childhood in every jarrito (clay mug). For him, ponche carries echoes of the fizzy, fermented tepache de frutos that Don René Sánchez Ramírez makes in Oaxaca. Ponche, by contrast, is more mellow since it’s simmered over the stove and served piping hot the moment it’s ready, like the most generous tea.
In Los Angeles, the chef Fátima Juárez of Komal at Mercado La Paloma carries that same warmth across the border. While growing up in Mexico City, Ms. Juárez and her family made an enormous pot that perfumed their entire house every December. When she moved to L.A., the ritual slipped away yet the memory stayed with her: the bite of the small, porous yellow apples that swell with the scents of cinnamon, hibiscus, guava and clove until they practically burst with flavor.
For Ms. Juárez, ponche is the taste of “cooking according to what we used to do in Mexico.” This holiday season, she is hosting her family in Los Angeles for the first time and will simmer the ponche in a massive olla on her stove. As she stirs the pot, she’ll think of her father, who died last month, and the scent filling her home will be a quiet way to grieve and keep him present.
Mr. Cueva said that this form of fruit resting in liquid tastes like Christmas itself. Whether you hold deep memories of ponche or have never tasted it, its aroma is transporting. One sip, and you are home.
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The juicy fruit shines when baked into a bouncy, tender batter from Eric Kim.
By Eric Kim
Eric Kim is a food columnist for The New York Times Magazine and a recipe developer and video host for NYT Cooking. A native of Atlanta, he is also the author of the cookbook “Korean American.”
Published Dec. 12, 2025Updated Dec. 12, 2025
Cake baking, like painting or ceramics, is an art honed with time. That’s only part of why my latest recipe, a persimmon cake, feels like such a celebration of growth.
Arriving at this moist, bouncy recipe was not easy. Along the way, there were many flops that came out too boring or too bland. There was the version with soggy persimmons and soggier cake. Another started with butter creamed with sugar, the classic way, but the crumb was tough and greasy. For one test, I macerated the fresh fruit in maple syrup and spooned it over a yellow sponge, which felt like cheating because it wasn’t a persimmon cake, really — just a cake with persimmons.
The best persimmon is ripe, sliced and eaten over the sink. Was that, in part, why it was so hard to bake into a cake?
“They seem to be a fruit that many home cooks find challenging,” said Ethan Pikas, the chef and owner of Cellar Door Provisions in Chicago. He and his team seem to relish persimmons, serving up many a dessert over the years, including persimmon sticky toffee pudding, persimmon upside-down cake, smoked persimmon beignets and a custard-based persimmon torte Mr. Pikas is working on now.
I’ve not been as adept in harnessing persimmon’s potential. But, after even more tinkering and hair pulling, I’ve finally started to crack its code — five years on. It was well worth the wait. The resulting cake has one of the best textures and flavors I’ve ever achieved from scratch, something a box cake could never do.
Here are the three keys to unlocking its magic.
One difficult thing about baking with many fruits, and specifically persimmons, is that they’re dense with juice, which can seep into the batter as it bakes and turn an otherwise light cake dense.
“Why don’t you roast the fruit before baking with it?” my colleague (and fabulous baker) Yewande Komolafe suggested, as I lamented to her about this recipe.
Her advice turned out to be immensely useful: Baking wedged persimmons until their moisture dissipates and their flavor concentrates leaves you with syrupy fruit that doesn’t sog up the cake later, giving you more control over the final crumb. Even better, the peachy orange chunks maintain their structure once baked into the cake.
After studying all of the cake books on my shelf, I learned that the right mix of both baking powder and soda results in the softest crumb, but it wasn’t until I folded whipped cream into the batter that my cake finally got its desired airiness. Whipped cream, it turns out, “evens out the crumb,” said my friend and New York Times contributor Ella Quittner, who also employs this technique in her recipes.
When the pastry chef Heather Dekker-Hurlbert was working at Cherokee Town and Country Club in Atlanta, one of the members, the cookbook author Shirley O. Corriher, loved Ms. Dekker-Hurlbert’s pound cake, which used whipped cream in the batter. “It turned my world upside down,” Ms. Corriher wrote in her book “BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking.”
The idea “came out of curiosity,” Ms. Dekker-Hurlbert said to me recently. “I had a great pound cake recipe using liquid cream but found it dense so thought the whipped cream method might work better.” Folding whipped cream into her batter lightened it by adding air bubbles, a technique she borrowed from another recipe that used meringue for the same effect.
Here, whipped cream isn’t just a leavener. A spoonful on top serves as a foil to the spiced cake and a complement to the persimmons.
The flavor of persimmons — almost pumpkinlike, reminiscent of figs but spiced and honeyed — is remarkably delicate. To properly capture it, you’ll want to avoid strong flavors that might mask it, like musky vanilla and molasses-rich brown sugar.
Once I began using ingredients that bolstered that elusive flavor without competing with it, the cake finally sang. A little coconut extract, a whisper of the tropical, props up the gentle sweet aroma of ripe persimmons in a way that vanilla extract can’t. A sprinkle of cardamom sugar on top before baking gives the cake a glorious caramelized crust without too much extra sweetness, and highlights the fruit’s floral qualities.
I like refrigerating the cake, taking slices from it throughout the week and microwaving them. The persimmon is a fleeting pleasure. It deserves a cake that lasts.
Recipe: Persimmon Cardamom Cake
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By Genevieve Ko
Photographs by Linda Xiao
Styled by Yossy Arefi and Marina Bevilacqua
Genevieve Ko is a deputy editor of NYT Cooking and Food at The New York Times, where she also writes a column, develops recipes and appears in videos. In addition to writing her own cookbook, she has contributed to more than 20 cookbooks. Born and raised in East Los Angeles, she now lives in New York City and cooks dishes from everywhere.
Published Dec. 12, 2025Updated Dec. 12, 2025
For centuries, sugar flowed into cakes and pastries only on rare occasions, and the holidays were the season for elaborate bûche de Noël, panettone and gingerbread houses. In this age of daily little treats, it’s harder to capture the same awe that must’ve accompanied once-a-year confections. But this dessert table absolutely does.
It evokes the abundance of Renaissance still-life paintings, with updated takes on European classics and modern creations inspired by flavors from across the globe. What makes these showstoppers especially satisfying is how anyone can make them.
The cookbook authors Nicola Lamb and Yossy Arefi have been baking professionally for decades — and turning their pastry chef wonders into recipes straightforward enough for novice bakers. They’ve delved into the stories of cherished desserts and carried them along their evolution with brilliant new flavors and formats.
Meant for slicing and sharing, these big rounds can all be assembled for one spectacular dessert table, or you can prepare whichever ones you want and add your own sweets to the spread. Setting them on gilded platters, vintage or modern, and at different heights with the help of cake stands or stacks of books or blocks, will create a dramatic tableau for any gathering.
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Dressing up a classic dessert is a great way to get it ready for a party. Here, rich tiramisù-flavored cream and classic coffee-soaked ladyfingers are layered into a dark, crisp Oreo crust and covered with chocolate curls. Tiramisù has achieved legendary status in the dessert canon despite being a relatively recent invention: Its exact origin remains disputed, but after emerging in Italy in the 1970s, its popularity has consistently grown. Perhaps surprisingly, the tradition of cream pies in the United States predates it by a century — it is only right that the two should finally meet. NICOLA LAMB
In 2022, Sarah Hamouda created a chocolate bar to quash a pregnancy craving — even though she had never made chocolate confections before. In her home in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, she tinkered with pistachios, cream and a shredded variety of phyllo known as kataifi, eventually creating her signature Can’t Get Knafeh of It bar. A year later, an influencer called it Dubai chocolate in a TikTok video that went viral, and the rest is history. Now, countless variations have spread around the world. In this recipe, Yossy Arefi tops a tender chocolate cake with a creamy-crunchy pistachio kataifi layer. To give it the glimmer it deserves, she cloaks the two-toned stack with a silky chocolate ganache and adorns it with a crackling necklace of nuts and more kataifi. GENEVIEVE KO
Apple pie has a French cousin, and its name is pastis Gascon. Hailing from Gascony in southwestern France, it doesn’t have a definitive genesis but most likely dates back to the Middle Ages. Also known as croustade aux pommes or tourtière, pastis Gascon is the meeting of several divine things: apples, Armagnac (another Gascon specialty) and phyllo. This meeting is facilitated, of course, by butter — and plenty of it. The result is a crispy crown of pastry filled with soft, yielding Armagnac-scented apples. Golden Delicious are popular in classic French recipes, but using any flavorful variety that holds its shape well when cooking will work. NICOLA LAMB
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Over the past century, there’s been a mutual admiration and influence between Japanese and French cuisines, with a shared reverence for training chefs in the craft of fine dining. That’s especially evident in pastry and the exchange of ingredients across the globe. Yuzu, a floral citrus fruit popular in Japan, has found its way into buttery tarts, like this update on a classic lemon tart. Yossy Arefi has incorporated its distinct aromatic juice into a velvety, creamy curd set in a tender crust. Fresh yuzu remains difficult to find, but bottled juice delivers its signature complexity. GENEVIEVE KO
A classic dessert, the Mont Blanc was named for its resemblance to the tallest mountain in Western Europe. Since its first appearance in 19th-century France, it has undergone various transformations — in its simplest form, sweetened chestnut purée piped into noodles meets a mountain of whipped cream. The now-famous addition of meringue was popularized by the Parisian tearoom Angelina, whose version helped cement the dessert’s modern identity: a crisp meringue base covered in whipped cream and chestnut strands. Here, the Mont Blanc is piled in maximalist fashion: Layers of cream and meringue are stacked high and cascaded with chestnut purée. A secret layer of chocolate and coffee crémeux is nestled within the meringue foundation, adding a grounding bass note. NICOLA LAMB
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Forget those bland treats of yore: These tips make holiday cookies delicious and foolproof for anyone.
By Genevieve Ko
Genevieve Ko has developed more than three dozen holiday cookie recipes over the years.
Published Dec. 11, 2025Updated Dec. 11, 2025
The taste of nostalgia matters, all the more so around the holidays. Maybe the floury mildness of sugar cookie cutouts, pasty under hard icing, is important to you. If so, enjoy! If, however, you want a buttery, snappy shortbread with the floral sparkle of orange zest that is then glossed with a refreshingly zingy lemon glaze, bake these.
I would be lying if I said rolling and cutting out shortbread is effortless. But below, you’ll find ways to make the process less intimidating and more foolproof to turn out flawless cookies that taste like sunshine, as well as smart tips that make cutting and decorating cookies easier, no matter what recipe you use.
Fancy decorated cookies often call for fancy tools, starting with a stand mixer and ending with piping tips. But, regardless of the recipe, you can usually make some smart substitutions:
If you don’t have a stand mixer or a hand-held electric mixer, mix the dough by hand. This shortbread may even be better that way (more on that later).
A wine or other glass bottle can step in for a rolling pin.
No cookie sheet? A half-sheet pan works well. If you don’t have one, get one. You’ll use it for everything in the kitchen.
If you don’t have cookie cutters, these shortbread cookies can be made as slice-and-bake rounds, squares or rectangles.
Resealable plastic bags are great substitutes for piping bags. Either way, you don’t need piping tips to decorate.
When it comes to cutting out festive stars and stockings, sugar cookie dough has long been the favorite, but shortbread is far more delicious. Understanding these cookies’ three primary ingredients can help you choose which one to bake. The difference is a matter of proportion: Sugar cookies have a higher ratio of flour and sugar, which makes them sturdier and more like clay for rolling and cutting. But it comes at the cost of flavor. Shortbread highlights the milky allure of butter in its not-too-sweet dough. To end up with ideal shortbread tastes and textures, follow these tips:
For these tender-crisp shortbread, make sure your butter is at cool room temperature. Cold, hard butter won’t blend easily, and over-softened butter can cause finished cookies to feel greasy, spread too thin or bubble on top. The butter is ready when you press it and can leave a finger imprint with a little resistance.
To get your butter to temperature, cut a cold stick into half-inch cubes and then let sit at room temperature while you gather and measure the other ingredients.
Using two kinds of sugar — granulated and powdered — makes shortbread crunchy and tender. White granulated sugar not only sweetens, it also provides a light snap because it helps create air pockets in butter when the two are beaten together, while powdered sugar lends a melt-in-your-mouth crumble. Here, only a small proportion of powdered sugar is used because the shortbread still needs structure to hold up to decorating.
At its most basic, shortbread requires only flour, butter and sugar, but seasoning lends depth to the final cookies. Salt — in butter or granules — does heavy lifting, as does vanilla. This recipe goes one step further, giving vanilla shortbread extra zip by gently rubbing orange zest into the granulated sugar.
Be sure to grate only the outermost layer of peel to avoid any bitterness from the pith, and run the orange against the zester in short strokes to keep the bits fine.
Of course, you can use a stand mixer or electric beaters, but using a spatula or wooden spoon prevents overbeating. Too much air in the dough can cause it to puff in the oven and then collapse when cooling, and the vigor of an electric beater can make the cookies tough after the flour is added.
If you prefer the mixer, be sure to avoid high speed, and stop mixing as soon as the dough comes together.
You can’t roll shortbread dough right after mixing. It’s too sticky, so recipes typically call for patting the dough into a one-inch-thick disk before refrigerating for up to a few days before rolling. But chilling until the dough is hard can make it difficult to roll and easy to crack.
To avoid this, shape dough into a half-inch-thick block and chill only until it loses its stickiness but isn’t yet firm. (When you press it, you should be able to leave a fingerprint with a little resistance.) This makes it far easier to roll into a thin, even sheet. Even a wine bottle will be able to glide right over it.
The neatest way to roll any dough is by placing it on floured parchment and then covering it with a dusting of flour and, if you’d like, plastic wrap or another sheet of parchment. This keeps your counter clean and guarantees the dough won’t stick to it. Simply flip the dough every once in a while and, if using, lift the top sheet of plastic or parchment off each time to keep the dough smooth. Once rolled, those thin sheets of dough need to be chilled until hard before cutting into shapes and can be covered and refrigerated for days.
Cutting the dough on that floured parchment ensures any shapes will come right off. If they don’t, they can be peeled off like stickers.
Smashing the scraps of dough into a ball and rerolling will make them tough. Instead, jigsaw the pieces together and roll gently just to smooth them out. Or, bake bigger scraps as they are and enjoy them as snacks.
The beauty of shortbread is that you can bake it as you like. I prefer rolling the dough thin and letting it get quite brown at the edges and golden brown across the top for a complex caramelized toastiness and snappy crunch. If you like soft, golden cookies, roll the dough thicker and pull the shapes out of the oven earlier.
If you have the space and enough pans, cool the cookies completely on the baking sheets and then decorate on the pan. This saves you from extra dishwashing and wasting parchment.
When mixing icing, add just enough liquid (lemon juice, in this recipe) to powdered sugar to make a paste. (It’s easier to stir in a few more drops of liquid to thin a smooth icing than it is to stir in more clumpy sugar to try and thicken it.) Icing that’s thick enough to pipe clear lines and set firmly should stay opaque and run slowly off a spoon when lifted.
Tinting your icing is optional, but for the most vibrant hues, use gel paste food coloring and add a tiny dot at a time. As with mixing the icing, it’s always easier to deepen the color than it is to lighten it.
If you prefer more natural options, consider adding turmeric for gold, butterfly pea powder for lavender, matcha for mint green or a red juice, such as cranberry, pomegranate or sieved fresh raspberries, for pink.
As a general rule, it’s easiest to pipe from smaller piping bags that aren’t filled with too much icing so you can grip the bag with your whole hand. To transfer the icing into a piping bag without making a sticky mess, open the bag, slide it into a cup and fold the top of the bag over the cup’s rim. This keeps the bag upright and prevents icing from spilling onto the outside the bag.
If not using a piping tip, snip the smallest possible opening from the piping bag and then draw a line on parchment or a cookie scrap to see if you like that thickness. Keep snipping it wider until you reach the diameter you prefer. Either way, keep the wide ends of the bags tied shut, and slide the bags into the cups tips-side-up when they’re not in use.
With these basic steps, rolling and cutting shortbread dough into shapes will turn out the tastiest cookies — and maybe even evolve into a new holiday tradition.
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