Food Editor's Note:

This is a delicious alternative to the traditional cranberry relish. It is sweet, but not too sweet, crunchy, but without nuts, and beautiful to present on a round glass serving dish. It is very popular in our family and even the children love it. You will need an 8 1/2-cup ring mold for this recipe, which makes about 16 good-size servings. Prepare this at least one day in advance, refrigerate, and unmold just before serving.

This is a great cake to make when you want something different and festive, yet not too heavy or rich.  The white angel food cake, with the red whole cranberries and flecks of orange zest throughout, looks beautiful.  This is a perfect dessert for Thanksgiving, to augment the usual pie offerings.  Your guests watching their weight or their cholesterol – or those who have consumed too much turkey! – will be grateful.  The glaze is decorative and very sweet; for something more simple, just sprinkle the cake with powdered sugar.

This is a recipe that a friend gave me a few years ago.  I add raisins to it and think it makes a great lunch or dairy dinner with a salad.  It is very rich and creamy.

Food Editor's Notes:  This is one of our 2006 Passover Recipe Contest winners!  You won't believe how light and fluffy (yet still rich and creamy) a Passover kugel can be!  This is basically a sweet cheese noodle kugel without the noodles.  The farfel helps to hold it together, but doesn't make it dense or heavy.  This is a sweet treat – it comes out of the oven a beautiful golden brown and puffed up high.  It's best served like this, right from the oven – perfect for a brunch or company supper - but it's also wonderful reheated for breakfast, lunch, or a special snack.

Here’s the story behind this recipe. I was asked to bring charoset to the nth annual potluck seder a bunch of my friends threw every year. Having never made charoset before, I dutifully searched through Jewish cookbooks and articles to make the perfect charoset. I decided I needed walnuts, apples, wine and honey.

The first error was that I didn't think I was chopping the walnuts fine enough and threw them into my food processor and started grinding away. As things began to turn to paste, I kept adding more apples to “chunk” it up and wine to get the right color, because I thought the apples looked too white against what was now the walnut paste. The wine turned everything this really interesting purplish color. At that point I figured the honey was totally out of the question.

Slightly embarrassed, but having used the entire pound of walnuts, I brought it to the potluck seder. The host took one look, cracked up, and someone ran out to the hardware store around the corner to buy a “Pesadich” trowel to serve the charoset. It actually worked quite nicely when we made Hillel sandwiches (and for leftovers). It soon became a tradition for me to bring the mortar type of charoset and someone else was assigned to bring a “traditional” charoset.

I should note that this is best served with Larry’s killer homemade horseradish rather than the stuff from a jar.