Recipes Blog

Passover Apple Pecan Pie

By Tori Avey, The Shiksa in the Kitchen

Here’s the thing… I love pie. Love, love, love it! But at Passover, when leavening is not an option, making a tasty pie crust becomes much more difficult. This recipe evolved out of my need for a Passover pie substitute (because let’s face it– it’s really, really hard to get through an entire week without pie). I did away with the crust entirely and instead relied on matzo cracker crumbs to hold the filling together. The result is something between an apple crumble, a pan dowdy and a pie. Whatever you want to call it, it’s delicious!

Bake this Passover dessert in an old-fashioned pie dish, and nobody will complain about the missing crust… the flavor is very similar to a nutty apple pie. The candied pecans add a crunchy sweet topping to this decadent Passover treat. Serve ala mode for extra deliciousness.

Mrs. Stein’s Chocolate Cake

By Sarabeth Levine
From Sarabeth's Bakery: From My Hands to Yours by Sarabeth Levine with Rick Rodgers (Rizzoli 2010) 

When I was gathering the recipes for this chapter, my daughters, Jennifer and Tina, reminded me of an almost ridiculously chocolate pound cake that I hadn’t made in years. How I let this one slip through the cracks, I’ll never know. I did some searching, and there it was, tucked away in my treasured recipe book. It was splattered with chocolate batter, a clear indication that it was a favorite that I made again and again. I received the recipe from Mrs. Stein, a Hungarian beauty who was a relative of my father-in-law, Joe Firestone. Welcome back, old friend.

Photo by Quentin Bacon