Karen Resta

The man across from me was vaguely familiar, but I really didn’t know him at all. The woman next to me I did know, but at the moment she was acting distant. We sat in a large booth near the front of this famous old Brooklyn restaurant, a gilded place with broken-springed red velvet banquettes, uneven wooden floors, and elderly waiters wearing long aprons that fell well below their knees. The gaslights fizzed grimy yellow, highlighting the dark sticky contours of the heavily varnished booths.
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Cake Zine is a hedonistic exploration of history, pop culture, literature, and art through sweets. The fourth issue, Tough Cookie, presents a hearty batch of trials and triumphs all in the context of cookies. It's ninety-six pages of recipes, essays, illustrations, poems, fiction, and photographs includes a dishy reflection on being the head chef at a powerful Wall Street bank in the eighties.

Food has always been central to the Susan Alexandra brand, known for quirky, colorful, beaded accessories so covetable they’ve reached cult status among the it crowd. The first piece I fell in love with was a pair of earrings, unlike any I’d seen before. From an almost invisible silver hook dangled a lemon wedge the color of sunshine just above a shrimp, whose pale pink, orange and white were the colors of a Florida sky at daybreak.

Illustration by Lior Field
Knife-cut chunks of iceberg lettuce, wedges of pale scarlet tomato, cucumber rounds with insolent seeds glaring from their centers, mean slivers of green bell peppers, thin slices of red radishes. The radishes were bitter, as was my mother. The iceberg lettuce showed her dislike of cooking, the tomatoes represented something sweet, yet rarely expressed. The angled slivers of green pepper were an artistic touch, resembling tiny armed soldiers who might leap right out...

The perfect cat eye, with its great sense of drama and a lineage that extends back to Cleopatra, has always been one of my favorite looks. Depending on how you draw it, it can imbue a face with sexiness, haughtiness, elegance, cuteness, strength, or eccentricity. But as the passage of time has started to show itself on my 65-year-old skin, I’ve learned that it’s an incredibly difficult look to create on eyes with wrinkles or drooping.

Beans and taters, pimiento cheese, country ham, and more.
It seems impossible that Loretta Lynn is gone. It also seems impossible that she'd been with us for 90 years, because she always seemed ageless.

Though madeleines are only small sponge cakes shaped like shells, they somehow always have an air of sophistication, and there are a number of reasons for that. The first and foremost reason is the shape, which is delicately molded and detailed to look like a soft ivory fan. Another reason is that when made well, madeleines are incredibly light in texture, almost melting on the tongue.

Valentine’s Day is one of those holidays that demands chocolate. It can be a gesture of your love and appreciation for your special Valentine. Or it can also be a reminder that you can indeed treat yourself to some gourmet goodness.

Chocolate—and gourmet chocolates in particular—have earned a reputation as one of the best and most delectable gifts you can give another person. The sheer variety of chocolate available today is nearly endless, but if you're shopping for a gift, skip the grocery store candy aisle and opt for turtles, truffles, and bars that are crafted by the finest chocolatiers from around the world.

Drinking chocolates run the gamut from sweet to gently bitter and from a rich, dense texture to a light, barely-there mouthfeel. What anyone likes in terms of a drinking chocolate is highly subjective and intensely personal. There are, however, several ways to put any drinking chocolate to a critical test. The flavor profile, the source of the cocoa beans, the processing method, and more all play a part in choosing the one for you. We’ve put together this collection of drinking chocolates, covering many bases and different ideas of what a drinking chocolate can be.

This collection of top Easter baskets includes a variety of options, all available online. On Easter, it could be that your day is all about candy and sweets, as much as anyone could want! These sweet (and savory) baskets will make it your own special occasion, filled with delights and we can all pretend that the Easter Bunny delivered all these delicious treats right to our doors!

A good basting brush can really change your grilling or baking game, taking it from “This is really good,” to “Wow, this is amazing! How’d you make it?!”

It’s all about the specialized design of your tools. In brushes, the basics are the handle and the brush. What are they made out of? Will the brush bristles be too strong, too light, too big, or too small? How will the handle fit your hand, and will you enjoy using it? And last but not least, is it easy to clean? That last question is important because sauces and melted butter and beaten egg yolks have a habit of getting in every nook and c

Leonardo da Vinci once said, "Details make perfection, and perfection is not a detail," and this definitely applies to baking cups. Little cakes, muffins, and cupcakes are designed to be detail-driven. We look at them more closely than we might a larger cake or loaf, we admire their precision, and many bakers find ways to decorate these treats for the individual person in a number of inspired ways.

Salt water taffy is a candy with a personality all its own. It reminds us of sunny days at the beach, walking in our flip flops up the boardwalk, looking at all the amazing things we can eat. It's one of those treats that we equate with summer and lazy days. Right up there with the smell of salty air and sunscreen, hot dogs, and french fries is the sticky smell of sugar being cooked to be made into fresh salt water taffy.

It’s a good bet you’ve already got a muffin pan or two in your kitchen, but do they really work as well as you’d like? Muffin pans are one of those kitchen tools that often don’t get taken as seriously as they should be, and because of this, they end up in the back of the cupboard, unused and forgotten.