everything bagel bombs
If you’re into food novelties, these are for you.
Also, if you like convenient party food, these are for you.
Read MoreChocolate Peanut Butter
This was a recipe I definitely did not mind testing. But though I tested (with LOTS of tasting), there’s still just a lot of wiggle room in the recipe. When you have a treat like chocolate peanut butter, it might as well be just to your taste. So please don’t be annoyed by my loosey-goosey ingredients list. Feel free to follow it to the letter the first time, but fiddle with it as you please! I really just want to empower you to just try making it, that’s all. And anyway, chocolate and peanuts? You can’t really mess it up.
Read Moreraspberry oat bars
Linzertorte is a traditional Austrian dessert sandwiching fruit preserves (typically raspberry) between a nut-based pastry and a beautiful lattice top. These raspberry oat bars are the happy result of a search for a linzertorte-like dessert without so much of the hassle, and without the nuts.
Read MorePita Bread
Have you made pita bread? You should. It is wonderfully easy. Plus, it can be filled with a whole array of things to make a meal (falafel, veggies & rice, meat, bananas & peanut butter, fried eggs & quinoa, etc…). Or, simply have it on the side to enjoy! Toasted and smeared with butter — incredible.
Read More"Twix" Candy Bars
For the past several years, my sister-in-law and I have been making the bulk of our Easter candies. Both of us love to bake, and it is fun to pick out different recipes to try out, opt for new challenges, and try again to nail a previous favorite.
Read MoreOrange Cranberry Scones
If you can’t have too many muffin recipes, neither can you have too many scone recipes. My favorite will always be the impossibly easy cream scones, but I don’t mind a little change up now and then. These scones are lightly orange-scented and studded with tangy cranberries. Cream scones are soft and tender, whereas these butter-based scones have a richer flavor and are a bit dryer with crisp golden edges. They’re good fresh, but my favorite is to wait a bit longer and then slice, toast, and spread them with butter.
Read MoreBasil mint cake with pistachio chantilly cream
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
Just over a year ago I came across a recipe for a parsley cake while visiting Maria and flipping through her copy of Food52’s Genius Desserts cookbook. It was love at first sight…a crazy vibrant green herb-loaded cake.
Read MoreEveryday Soda Bread
Ever since writing this post our first year up and running, I’ve begun to bake Irish soda bread beyond the annual St. Patrick’s day. It is too good not to enjoy more times of the year! Plus, it is so quick and easy. We are a bread with every meal (basically) family, so soda bread is a great one to fall back on.
Read MoreChocolate, peanut butter & fig energy balls
So as a mom of two with a third on the way I got to this point of being fed up with buying granola bars. Sure, they are convenient. But do they have any real nutritional value?
Read More"anything you choose" muffins
Ok, so Joy of Cooking just calls these Basic Milk Muffins, but since you can also use cream, or buttermilk, or add any kind of fruit - dried or fresh - or nuts or spices or any variation thereof, I figured I could get away with calling them “endlessly variable”.
These really are just a simple muffin - not heavy and bready, not fluffy and cakey; moist but not dense, and juuuuust sweet enough. They are delicious. Sometimes I make them plain Jane with nothing at all. Sometimes I add a bit of cinnamon and chocolate chips; sometimes I add fruit and/or nuts. In the variation pictured above, I added orange zest, fresh cranberries, white chocolate chips, and walnuts.
I have never made these and not liked them.
Read Moreorange cornmeal cake with candied rosemary and orange bourbon soak
One of my favorite challenges in reworking or rethinking or creating a new recipe is to minimize waste. So, for instance, my preferred method of making macarons is to use a French buttercream as the base for the filling—which uses up all the egg yolks leftover from the macaron shell’s egg whites. (On that note, Sophie does have two great posts offering tips on using up leftover egg yolks and egg whites.)
Read MoreChocolate Oatmeal Lace Cookies (GF & Milk Free)
I’ve loved these cookies for years. Though only five ingredients (six with the chocolate), they are interesting and addictive. They just happen to be gluten and milk free. I sometimes add spices like cinnamon to them to vary them up. They are thin, crisp, and almost melt-in-your-mouth.
Read MoreMini marzipan scones
Hands down almond is my favorite flavor. I can vaguely recall a time as a child when I didn’t like marzipan, but those days are far behind me. Something happened and now I can’t get enough of anything almond-flavored.
Read MoreLemon Tea Cookies, 3 Ways
I found this recipe many years ago. A friend came over after school, and we paged through my family’s cookbooks for baking inspiration. We hit upon this one, and it has remained a beloved recipe ever since.
Read MoreNo-Knead Artisan Bread
Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (or ABIF) was something of a revolution when it first hit the market just over a decade ago (in fact, the word “revolution” is present in its very title). It was the bread-baking technique that first got me, and countless others, baking bread on a regular basis. The notion was simple: bread baking shouldn’t be prohibitive; it’s a basic human activity. How can this ancient tradition be reintroduced to the modern home? With a recipe that takes roughly “Five Minutes a Day,” Artisan bread was back on American tables.
Read MoreApple Pandowdy
Apple Pandowdy may very well be better than apple pie…and I’m someone who really likes apple pie.
It’s not an elegant dessert—I think the name speaks clearly to that. But it’s the name, “Pandowdy,” that first got me hooked, and the baked dessert lives up to it every inch.
Read MoreSalted Caramel Sauce
It’s the season for apples, cinnamon, pumpkin and all things autumn, and there’s really no better accompaniment for all those good things than a salted caramel sauce. It’s so versatile and adds another dimension to dessert with its more complex sweetness and buttery smoothness. Drizzle it over cheesecake or pie, swirl it into brownies, sandwich it between cake layers - there’s so much you can do!
Read MorePumpkin Cinnamon Rolls
I’m not crazy about making all things pumpkin the moment Fall begins. BUT, I’m not one to complain about cinnamon rolls either. So, when my little sister visits and requests that we make these, I don’t object.
Read MoreSoft white sandwich bread
If you look closely at these photos, you’ll notice that the crumb is a little more open than it should be. Perhaps it wasn’t shaped as tightly as possible or the dough wasn’t developed as well as it could be for even distribution of yeast development. Guess why I don’t care. BECAUSE MY EIGHT YEAR OLD SON MADE IT. I realized one day that he was totally capable of baking bread start-to-finish all on his own and that not only would it be a great learning opportunity for him, but it could also become one of his “chores”. So I walked him through the process and wrote down these ingredients as we baked this loaf together - intended to be easy and forgiving and to yield a loaf that he would be proud of and all the kids would want to devour.
Read MoreDutch Cocoa Cream Cake
I had my doubts about this cake. The ingredients and method both seemed unusual to me, and I expected it to be maybe one dimensional and unremarkable. I know the recipe promises the cake will be “light, delicate, and delicious … like a milk chocolate bar”, but I was skeptical. But I’ve been working through my vintage recipe project and the occasion of my 1 year old’s birthday was pretty low stakes, so I gave it try. And I am so glad I did! This cake came out of nowhere and totally won me over. It is so so delicious. It’s not fancy, it’s nothing gourmet or complicated, but it is light as a dream with a delicate texture and chocolate flavor. The cake layers and the whipped cream together are airy and not too sweet - in fact, the cake is almost salty in the way that the most delicious milk chocolate has the sweet/salty element that keeps you going back for more. The frosting is very sweet, but it pulls it all together and balances the cake and cream. I’ve made a lot of cakes and watched a lot of kids eat those cakes and most of the time they don’t finish, or they eat the frosting and leave the cake or pick out the cake and leave the frosting. Not this time. They inhaled it., each one of them, both days it was served. So did the adults… I mean, when a cake is this light, it goes down real easy.
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