The Best Sweet Spice You’re Not Baking With 🥧

Mysterious MVP of cakes and crumbles

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June 18, 2026 8:04am EDT

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Ren, Radhika, June and Max of the Burlap & Barrel Team

Greetings spice friends, I’m Max, the new editorial lead at Burlap & Barrel. I’m a food and travel writer and have been working with the team for a few months now, so I wanted to introduce myself. I’m also here to stage an intervention of sorts, because I heard that most of you aren’t cooking with mace—my baking MVP—and I want to try and change that.

GET MACED BY MAX

Grenada Gold Mace from the Burlap & Barrel Team

I go through more mace than cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg put together in everything from pies and cakes to rice pudding and ice cream. Mace is citrusy, aromatic and mysterious. It tastes like sandalwood, but also apricots, with hints of vanilla and butter. The flavor makes its presence known without clobbering everything else, so it gets along with other ingredients better than heavy hitters like Royal Cinnamon.

Eating mace gets me in a medieval mindset when the world seemed bigger and spices were worth their weight in gold. Nowadays we have everything at our fingertips and rarely get to feel surprised by what we eat. Mace is surprising. It’s a secret element I add to sweet and savory dishes that always gets people asking for the recipe.

See that scarlet webbing? That’s our Grenada Gold Mace before it’s separated from the nutmeg seed, sun-dried and ground.

There was a period years ago when I was on a real mace bender. I picked up a fruit crisp recipe from my friend Sam and his mom Suzanne, who was a chef in Berkeley. Suzanne made a dynamite topping out of pecans, flour, butter, raw sugar and lots of lemon zest and salt, blitzed together in a food processor and spooned over any fruit she could find. I got hooked, using it on apples in the fall and peaches and sour cherries with bourbon in the summer. Each time I made a new crisp I tweaked the recipe to my taste. On a lark one day I added some mace that had been languishing in my pantry for far too long. The crisp got rave reviews. Sam told me that even his mom, a tough customer if ever there was one, would have loved it.

Grenada Gold Mace Crumble from the Burlap & Barrel Team

Since then there’s been no going back. I add mace whenever a recipe calls for nutmeg to bring an extra special lift. It’s essential to my rice pudding with cardamom and cinnamon. And I still use it in that pecan crisp all the time. Whenever I do, I think fondly of my friend Sam, who moved back home to open a restaurant with his mom. Good food takes you places and lets you travel through time. My friendship with Sam tastes like mace, and now all my fruit crisps taste like friendship.

Ready to try mace?

Swap it for nutmeg in Nutmeg Yogurt Cake, Chocolate Mousse or use it with nutmeg in this Guava-Apple Crumble from Grenada
Stir into any slow-cooked meaty braise, like a tagine with lamb and apricots. Mace loves apricots.
Add to homemade whipped cream for topping any fresh fruit
Fold into yogurt and top with Sumac Pomegranate Cherry Preserves