A perfect, simple birthday cake. One that effortlessly handled the car ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Flourless and made primarily with almond paste and eggs, it's baked until golden, then flooded with a simple, smudge-proof buttermilk glaze.

Beautiful buttermilk muffins - berry-streaked with sugar-sparkled tops, big flavor, and buttermilk-tender texture.

One of the easiest cookies I know how to make - made from rolled oats, they're razor thin and lacy, golden, freckled with poppy seeds, with and anise accent from crushed fennel seeds.

Whole Wheat Raspberry Ricotta Scones - golden-crusted, tender, moist, barely sweet, and streaked with violet swaths and chunks of blackberry. They're beautiful.

The Saffron-Vanilla Snickerdoodle recipe from The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee: Growing, Roasting, and Drinking, with Recipes.

A banana bread absolutely packed with sesame seeds, made with a blend of whole wheat and white flour, yogurt, ripe bananas, and lemon zest.

A simple savory tomato tarte tatin made with ripe market tomatoes, plenty of caramelized onions, a wee splash of balsamic vinegar, and whatever pie dough you might have on hand (or in the freezer)...

Snappy, small, fragrant, vanilla wafer cookies made with a whole vanilla pod. The entire thing!

A variation on the granola from my last book - this time with rose petals, walnuts, currants, and black pepper.

A heads up about a recipe I've done for Nikole Herriott's new For the Love of Pie series. My contribution: Blueberry Lemon Verbena Pie.

Inspired by a recipe from Alana Chernila's The Homemade Pantry, these are the cheese crackers I made for my nephew (in owl shapes!) when he came to stay with us last week.

I took slices of this chocolate bundt cake on a road trip to Portland this week. Slathered with chocolate buttermilk icing, it's a great travel treat made with a blend of whole wheat and all-purpose flours, lots of yogurt, and the darkest brown sugar I can get my hands on.

A hearty black bread - caraway-crusted, and flecked with dashes of grated carrot. It's dark, dense with rye, and perfect when toasted then topped with a fat smear of dill butter.

Gougères - I have these little cheese puffs in my freezer, ready to bake, nearly always. This version, a favorite, is made with whole wheat flour, sharp white cheddar cheese, fennel, and ale.

This black sticky gingerbread recipe makes an outrageously dark, dense, flavorful and delicious cake. The burnt-caramel-esque crust that forms on the top of the cake is part of what makes this recipe a keeper.

A moist, ridiculously good banana bread recipe. A banana bread that is chocolate studded, lemon kissed, and made with whole wheat flour (and olive oil!) - from Melissa Clark's new book. Plus pics from a a beautiful wedding I attended at an off-season summer camp.

A few London pics, a look at how I packed my lunch for the flight, and the baked quinoa patties I brought along with me - dill, feta, chives, cumin, and garlic.

A sweet little buttermilk pie I made. The filling is pure, creamy, maple-kissed tanginess, and simple to pull together.

The bread you should make right this minute - yeast-based, farm-style, made from rolled oats and a blend of all-purpose and whole wheat flours.

A crumble-topped muffin recipe made with an oatmeal and yogurt base. Craggy, golden-topped, the last thing I'll bake before moving on to a new oven.

Toasty, nutty sable cookies made with whole wheat flour, sliced almonds, currents and salted butter. And a peek at some of my favorite vintage cookie cutters.

Snappy, substantial, homemade oatmeal crackers - made with rolled oats and rye flour. Plus a little glimpse at some postcards I made.

A six recipe PDF sampler from my new cookbook, Super Natural Every Day. It includes a few of my v. favorite recipes - Millet Muffins, Ravioli Salad, Avocado & Mustard Seeds, Black Sesame Otsu, Tinto de Verano, and a Tutti-Frutti Crumble. Enjoy!

Made using 100% whole wheat flour and hand-chopped chocolate chips, this is a skillet-baked twist on Kim Boyce's celebrated Chocolate Chip Cookies.

A rustic oat soda bread you can make in less than an hour. Seriously. Made from a simple ingredient list of rolled oats, flour, baking soda, salt, and buttermilk.

Savory muffins packed with spinach, feta and Parmesan cheeses, black pepper, mustard, and sunflower seeds. Adapted from a recipe in a lovely little self-published Australian cookbook, Martha Goes Green.

Adapted from a Susan Herrmann Loomis recipe - charming, snappy, salty-sweet olive-flecked shortbread deliciousness. Quirky yet sophisticated, they exist in some middle Earth realm between cracker and cookie.

A limoncello macaroon recipe along with a batch of photos from a cabin weekend in Mendocino. The cookies are golden-crusted, powder-coated, almond-citrus gems spiked with limoncello liqueur my sister made for me.

I'm posting this recipe not because these are the best oatmeal chocolate chip cookies ever of all time. They're good, but...I'm posting the recipe, because they make amazing ice cream sandwich cookies. And it's prime ice cream sandwich season.

Certainly not the most attractive cake I've ever baked - but right in so many other ways. Deep chocolate flavor, barely set center, indiscernible crumb, thin Muscovado crust...if you can get over how it looks, you'll love it.

Inspired by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's soda bread recipe, this version is made with a blend of spelt flour and all-purpose flour. The dough is littered with seeds - sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, flax seeds, and fennel seeds. It bakes into a perfect, rustic, crusty loaf of bread with relatively little effort.

A cake I made for the Kim Boyce potluck at 18 Reasons - Incredibly moist, golden-crumbed, flecked with rosemary, and dotted with big and small chocolate chunks, I'd make this again in a heartbeat.

Cookies made from toasted quinoa and wheat flours, flecked with chocolate shavings, rolled and stamped into cloud shapes.

A simple spring crumble - rhubarb, strawberry, and a splash of port wine with a buttery black pepper, pine nut and oat crumble top. Sounds a bit fancy, but really, it couldn't be easier to make.

A rustic, minimally structured, custard-topped, crusty-edged, herb-scented corn-quinoa skillet bread.

Dense, gooey chocolate brownies packed with boozy, port-soaked dried cherries. Made with Muscovado sugar, chocolate chunks, and crème fraiche.

These muffins are saffron-smacked and riddled with golden raisins, buttermilk battered and barely sweet. Said another way, Lucia buns reinterpreted as muffins. If you love saffron give them a try.

These jammy, fig-swirled buckwheat scones are from Kim Boyce's inspiring new book, Good to the Grain, about baking with whole-grain flours.

This olive oil flatbread is made from white whole wheat flour along with pepitas, sunflower, poppy, and mustard seeds. You can pull the dough out paper thin or leave it a bit thicker, serve it straight or bake it with toppings. Whatever you like, really.

I made these for Lottie & Doof's 12 DAYS OF COOKIES. They are tiny, bite-sized holiday cookies made with two kinds of ginger and lots of shaved chocolate. The turbinado sugar crust gives them a bit of crunch which is a nice contrast to the ooey-goey chocolate.

Rustic orange-scented oat scones peppered with currants inspired by a recipe in Romney Steele's new Big Sur-based My Nepenthe cookbook.

An apple and carrot-flecked shortbread recipe inspired by a recipe I came across in Good Tempered Food by Tamasin Day-Lewis.

An old-fashioned blueberry cake sweetened with molasses adapted from a reader submitted recipe to the July 1974 issue of Gourmet Magazine - rustic, dark as chocolate, tender, and punctuated with lots of tiny pockets of oozy, magenta berry flesh.

These cheese straws look like wispy tree branches. Wayne calls them cheese twigs, and they never last very long around here. Crispy, cheddar-flecked, and rustic - it's the buckwheat flour that lends these slender creations their convincing shade of brownish gray.

From the Big Sur Bakery cookbook, a seed-packed pocket bread recipe contributed by a good friend of the bakery. Sesame, sunflower, flax and poppy seeds, millet, oat bran, and a bit of beer impressively cram themselves into these delicious, hearty rolls.

A deliciously dense, buckwheat flour cake that can be baked off in a tart or cake pan. From David Lebovitz's new book, The Sweet Life in Paris.

These charming little tartlets finish off a meal nicely. Oat-crusted with a creamy, ginger-spiked yogurt filling, they are delightful topped with any number of adornments - fresh berries, dried fruit, or crystallized ginger.

An all-natural carrot cake recipe. It is dense, rich, rustic, walnut-studded and carrot-flecked. Sweetened with dates and ripe bananas, it doesn't need any added sugar beyond that. Topped with cream cheese frosting.

This is a rich, decadent, but basic chocolate cake recipe. It is chocolate-packed, moist, and not-too-complicated. Baked and served in one pan slathered with a layer of fresh chocolate whipped cream frosting.

One of my favorite cookies - a carrot oatmeal cookie sweetened with maple syrup. They are made with fragrant coconut oil, plenty of chopped walnuts, rolled oats, and a bit of fresh ginger. They also happen to be egg-free and vegan.

A simple thumbprint cookie recipe. Made with whole wheat pastry flour and oats, and sweetened with honey instead of granulated sugar.

Thin, biscotti-style crackers densely pebbled with all manner of nuts and seeds - green pistachios, rust-toned hazelnuts, and off-black poppy seeds.

The perfect bite-sized chocolate chip cookie. Tiny, thin, golden, crisp, a bit nutty with plenty of shaved chocolate.

This ginger cookie recipe is made special with three kinds of ginger and a hint of lemon zest. Cracked and sugar-crusted on the outside, dense and moist within.

My friend Sante shared his hermit recipe with me - a simple, drop-style, spice cookie loaded with tiny currants, chopped walnuts, and finished with a bit of icing.

Favorite, easy pumpkin pie recipe. Made from a rich, roasted pumpkin and coconut milk base, and baked in a hazelnut-lined crust - delicious!

A moist, tender buttermilk cornbread packed with corn kernels and flecked with red pepper flakes. Simple and delicious.

A deliciously unfussy and relatively healthy apple cake recipe. Red-skinned apples punctuate a buttermilk batter and a final sprinkling of sugar before baking lends a nice top crust.

Kids love these animal-shaped cookies. They bake up fragrant, golden and crisp and are made from whole wheat pastry flour, a dollop of coconut oil, shredded coconut, ground walnuts, a touch of salt, and as little sugar as I thought I could get away with.

A wonderful coffee cake recipe made from fresh wild huckleberries using maple syrup as a sweetener instead of white sugar.

A remarkable healthy cookie recipe - banana-batter, shredded coconut, dark chocolate chunks, and oats. Butter-less, flour-less, egg-less, and potentially sugar-less cookies make great after school or after work treats.

Chocolate stuffed sandwich cookie recipe made with a poppy-flecked brown sugar dough.

A favorite zucchini bread recipe - green-lined strands of shredded zucchini, lemon zest, poppy seeds, and fragrant notes of coriander, cumin, and clove make this a very special zucchini bread recipe.

Not your typical peanut butter cookie recipe - but just as good. Tastes pretty darn close to the classic bu without all that butter, and with maple syrup in place of the white sugar. Vegan, egg-free, and easily made wheat-free if you like.

A rustic, cherry cobbler recipe made from fresh cherries - though you can certainly try this recipe with other types of summer fruit and berries.

A riff on one of my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipes. This version features banana chips, chocolate chips, toasted walnuts, toasted wheat germ, and whole wheat pastry flour.

Alice Medrich's twist on a traditional butter cookie recipe from her latest book, Pure Dessert. She uses a knock-out blend of all-purpose and buckwheat flours.

This quirky, yet amazing black bean brownie recipe delivers deliciously dense, bite-sized squares of melt-in-your-mouth fudge-textured brownies.

An Anzac cookie recipe, with a few little twists. Not overly-sweet, Anzacs are made from oats, coconut, and flour coming together in a butter-kissed dough. You end up with a hearty, sturdy cookie, with little fuss - altogether hard to get wrong.

This cracker recipe makes thin, snappy, rustic crackers - sturdy enough to stand up to a hearty dip. The technique is simple and straightforward (utilizing just a few ingredients) and the dough is a welcoming canvas to all manner of seeds, salts, cheeses, spices, or flavored oils that you might want to use as accents.

A fun twist on a traditional scone recipe. Instead of cutting dough into small pieces, a big piece of lemony scone dough is slathered with raspberry jam and folded in on itself.

A twist on the shortbread recipe I included in my book -perfectly golden pine nuts and just enough rosemary and lemon zest to infuse the buttery sweet dough with fragrance and flavor.

Yeast-leavened corn bread recipe, heavily flecked with kernels of bright yellow corn and generously spiked with chives. Perfect for stuffing and soup-dunking.

A grown-up twist on the figgy classic. This filling for this fig cookie recipe is dried figs that are marinated overnight in port and pomegranate juice and then pureed. They also happen to be gluten-free.

Golden, puffy, sun-dried tomato, and cottage cheese muffins. High in protein, low in carbs, they are a great, satisfying way to start the day.

Perfect, golden, scalloped madeleines. From a favorite recipe shared with me by a friend and long-time Madeleine baker.

Peter Reinhart's challah recipe creates a wonderful (and reasonably forgiving) dough that bakes into a tender, delicious version of the traditional Jewish celebration bread.

A delicious bran muffin recipe made from a yogurt and whole wheat base with minimal butter - they can certainly hold their own against their not-as-nutritious counterparts.

This rustic plum and peach crisp has a generous oat-flecked crumbly crust. Paired with a dollop of cold, creamy vanilla ice cream - heavenly.

Made from polenta, buttermilk, cayenne pepper, and Parmesan cheese, this is a perfect party cracker recipe.

A fudge brownie recipe packed with optional add-ins including freshly ground espresso beans, toasted walnuts, and mashed extra-ripe banana.

A fun and delicious alternative to deep-fried doughnuts. This cinnamon-sugar dusted baked doughnut recipe turns milk, flour, nutmeg, sugar, eggs, butter, and yeast into perfectly dunkable, delicious doughnuts.

Knee-deep coconut flecked frosting tops over a sour cream coconut cake batter base make these a quintessential holiday cupcake recipe.

A good Mexican wedding cookie recipe results in a tender nutty, butter-based cookie topped with an extravagant blizzard of powdered sugar.

Dark chocolate cookie recipe, each cookie pumped full of lots of freshly ground espresso powder.

As promised, an all-natural Thin Mint recipe for you. No shortening, no trans-fats from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils - just good old-fashioned butter, cocoa, vanilla, sugar, chocolate, whole grain flour, and peppermint turned into delicious, thin minty goodness.

The most exhaustive, detailed instructions on how to make a souffle excerpted from La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange - there are few better teachers.

A lilikoi curd-swirled loaf cake. It moist in the middle, sliceable, and delicious. Change curds with the seasons or as you are inspired - any flavor will work.

This jam tart recipe makes the cutest tarts ever. Cornmeal biscuit dough is the base, and you can play around with different shapes and sizes - they are delicious and buttery straight from the oven or at room temperature hours later.

From Michael Ableman's book, Fields of Plenty, a rustic, homey, unfussy pear cake recipe that comes together in five minutes before baking.

Spicy apple coffee cake recipe punctuated with oozy, warm apples.

Julie Hasson's delicious ginger cupcake recipe. Little bursts of crystallized ginger speckle each moist and sophisticated little cake.

If you like a serious chocolate chip cookie, this is the recipe. A high chip to dough ratio guarantees lots of chocolate in every bite, and the walnuts add crunch, density, and a delicious flavor to the overall mix. They are that good.

Stephan Pyles' banana bread recipe includes rum-soaked golden raisins, toasted pumpkin seeds, coconut milk, and oven-caramelized ripe bananas.