Recipe: Thick and Chewy Oatmeal Raisin Cookies, Adapted from Quaker Oats

A parent who thought their toddler disliked cheese discovered he loved goldfish crackers at a park. That led to a decision to make homemade cheddar crackers, drawing on a prior discovery that cheese straws taste like Cheez-Its.

A food writer shares a marbleized hamantaschen recipe that combines chocolate and vanilla doughs with a cream cheese filling, departing from traditional pareve versions. The recipe, adapted from Breads Bakery, uses a food processor for quick dough and yields 30 to 36 cookies, offering a dairy-rich alternative for Purim.

A self-described kale skeptic describes an unforgettable salad at Barbuto during a Chef's Table birthday dinner and attempts a home version. The salad pairs raw slivered kale with wine-plumped golden raisins, toasted walnuts, olive oil-toasted breadcrumbs and aged pecorino romano.

A parent's account of making a confetti cake for a daughter's second birthday, sharing a tweaked white cake recipe and instructions for turning it into an Elmo sheet cake. The recipe reduces flour and baking powder while increasing butter for a moist crumb, and includes a stencil method for piping Muppet characters.

A food blogger revisits homemade granola bars after trying a thick, chewy version at Whole Foods. She adapts a King Arthur Flour recipe by reducing sugar and using a smaller pan to achieve the desired texture, aiming to solve her breakfast-skipping habit.

A scaled-up pumpkin bread recipe uses a full 15-ounce can of pumpkin puree and adds a cinnamon-sugar topping that bakes into a crisp, snickerdoodle-like lid. The recipe addresses common issues with loaf size, leftover puree, and texture contrast.

Smitten Kitchen's Deb Perelman has revisited the David Leite chocolate chip cookie recipe from The New York Times, a dough that requires at least 24 hours of chilling and yields 18 cookies up to 5 inches wide. She explains why the oversized, three-textured cookie has become worth the wait.

A food blogger shares a one-bowl chocolate loaf cake recipe designed for summer, contrasting it with heavier cold-weather chocolate desserts. The cake uses buttermilk and Dutch-processed cocoa, bakes in 60 to 70 minutes, and the blogger says it tastes even better on days two and three.

A home cook discovers a famous winter squash toast recipe from Jean-Georges Vongerichten's ABC Kitchen. The dish combines roasted squash, tangy onion confit, ricotta or goat cheese, and mint on olive oil-toasted bread, offering a crowd-pleasing weeknight meal.