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Maybe today's a good day for double-caramel sticky buns, or perhaps you're in the mood for gently flavored pistachio buns with a pistachio paste-loaded frosting. These tender and light (well, light for a sticky bun, at least) rolls get covered in a gooey, glorious caramel when they come out of the oven. To those of you who think a caramel sticky bun isn't caramel-y enough, we present the double-caramel sticky bun. Toasted sugar in the dough, filling and the caramel mixture itself doubles down on the caramel flavor at every stage of baking.

We're pretty sure most Serious Eats readers have a copy of The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science by Kenji López-Alt, since it's indispensable, which means you know how great a gift it will be for anyone who is interested in improving the quality of the food coming out of their kitchen. The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science $33.96 from Amazon Stella Parks's BraveTart: Bangkok: Recipes and Stories from the Heart of Thailand $20.68 from Amazon Hawker Fare: Stories and Recipes from a Refugee Chef's Isan Thai and Lao Roots by James Syhabout, the chef behind the Michelin-starred Commis in Oakland, and award-winning author John Birdsall, is a great introduction to some of the flavors that make Isan and Lao cuisines unique. I've written about why I think The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael Twitty should be read by just about everyone, but I also think it makes a wonderful gift for anyone who is interested in history, food, the history of food, and this terribly flawed but nonetheless beautiful thing we call America.

Here, it's important to use a mild molasses (often called baking molasses, light molasses, or Barbados molasses). Gingerbread cookie dough can be rolled to any thickness, but I like my cookies thin and crisp, so I take the dough all the way down to an 1/8th of an inch since they'll puff up a bit as they bake. For those who prefer soft and thick cookies, stop at 1/4th of an inch instead, but do bear in mind this will substantially reduce the recipe's yield. Gingerbread cookies don't need frosting, since they're crisp and rich and totally satisfying without it, but royal icing is a fun and traditional way to further personalize the cookies.

As an architect, he's designed every Nobu location around the globe, not to mention airline terminals, multiple W Hotels, and the Dolby theater, where the Academy awards are held. So when I decided I wanted to devote a couple of episodes of Special Sauce to visual thinking, I immediately emailed David. These early projects were before the dawn of the Legos era, but Rockwell did eventually discover those addictive plastic pieces when he would bring them home for his own son: "When he was seven or eight, I would get these insanely complicated lego sets and my wife would remind me, those lego sets are supposed to be for Sam." You Could Be on Special Sauce Want to chat with me and our unbelievably talented recipe developers?