Brandy

The Jersey Lightning is so easy and so excellent. Whatever you call it, a manhattan simply made with apple brandy is a wonderful thing.

A touch of coffee balances the flavor of this modern spin on eggnog.

This fruitcake-like dessert is finished with generous dose of dark rum.

This is a perfect sipper for a warm day. The boozy sour is tempered by lots of ice and brightened by tart and tender raspberry.

This easy crepe recipe calls for brandy, but you can substitute any flavorful spirit or liqueur to customize it to your tastes and pantry.

A classic Southern cake, after winning first prize at the county fair in Columbus, Georgia, Lane Cake also earned the name “Prize Cake.” 

Mince pies, basically rich tarts filled with dried fruits and spices soaked in alcohol, were once a status symbol because only the rich could afford these delicacies. The combination of fruits and spices is often diverse, but raisins, currants, and candied lemon, citron, and/or orange peel are standard. Some old recipes also contain prunes, dates, figs, or candied ginger. Spices are usually cinnamon, cloves, mace, and nutmeg. There is always grated apple or pear and sometimes also lemon or orang.…

Classically French, prune‐Armagnac ice cream is one of the most graceful ways to serve a prune. Whereas most fruits become hard and icy when frozen, these prunes remain chewy and soft.

Creamy, nutmeg-spiced eggnog is one of my favorite holiday indulgences, and has been since I was a child. Now I’ve turned my favorite holiday cheer into a compelling ice cream.

For most drinkers of a certain age, Jägermeister is the unofficial source of many bad decisions. But here it acts as the base of a bone-warming drink that combines the herbal notes of the liqueur with apple brandy for a decidedly adult way to fortify oneself after a day out in the cold.

While brandy is the traditional partner for fruit cake, you could also try using a dessert sherry such as Pedro Ximénez. It’s an intensely sweet, dark sherry made from the Spanish grape variety of the same name. Perfect in festive cakes, puddings and custards, you can find it in liquor stores.

This is not your grandma’s beef stroganoff. We updated our favorite parts of the classic by swapping in a medium-rare strip steak and adding a squeeze of lemon and sprinkling of dill for a fresh take on dinner.

Meet your new favorite show-stopping Christmas dessert: a spiced chocolate cake topped with a cream cheese mousse studded with dried fruit and nuts and glazed with brandy-spiked melted chocolate. Serve it with sparklers on top for a memorable entrance.

Vanilla-infused brown butter adds nuttiness to tender pears beneath a crisp almond topping.

This pared-down mulled wine recipe is great for impromptu entertaining this weekend.

This has become a Staplehouse all-star. We simplified it a bit, setting it in jars rather than the buttery pastry crust it’s served in at the restaurant. Don’t worry: We didn’t mess with the shamelessly high ratio of butter and cream to liver.

For those times when you buy as many quarts of berries as you can carry, then don’t know what to do with them, preserve them into drinkable form.

Coeur à la crème (cream heart) is a classic French dessert traditionally served with strawberries.

Your blender does most of the work for you to make this decadent mousse: no eggs, no double boiler, no extra fuss. It's the perfect make-ahead dessert for an impressive holiday meal.

My favorite apple pie recipe comes from a friend who shares my name, and who was kind enough to share with me a recipe for an apple pie that's practically a work of art. More than a thousand words long, it features little anecdotes here and there, making the recipe valuable for the writing alone, never mind the pie that comes off its pages. We wanted to re-create the flavor of apple pie in ice cream, but pie crust didn't quite work out when tucked into custard—it got too soggy for it to be any good. Instead, we decided to keep the filling and use bits of cooked crumble topping as cookielike bites mixed in with bits of apple. Calvados is a nice way to bump up the apple flavor, but if you don't have that on hand, rum or brandy should do in pinch.

Baking a batch of these classic Austrian sandwich cookies is a project—but totally worth it.

There are many stories about the origins of this cake, known as both Clichy cake and Opéra cake. Many believe that Louis Clichy was its creator because he premiered the gâteau, with his name written across the top, at the 1903 Exposition Culinaire in Paris. It became the signature cake of Clichy's shop on the Boulevard Beaumarchais. However, another pastry shop, Dalloyau, sold a very similar dessert, known as L'Opéra (in honor of the Paris Opera), and some claim that theirs was the original.

My criteria when it comes to recipes are these: Is it tasty enough that I will crave it over and over? Is it easy? And does it look pretty? This recipe hits those marks. It is moistest, richest, most flavorful pound cake I have ever made.

Not quite so popular these days, this style of cocktail demands a steady hand to layer the ingredients, starting with the densest and ending with the least dense, to create the drink's snazzy colored stripes. The pousse-café glass is a specific vessel, but try it in a champagne flute or another glass you have to hand before you invest in extra equipment.