Calvados

This recipe bridges the gap between winter and spring with warming spices and a light rosé.

At Clove Club, they use dandelion and burdock bitters in this winter warmer of a drink. They’re tough to find, though—Angostura bitters are your best bet (and the drink won’t suffer for it).

Named for a region in Normandy known for its apples (and Calvados), this traditional recipe combines both in a rich, creamy sauce. Afraid to flambé? Buy a long-reach lighter at a hardware store.

This lightly sweetened, crepe-like dessert is a great way to end any meal, be it breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It's delicious with crème fraîche or vanilla ice cream.

Bring in the cheer with this ruby red drink made with apple brandy, hot cider, cranberry, and plenty of warm spice.

This is a dessert you'll make over and over in the fall when interesting apples fill the farmers’ market; but the Calvados sauce ensures it even makes out-of-season apples sing.

My favorite apple pie recipe comes from a friend who shares my name, and who was kind enough to share with me a recipe for an apple pie that's practically a work of art. More than a thousand words long, it features little anecdotes here and there, making the recipe valuable for the writing alone, never mind the pie that comes off its pages. We wanted to re-create the flavor of apple pie in ice cream, but pie crust didn't quite work out when tucked into custard—it got too soggy for it to be any good. Instead, we decided to keep the filling and use bits of cooked crumble topping as cookielike bites mixed in with bits of apple. Calvados is a nice way to bump up the apple flavor, but if you don't have that on hand, rum or brandy should do in pinch.

This is a tiki drink disguised as an old-fashioned, so it's no surprise that it comes from Brian Miller, Death & Co's resident scalawag and expert on all things Polynesian. One night a waitress asked Brian to make something stirred and boozy, so he took one of tiki's core principles—blending several base spirits to create a new flavor profile—and applied it to whiskey and brandy. It was another breakthrough moment for the bar, and these days it's not unusual to find two or more base spirits in our drinks.