A recipe for an olive oil rosemary cake with pine nuts. This is an Italian cake that isn’t too sweet, and is great with preserved fruit and a little liqueur.
Dessert Recipes
A selection of recipes for snacks and desserts featuring wild edible plants. You'll find baked goods, ice creams, cookies and cakes, all using wild nuts and berries.
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• Recipes: Ice Creams & Ices | Booze & Brewing | Baked Goods | Wild Syrups
Ice Creams and Ices
I love making ice cream with wild ingredients, and, where something creamy isn't appropriate, ices and sorbets.
Some of my favorites are wild mint leaf ice cream, paw paw ice cream, and black walnut ice cream, which is also great with butternuts or hickory nuts.
I also make a damn good gooseberry and blackberry sorbet.
Booze and Brewing
Infused liqueurs, wild beers and wines, even wild champagnes are big favorites. It's an important way to preserve the aromas and flavors of many wild foods.
Some of my most popular recipes are elderberry wine, elderflower liqueur - and elderflower champagne - as well as spruce tip beer, and my all time favorite wild brew, a red ale fermented on wild juniper yeast I call Junipine.
Baked Goods
I am not a natural baker, but I do have a few recipes for baked goods I am happy with, mostly cookies and simple cakes. Especially cookies.
The pretty picture at the top of this page is of my pine nut cookies, and some of my other popular baked goods include persimmon bread, olive oil rosemary cake, butternut squash bread, fig bread, huckleberry muffins, butternut cookies and anise cookies made with wild fennel seeds.
And come holiday time, venison mincemeat pies are well worth the effort - sweet, tart, savory, fatty, and crunchy, they check all the boxes.
Wild Syrups
One of the most versatile things you can do with a wild fruit or aromatic herb is to make a simple syrup with it. This brings out the flavor of the fruit, and is shelf stable.
My most popular wild syrup is prickly pear syrup, but I also make a mean spruce tip syrup, that also works with pine or fir, a simple blackberry syrup, and an intriguing fig syrup that is great on ice cream or pancakes.
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Pine Nut Cookies
How to make pine nut cookies, pignoli, with American pine nuts — although any kind of pine nut works. These cookies have a touch of rosemary in them and are not too sweet.
Butternut Squash Bread
My take on the classic, butternut squash bread is like pumpkin bread: A semi-sweet, breakfast type quickbread studded with pepitas.
Fig Bread
A semi-sweet, moist fig and nut bread that’s great for breakfast or a snack; it’s a hybrid fig bread and fig cake. Walnuts add a nice crunch.
Fig Syrup
Tired of maple syrup? Make fig syrup. You can use fresh or fried figs, wild or store-bought.
Elderberry Ice Cream
I love ice creams. They are my main weakness when it comes to sweets, and I specialize in weird ice creams — herbs like yerba buena and fruits like this elderberry ice cream. Elderberries live in most states, and are ripe from June to September, depending on where you live. Only use ripe berries, as
Blackberry Panna Cotta
Blackberry panna cotta is a joy of summer, and can be made in several different ways that I’ll go through here. A traditional blackberry panna cotta would actually be a vanilla panna cotta with blackberry syrup and fresh or macerated blackberries on top, as in the picture. I prefer to infuse the blackberries in the
Elderflower Liqueur
Making your own elderflower liqueur is a way to remember that moment when spring becomes summer, even in the depths of winter. Elderflowers are the color of butter and smell sweet and just a bit spicy. Their beauty fades fast, however. You will need to pick them before noon, as the aroma fades once the