By the time I made it down to the deck overlooking the chicken coop, the raccoon had her half way down the run. I stood above them, trembling, crying, and throwing rocks until the ‘coon dropped the injured hen and alighted to the top of the fence.

By six am the sun was up, Trotsky was in the ground, and her last two eggs were folded into a batch of blackberry orange muffins. Despite our heavy lids, I knew the Squeeze and I were up. And we may as well eat.

Ingredients:

Procedure:

I always have greater success in achieving a good texture when I mix these muffins by hand instead of in an electric mixer. Lumpy batter is OK.

1. Prepare ten standard-sized muffin cups and preheat oven to 350ºF.
2. Cream butter and sugar. Don’t worry about “light and fluffy,” just get them smoothly and evenly combined.
3. In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.
4. Add eggs, vanilla, and orange zest to butter mixture. Stir to combine. Do not mix so long that it becomes smooth and uniform.
5. Add flour mixture and milk. Again, stir to combine, leaving some lumps.
6. Gently fold in blackberries. Scoop into muffin tin.
7. Bake until lightly browned and a toothpick inserted into the center of the muffin comes out clean.
8. Cool five minutes on a wire rack before removing muffins from the tin.

Adíos, Trotsky. We’ll miss you and your delicious eggs.

Ingredients:

• 3 Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored, halve and thinly sliced.
• For the tart dough:

• For the frangipane:

Procedure:

• For the tart dough:

1. Cream butter, sugar, ground nuts, and almond paste.
2. Add egg and beat.
3. Mix in flour and salt until just combined.
4. Wrap tightly in plastic and chill before use

• For the frangipane:

1. Cream butter, sugar, nut flour, and almond paste.
2. Add egg.
3. Mix in flour and salt until just combined.
4. Wrap in plastic and chill before use.

• To assemble and bake the tart:

1. Preheat oven to 350ºF.
2. Roll out dough to ¼inch thickness and line tart pan/ring.
3. Spread in frangipane to just below the top edge of the tart.
4. Arrange apples in fan pattern or, as shown, in a co-centric circles.
5. Bake until edges are dark brown. Cool completely. Glaze, if you like. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. Combine all and toss.
2. Let sit out, covered, for at least one hour to marry the flavors.

Procedure:

1. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
2. Beat in vanilla and egg and combine thoroughly.
3. Stir in flour, cornmeal, salt and baking powder. Mix with paddle attachment on low speed until dough becomes one cohesive lump.
4. Stir in cranberries until evenly distributed.
5. Divide dough in half and form two logs, about an inch in diameter.
6. Wrap logs in plastic and freeze or refrigerate.
7. Preheat oven to 350ºF.
8. When dough is cool enough that it’s no longer sticky, slice about ¼” thick.
9. Lay slices out on a cookie sheet lined with parchment or silpat. You may place them fairly close together, as these cookies do not expand very much.
10. Bake until edges are just beginning to brown, rotating once, about fifteen to twenty minutes.
11. Transfer to wire rack immediately.

I guess I must have grown up a Nabisco Kid. I can still hear the mid-1980s jingle: the rising intonation of the company name followed by the sweet little “bing,” just like, I always imagined, a faerie’s wand, putting just a little bit of magic into my favorite snack cookie. Little Debbie was cute, but she never stood a chance.

While the Keebler Elves kind of creeped me out, and I’ve always preferred Premium brand saltine crackers to Nabisco’s Club, the Fig Newton is, I believe, among the very best of the brand’s bunch. And while I can’t really sign off on the “fruit and cake” assessment, the classic Fig Newton is no ordinary cookie. Neither is my grown-up version of it, a revision and expansion of David Lebovitz’ Fig Cookie recipe in his gorgeous cookbook, Room for Dessert.

You will need a couple of hours from start to finish, which may be split over two days if you like. I suggest starting with the filling, and letting it reduce and thicken while you make the cookie dough. When both the filling and the dough are well chilled, you’ll want a good-sized, cool workspace upon which to roll out the dough and assemble the cookie logs. I like working on a lightly-floured pastry cloth, as the cloth makes transferring the log to a cookie sheet quite easy. When I set to making these the first time, I was somewhat intimidated at the notion of making a filled cookie, but they are really quite simple.

Roll the dough out into rectangles, then make a row of filling in the middle.

Then brush the edges with water. Fold one side up, then the other.

Next, just press the short ends together to seal off the log and transfer to a lined baking sheet.

Bake until golden, about thirty minutes. Cool; slice.