Cooking Crafts

Homemade Chile Powder for Spice Blends

How to dehydrate and grind chile peppers, with recipes for chili powder and custom spice blends using fresh homegrown and/or exotic store bought chiles. Preserve expensive and/or hard to find chiles.

Homemade Sprinkles

Learn how to make homemade sprinkles in custom colors using the royal icing method. From the author of the Sprinkles cookbook.

Bombshell Boxed Brownie Dessert Pan Pizzas

These individual brownie pan pizzas are baked and served in Lodge 3.5-inch cast iron skillets. The options for different toppings are endless. Have fun experimenting with different combinations or set up a topping bar and let everyone pick their own.

Black and White Oreo Bark

Three ingredient white chocolate bark with Oreos that can be made in 30 minutes or less for a quick dessert or snack.

Mini Brownie Stack Cakes

A beautiful looking stacked dessert that’s easy to make using boxed brownie mix, berries and whipped cream.

Rainbow Sprinkles Cream Cheese

Rainbow sprinkles for breakfast? Yes! A crunchy and slightly sweet sprinkles cream cheese recipe for everyone who needs more rainbow sprinkles in their lives.

Sriracha Lime Vinaigrette Salad Dressing

This super easy salad dressing recipe is especially good on a Greek salad, cucumber salad or Asian Chicken salad and you can make it right in the bottle if you only have a little bit of Sriracha left.

Chocolate Caramel Apple Pops

A cute, kid friendly recipe for slices of apples dipped in chocolate and decorated with sprinkles candy or nuts. This recipe was originally developed fro Refinery29.

Baguette Breakfast Casserole

This visually stunning breakfast casserole is elegant, yet quick and easy to prepare. Tuck savory Canadian bacon, eggs, herbs, and cheese inside slices of crusty baguettes. Recipe and food photography by Jackie Alpers

Black & White Cookies With Sprinkles

Look to the cookie. These soft and cakey half-and-half cookies are the perfect palette for your favorite sprinkles, jimmies, confetti, or dragees in elegant shades of black and white.

Fleur De Sel Caramels

Fleur de sel (flower of salt) is a hand-harvested sea salt with distinctive flavor. Look for variations that have a pink or gray tone. You’d think that something with such a fancy-sounding name might be complicated to make, but in fact these sweet and savory bite-size treats are as easy to concoct as they are to devour. Still, if you want to let your friends believe these caramels are a feat of culinary magic, your secret’s safe with me.

Sprinkles Fairy Bread Sandwiches

Make any day a celebration! Just barely sweet, these sparkly sandwiches make a fun breakfast surprise, after-school snack, or party food.

Inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “Fairy Bread” from A Child’s Garden of Verses, fairy bread is a popular treat at children’s parties in Australia, New Zealand, and other little pockets of the world.

This recipe is from my book Sprinkles!: Recipes and Ideas for Rainbowlicious Desserts. The photograph is previously unpublished

Hand Painted Flower Cookies

Celebrate spring with hand-painted watercolor flower cookies. Herbs, fruit juice and plant dyes can all be used as food coloring.

Sparkling Cranberry and Brie Crostini

Visually stunning sugared cranberries are a study in contrast. The tart, dark berries which appear to have been encrusted in tiny jewels, add a magical quality to these brie crostini.

Postmodern Art Popsicles

What is the nature of art? Can it exist in popsicle form? Is it still art after the popsicle has been eaten? How does the process of melting affect the piece? These are some of the questions that I pondered while creating, and then ingesting this popsicle. made it from diamond shaped sprinkles in primary colors and Sno-Caps candies.

Pretty in Pink: Candied Lady Apples

These easy candied apples are a healthy, sweet treat that are fun for kids to make. I used Lady Apples, which are stunning, tiny, sweet apples that resemble crab apples. Also called Christmas Apples, they are generally available in stores starting in mid-October.  The candy melts are small discs that come in a variety of colors and are available at Michael’s and other craft stores as well as some supermarkets. I chose pink because I thought it looked nice with the red apples, but it’s fun to play around and find the colors you like best.