Contemplating how to cook the Easter ham? Consider Alton Brown’s favorite way, with his grandmother’s “secret” ham crust recipe.

The secret is now out of the bag: brown sugar, mustard, bourbon and pulverized ginger snap cookies.

 
Watch Alton do it!

Most items bake evenly in the middle of the oven.

When it’s important to brown the bottom of the food—like a fruit pie where the crust can get soggy—the lower rack is required. It puts the pan or baking sheet closer to the heat source, on the bottom of the oven.

Conversely, if you want more browning on the top—a meringue topping, for example—place the pan on the top rack. The meringue will brown without heating the fruit curd underneath.

If you want to bake two cake pans at once, advises Lauren Chattman, author of The Baking Answer Book, two nine-inch pans can be placed side by side. But for even baking, you’ll need to rotate them after the cakes begin to set.

With cookie sheets, you can place one on the bottom and one on the top, rotating them midway. Advises Lauren, “I recommend this only for items like cookies that require a relatively short baking time. With longer-baking items, the risk of burning is greater and not worth the savings on time.”

These directions don’t apply to convection ovens, which have an even circulation of air that avoids hot spots and cold spots of traditional ovens.

Find our favorite cake and cookie recipes.
  

Biscoff spread sweetens a bagel. Photo
courtesy Lotus Bakeries.

Now, a crunchy version is rolling out across the U.S., at Central Market, Cost Plus World Market, The Fresh Market, Market Basket, Schnucks, Shop Rite, Walmart, Wegmans and Winn-Dixie. We even saw a private label brand at Trader Joe’s, called “Cookie Spread.”

Crunchy Biscoff Spread takes the original creamy caramel spread delight and adds chunks of caramelized Biscoff cookies. The combination of creamy and crunchy is even better than the original. Imagine the possibilities:

 
Biscoff Spread Creamy is available at Central Market, Cost Plus World Market, The Fresh Market, Giant Carlisle, Giant Landover, Hannaford, Kroger, Market Basket, Safeway, Schnucks, Shop Rite, Stop & Shop, Walmart, Wegmans, and Winn-Dixie and others, as well as through Biscoff’s website.

A complete list of retail locations is available at www.biscoff.com.

Or, you can buy it online now.

Find more of our favorite bread spreads: product reviews, recipes and more.

Find it on your grocer’s shelf or online.

Have some dessert tea: with dessert or
instead of it. Photo courtesy TeaForte.com.

Many people enjoy a cup of tea with dessert. But what exactly is dessert tea?

Dessert tea is a relatively new addition to the tea repertoire. It sprouted up with the green tea and white tea push a decade ago. Many non-tea drinkers wanted the antioxidant benefits of tea but didn’t like the taste of plain green and white tea (which don’t taste great with milk and sugar).

So tea blenders started blending green tea, and then white tea, with any number of ingredients that provided flavor and a hint of sweetness: fruits and nuts; butterscotch, caramel and chocolate extracts; flowers (hibiscus, jasmine, rose, saffron); plus cinnamon, mint, vanilla and other flavorings.

At a certain point, one producer saw these nearly-calorie-free flavored teas as appropriate for dessert or as a guilt-free sweet beverage; and “dessert teas” were born.

Flavored Teas Are As Old As “Tea”

Dessert teas are seen as expanding the tea-buying market by appealing to the non-tea-drinker with mass-appeal flavors common in soft drinks and flavored lattes. The concept is not new—only the name and the marketing of the tea for “dessert.”

Since the dawn of man-made fire and vessels, teas were steeped from many barks, berries, leaves and roots. Before tea arrived in Europe in the 17th century (coffee also arrived then, in 1615, along with hot chocolate), this is what was drunk.

Today, “tea” refers specifically to brewed leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant, or tea bush. “Herbal tea” is called a tisane in the industry (the word originated with the Greek word ptisane, a drink made from pearl barley).

More about tea.

As the story goes, the Jews had to leave Egypt immediately. They gathered up possessions and livestock but could not wait for the bread dough to rise, resulting in matzo, an unleavened flatbread. Thus, during the week of Passover, no leavened bread is eaten; only matzo (also spelled matzoh, matza and other variations).

So what if you want to celebrate Passover with matzo, but have gluten sensitivities?

Two brands are at the ready:

 
Seder Idea

The Passover seder, the ritual feast celebrated on the first two nights of the holiday, is accompanied from beginning to end by a reading of the Haggadah (“telling”).

This year, participants at our seder are coming as witnesses of the Exodus. Each of us will provide a few minutes of insight into the desires, hopes, frustrations, fears and domestic lives of our characters. Participating will be will be Moses, Pharaoh, a nameless Jewish slave and an Egyptian, along with Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, a first century scholar who appears giving commentary in the Hagadah.

We are going as a baker, faced with feeding the exodus masses without the time to leaven the bread. The result: matzo.