If you guessed Rosh Hashana, you’re 100% right! That’s the Jewish new year, when it’s traditional to eat sweet foods to usher in an equally sweet new year.

Honey is one of the most popular Rosh Hashana foods. A lot of people make a honey cake, but as Kenny pointed out, it’s not the best of cakes. So instead, I offer up these honey cookies!

The school system I teach for actually gives everyone the first day of this holiday off, so I only have to take leave for the second day. Yay for my wonderful county!

At the same time, most of my colleagues don’t celebrate the holiday, so they’re all excited to be getting into a three-day weekend, whereas I’m just looking ahead to lots of cooking and cleaning.

It’s traditional to make a lot of food for our holidays, and it’s all good stuff. There’s the requisite brisket, or honey-baked chicken, or kugel (look it up if you don’t know what this is). It’s all so much food, and yet people seem to eat every bite.

Seeing as how I’m doing a lot of work this weekend to prep, I’m keeping this post short. We all good on that? I’ll also be incommunicado through Tuesday night, so it is what it is. Goodbye, pretty iPhone. For now.

Honey cake is controversial because it’s often dry and comes across as an inferior version of spice cake or carrot cake. Therefore, I’ve jettisoned it completely in favor of honey cookies.

These are a snap to put together, and they are delightfully honey-ish without going fully over the threshold of being too sweet. If you pair these with tea, it’s a match made in heaven.

To all my friends celebrating, shana tovah (happy new year). May this be a year filled with all the good things!

I’m on a cake kick, for sure. Something is just very comforting about cake this time of year, and I need all the comfort snack breaks that exist. Pass me a fork and a plate!

This recipe is a one-bowl, throw everything together and mix kind of recipe. Even the glaze takes about two seconds to throw together. When you’re done, there’s a fluffy apple cake with a lovely honey glaze that looks like it took hours to make, but in reality might have taken 10 minutes. Are you game?

I’m so excited for apple season. Once a year, my family goes to an orchard (it’s about 26 miles away, so it’s not super nearby) for their annual pumpkin festival. While I love the corn maze (not) and the hay rides (yay!), the best part is undoubtedly their caramel apples.

Yep, it turns out that not much in life is more delicious than a freshly picked orchard apple smothered in caramel, peanuts, sprinkles and sea salt. I get mine with the works every year, and then I hide from my kids while I eat it on top of a hay bale. That way, Mommy doesn’t have to share.

This time of year also beckons the upcoming Jewish new year, otherwise known as Rosh Hashanah. That’s Hebrew for “head of the year.” To celebrate, it’s traditional to dip apples into honey (so good!) to beckon a sweet new year.

A few days ago, my daughter (the baby, she’s 4 and change) saw me baking this cake. When she found out that it was an apple cake, she immediately figured out that it was for our upcoming new year festivities. She’s smart, that one! And then she said, “Mommy, put honey in it.” Because of course, she knows that’s a winning combo this time of year.

To make her (and myself, honestly) happy, I put a simple honey glaze over the cake. It was really the perfect finish, and I’m so glad my kid figured that out for me.

Like I said, if you’re short on time, this cake is the way to go. My family really enjoyed it, and I plan on baking several more this autumn. It’s that time, after all. Let’s get our apple on!

Happy New Year! It’s my first post of 2016, and I’m so excited to see what this year will bring!

If there’s one food I want to see lots of in the coming year, it’s homemade bread. We’re all familiar with the yeasty goodness of bread that doesn’t come in plastic bags from the grocery store, and it’s so easy to get a perfect loaf with just a little help from my best friend, a.k.a. the bread machine. Life was so cold and dark before we met!

Luckily, fresh bread is always possible, and this one is special. It’s made with mostly whole wheat flour, which will help you stick to your healthy eating resolutions. It’s also full of walnuts for an extra protein punch, not to mention sweet Craisins® Dried Cranberries. It’s a loaf worth making!

On a day like today, I really need the extra sustenance. Studies have shown that today is one of the trickiest of the whole year. People drag themselves back to work and school from the celebrations of weeks past and realize that winter is ahead. If you look at it that way, it can be pretty grim.

But there’s so much to look forward to! Good TV, for instance. A lot of shows took mid-season breaks, but now they’re back. I’ll get to find out if the world ends on Heroes: Reborn, or find out if the world ends on Once Upon a Time. Now that I think about it, maybe I should stop watching television shows that deal with any coming apocalypse. It might explain those disturbing dreams I keep getting.

When I wake up after a night of dreaming and prepare for a day of work after a too-short winter break, I need to have a motivating force to propel me out of bed and into the cold, dark morning. And that force is bread, pure and simple. How could breakfast get any better?

If I’m feeling energetic, the best topping for this bread is cream cheese. But honestly, if I’m in a rush, I’ll eat it alone. There’s so much flavor happening here. Plus, the walnuts provide protein while the Craisins® give me that sweet zing I crave every morning. And with the whole wheat flour, this healthy bread gets me through until lunch. When I have more of the bread, of course. I made sandwiches with this for my kids, and they had a ball calling it “crazy bread.” For years, they’ve referred to Craisins® as “Crazies.” I love it.

And if I’m not packing my Craisins® into the best bread ever, then I’m sending them to work and school with everyone. This time of year, when packing lunches gets harder and harder as we try to find new foods to make everyone happy, we know we’ll always be good with Craisins®! After all, fresh fruit is hard to come by in the winter, but these magical “Crazies” equal a fruit serving.

You might be fighting off a case of the post-holiday blahs, but remember that good things are still in store! Fresh bread and good TV make life better. Instead of making New Year’s resolutions you can’t keep, focus on the joys of life and make this a year to remember!

To find Craisins® and other products (like new Craisins® Fruit Clusters), look in the dried fruit section at Walmart!

For those of you scratching your heads right now, that means that the Jewish new year is upon us. It’s traditional to eat apples and honey and other sweet foods to bring on a sweet year. There’s only one problem with that.

Honey cakes are often dry and not worth eating. It’s a serious problem. So here I am, your holiday 411. This cake is definitely worth gobbling!

What I like about the Jewish new year is that it’s introspective. Instead of making resolutions that we can’t possibly keep, the holiday is focused on us reviewing the past year and atoning for the mistakes we’ve made. If we’re truly sorry, and if we really wish we’d done things differently, this is our chance to try again with a clear slate.

But I’m not talking about the things we do constantly and don’t change, like Netflix binge when we’re supposed to be working. It’s not that kind of atonement. It’s centered on how we treat other people, how we treat ourselves, and how we interact with the world around us in a meaningful way. I like to take time to think about that, so it’s a good thing we get two days in synagogue to hammer it all out.

Mistakes are par for the course, but it’s how we respond to them that really makes a difference. I wish I were less of a gossip, and it’s actually considered really wrong in Judaism to speak badly about other people. It’s also the hardest habit to break. After all, what could make us feel more confident than putting someone else down behind her back? Or being the first to deliver news that nobody knows yet? What a great way to feel important.

Over the years as I try to better my own personal habits, I find that the best way to become a better person is to look outward. Nope, not inward. Outward. Look around at all the people who need help, and do something about it. That help could be as simple as giving charity to a local food bank, or more complex, like volunteering precious hours of time to make someone else’s day a little better.

A few years ago,  I was discussing the concept of charitable giving with a bunch of teachers. One said, “I don’t need to give charity. That’s what I do every day for a living.” I didn’t say anything out loud, but it make me kind of angry. Sure, teachers are underpaid. And sure, teachers spend their days helping others. However, I get more from my job than it gives me. It’s great to go home at the end of the day not only with a paycheck, but also with the feeling that I’ve done something worthwhile with my day.

On Rosh Hashanah, then, I think about how to be a better person. And of course, I think about how to bake a better cake.

This year, I grated an apple into the cake batter. I was trying to see what it would accomplish. Would it add to the cake’s moisture? Change the texture? What would happen? Oh, the experimental life of a baking blogger.

I grated the apples in so finely that they’re invisible after baking. I could taste the apple in the final product, but not too much. The apple gave the honey cake a gentle edge that honey cake usually doesn’t have. And to add to the moisture content, the cake is topped off with a simple sugar glaze. I’ve never met a bundt cake that didn’t benefit from some glaze on top.

Is this the most moist honey cake ever? In the end, no. But it’s still really good. And next year, I’ll keep trying to make it better, just like I’ll keep trying to make myself better.

To my Jewish friends, shana tovah (happy new year). And to everyone else in the digital realm, I’ll catch up with you in a couple of days!

In fact, my Eastern European grandmother (or Baba, as I called her) only made chocolate chip cookies for us as a concession to her grandchildren’s tastes. The rest of her baked goods were much more in line with her own upbringing.

A couple of times a year, my Baba would ship a huge box of her treats to us. She lived in New York and we lived in Indiana, so my brothers and I got super excited when those boxes arrived. Nestled in there were babkas, and rugelach, and cookies, and these. She called them yo-yos, and we loved them.

Yo-yos are a honey cookie, soft and cakey, sandwiched with jelly. You can pick your jelly flavor. I’ve used apricot in the past, but my favorite is raspberry. The jelly plays off the sweet cookie layers so well.

I always like to make these cookies around the Jewish new year, since they’re honey-based. The tradition is to eat sweet foods for an equally sweet year, and if that’s the requirement, I think my sugar addiction is ensuring a lifetime of happy years to come!

Yo-yos can be made in any size. These were fairly big, and I realized while following my grandmother’s sketchy baking directions that I was doing something wrong, because hers were always smaller. So if you’d like, disregard the recipe instructions and make the balls of dough smaller.

Either way, enjoy! Kids love these, and adults don’t turn their noses up at them either. My grandmother knew what she was doing!

Except, well, they’re often not so great. Honey cakes can be dry, sort of like pumpkin cake’s less sexy counterpart. Why make a honey cake when there’s pumpkin around?

I’ll tell you why. This cake. This amazing, tricked-out, not dry but super moist honey cake!

This is not your grandmother’s honey cake, everyone. It’s got coffee in it, sure. But it also has a lovely amount of Jack Daniel’s. Nothing says Happy New Year like whiskey!

My favorite thing about this cake is the ease of it all. You mix it all up in one bowl, pour it into a bundt, and voila! Amazing honey goodness. And then I made it even more crazy by adding a honey glaze to the surface. Heck, why not? Glaze just makes everything better!

So let happiness abound here, y’all. It’s a holiday for many people out there, and they should all have the best honey cake for a sweet new year.

Challah, that is.

Challah is too awesome to fly so much under the radar. It’s traditionally an egg bread made with white flour and sugar, kind of like brioche.  It makes amazing French toast.  There are also water versions, calling for no egg, as well as challahs filled with anything from raisins to chocolate chips.

And lately, whole wheat challah has begun to pop up in bakeries with more frequency, though it’s often put down by challah traditionalists, and who can blame them?  Challah is an indulgence, a bread so good that spreading butter or jam on a slice can actually take away from the yeasty, fresh-out-of-the-oven perfection of the bread itself.

I was pretty hestitant to give the whole wheat thing a try.  Why fix what ain’t broke?  But in a world where whole grains are healthier and white bread is just an occasional indulgence, I wanted to have my challah and eat it too.

After much experimenting, this puppy was born.

It tastes surprisingly non-whole wheat-y thanks to two things: a generous amount of honey and vanilla along with a hybrid of whole wheat and bread flour.  It’s mostly whole wheat, but I kept some of the bread flour in there to give the loaves that stretchy, chewy, yeasty texture that contrasts so nicely with a crisp crust.

See?  Isn’t she pretty?

Okay, honestly, I did the best I could.  Making the dough is the easy part, thanks to my best friend (a.k.a. the bread machine).  Braiding it, on the other hand, can be a real struggle.  As my son’s adorable friend asked, “Why does the chawwah wook so weiwd?”  Well, kiddo, I tried.

Speaking of kids, they love it when you make the dough into shapes.  I do the letters of their names, or Mickey Mouse.  Though note I did not provide a photo of that attempt.  The ears sorta fell off Mickey’s head.

But it’s all about the journey, right?  The journey to fresh, warm, home-baked bread that you can feel virtuous about eating. And serve on pretty platters.

So how do you achieve healthy bread heaven?  Take a look:

Ingredients:

• 2 eggs at room temperature
• 1 cup warm (not hot) water
• 2 tablespoons honey
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1/2 cup canola oil
• 2 and 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 3 and 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1 cup bread flour
• 2 and 1/4 tablespoons yeast (if you use a packet, it’s pre-measured)

Instructions:

As recommended by bread machine manufacturers, start with the wet ingredients.  Put them into the bread machine in the order listed above.

Once the wet ingredients are in add the salt and sugar and then pour in the flour.

Using your index finger, make a small well in the flour.  Fill it with the yeast.

Select the dough cycle on your bread machine and press start.

Shortly before the dough is set to come out, line two cookie sheets with aluminum foil and spray liberally with cooking spray.

Once the dough is done (usually about an hour and a half, depending on your machine), take it out and put it on a floured surface.

Punch the dough down and let it rest for 5-10 minutes.

Using your hands or a sharp knife, divide the dough in half.  Then, separate each half into three equal sections.  Rolling each section between your palms, elongate each piece into a rope. Cross the ropes over each other into a braid and pinch the ends together.

Note: you can shape the challah any way you like, so you can also make rolls, round challah, or whatever suits you!

Once the dough is shaped, place it on the prepared foil-lined pans.  Cover the dough in plastic wrap and let it rise, about one hour.  Sometimes it takes an hour and a half, depending on the temperature and humidity of your kitchen.

When the dough is risen, preheat the oven to 350.  Once the oven is ready, put in the challah.

10 minutes into baking, rotate the challah pans so that they bake evenly.  Then, put the challah back in the oven for another 10-15 minutes until the tops are golden and the underside is medium brown.

Let the challah cool a bit before eating. However, if you are not eating it right away, wrap it in plastic or foil and then heat again before serving.