Passover Dinner

For those of you who don't know, on Passover you can't eat any leavened food. This includes any food made with flour that isn't prepared in a special way to ensure that it doesn't rise at all (that's why matzo is perferated like a cars cracker). There's all sorts of other categories of things you can't eat--legumes, for example--but generally if I can stick to unleavened food for the whole holiday, I'm happy.

Afternoon Tea for my Birthday

I love afternoon tea at the Berkeley in London. As tea goes, it not traditional and it's probably not the best taste-wise (not that it's not tastey, but sometimes they get so fancy they sacrifice taste just a bit), but it's still my favorite. It's the girliest tea ever and it's just so much fun! They base all their desserts off the latest runway styles and it's a hoot!

Pink Ombre Bunny Birthday Cake

Every year for my birthday my mom makes me a boxed cake mix bunny cake. (She can make great cakes from scratch, don't get me wrong, but I like boxed cake one day a year.) The deal is--or at least has been since I was 8ish--that she makes the bunny cake and I decorate it. When I was younger I made tie dye one and pink ones and really whatever I wanted. The last bunch of years though, I've been on a "I should make this resemble a bunny" kick. This culminated in last year's coconut bunny cake. I didn't think I could top the bunny-ness of that one, so this year I decided to go for something a bit less bunny and a bit more fun: pink ombré.

Paris, part 2

Other than the Musee d'Orsey, we pretty much avoided major tourist traps. It's not that we don't love the Louvre and the Eiffle Tour, but we've been to both countless times and it was nice just wandering and seeing new things.

Paris, Part 1

J'adore Paris. Seriously, it's my favorite city! Well, actually it's not my favorite. It's tied with New York City for favorite (and I do love London...) But it's defintely my favorite city I've never lived in! There's something about it that is just amazing. Of course more than the feel of the city, there's the food! So when I went to Paris for two nights, I pretty much ate my way through the city. I forgot to take photos of everything--I was much too distracted by actually eating it--but I got some of the deliciousness and here it is:

 

Chocolate Pudding Cake

This was another pre-Passover experiment in flourless chocolate cake baking. (I should point out that I have quite a few more traditional flourless chocolate cake recipes that I know work, but I've made most or all of them for my family at some point and I really want to try something new for the holiday.)

Chocolate Olive Oil Cake

I love olive oil cakes. Using oil, rather than butter, as the primary fat makes them remarkably light and, depending on the oil, smooth. Chiffon cakes are a good example; they use vegetable oil as the fat and, as a result, are light and silky as chiffon. I generally prefer olive oil to vegetable oil as it is healthier and I like the flavor more. But of course it is the flavor of olive oil that makes it hard to use in cakes--often you don't want to taste the fat and vegetable oil is virtually flavorless. Still there are times when the flavor from olive oil is just what you want. The olive oil cakes we made at school (and at the restaurant) are an example. But I like chocolate and none of these olive oil cakes I've learnt to make are chocolate cakes. Happily Nigella Lawson's new Italian-themed cookbook has a recipe for a chocolate olive oil cake!

Two Pies for Pi Day

I'm sure I've mentioned that Pi Day is one of my favorite holidays. If you haven't heard of it, Pi Day is so called because March 14th or 3.14 is, of course, the begining of pi. This year (since it is pi month--March 2014--and we get those so rarely) I made two pies, one savory and one sweet.

Homemade Granola

Alices Tea Cup makes incredible homemade granola and the recipe is in their cookbook. I think there's something funky with the recipe as scaled down to home cook sizes, so I've tweaked it here and there and changed the baking method a bit. Overall though, it captures the spirit of their delicious, honey sweetened, oatty and nutty granola.

Hamantaschen for Purim

There are many different explanations for why we eat hamantaschen on Purim and why it's triangular. I'll always go with the story I heard: the pastries are triangular to symbolize Haman's hat (which had three corners, three corners had his hat--we used to sing that at the Purim carnival at synagogue.) I'm not sure why we would be eating the villian's hat, but I like hamantaschen, so I don't argue.

Glazed Pumpkin Scones

I'm sure I've mentioned these before. They are Alice's Tea Cup's famous pumpkin scones. I've made them before and they didn't work quite right. This time around I paid more attention. They add absurd amounts of spices. I'm sure they taste delicious with a 1/4 cup of each type of spice (cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger, if I remember correctly), but that quantity of spices costs a lot of money. The first time I cut down the spices and the dough was far too moist. This time I used about 1/8 cup of each spice and topped each up with 1/8 cup flour (so there was still the same amout of dry ingredients). I also added about 1/8 cup extra flour since it was a damp day. That was about right and the dough was usable, though still on the wet and sticky side. It was a bit of a pain to work with, but the scones rose and cracked perfectly (they look just like the ones at Alice's) so I wouldn't add any more flour.

Playing Card Cookies

For those of us without dates on Valentine's Day, it's a rather depressing holiday. Netflix, apparently, knows this and decided to release the entire season of "House of Cards" on Valentine's Day. Now I've seen the original British series and I wasn't a huge fan. I think Kevin Spacey is an excellent actor and definitely improves the show. But, as much as I like him and political dramas, I just can't get into the show--perhaps it's because the actors (well, just Kevin Spacey, I suppose) break the third wall or maybe I just can't see how the plot (which worked relatively well given the UK's parlimentary system) can possibly work in the US. Regardless of that, I decided that spending Valentine's Day hanging out with a bunch of my political communications classmates and watching "House of Cards" would be more fun than spending Valentine's Day alone.

Mint Hearts (with Recipe)

These mint hearts are a really simple Valentine's Day treat. I made an extra stiff cream cheese mint dough, rolled it out between two sheets of parchment and cut it with a heart shaped aspic cutter (aspic cutters are smaller than most cookie cutters--I usually use mine to cut the centers of linzer cookies).

Wedding Reception Tea

Remember that wedding cake tasting we did? This afternoon tea was for that couple. Instead of the one cake, we catered an afternoon tea wedding reception for 30 people. For this afternoon tea, we served tea sandwiches and assorted desserts.

Football Cookies (and some simple things to do with royal icing)

In honor of the Super Bowl, I whipped up some football cookies. They are made from chocolate sablée dough. Pâte sablée dough is a French sugar cookie dough that makes wonderfully tender cut out cookies as the high fat and sugar content inhibits gluten development even when you roll and reroll the dough. To chocolate the dough up I added some cocoa powder and a drop of brown gel food coloring.

Dark Chocolate Raspberry Truffles

These are one of Christmas chocolates I made this year (technically last year, but you know what I mean). On a related note, while these were Christmas chocolates, they could very easily be Valentine's Day chocolates; between the flavor and the red sugar on top they'd be perfect. The dark chocolate raspberry ganache recipe is from one of the Baked cookbooks. It's raspberry purée (made from frozen raspberries), honey, heavy cream, and good quality dark chocolate.

Wedding Cake Tasting

I am making a wedding cake for a wedding this spring. I know the bride and she asked me to make the cake. As this is a proper business request (even though it was a friend) not a favor I felt I should give her and the groom a proper cake tasting--plus the groom had never tasted my food. They were pretty sure they wanted white cake, but they really didn't have much of an idea other than that. So I made 2 types of cake and 6 flavors of buttercream for them to try.

Gluten-Free Chocolate Orange Almond Cake

This is the same cake as the cake I made both this Christmas and last Christmas but with leavening. Last Christmas I made the same cake without baking powder because I didn't have gluten-free baking power. This year I do have it so I figured I'd give the leavened version a shot on Dec 23, in case it was better than the unleavened version. As a plain, unadorned cake I like it like this (probably more than the unleavened one). It looks lovely with the raised edges and it's a little damper. But the unleavened version is definitely better to decorate because it the top is pretty flat (instead of the raised edges and sunken center).

Salted Almond, Chocolate Chip Cookies

There's nothing more relaxing than making (and subsequently eating) chocolate chip cookies. I've made all sorts of chocolate chip cookies but I've never tried salted ones. I decided it was time. I based these off of Tate's bakery's "chubby Tate's” chewy chocolate chip cookies. Their recipe uses corn syrup to make the cookies nice and chewy. I then added chopped, blanched almonds and sea salt in addition to the dark chocolate chips.

Chocolate Bark

As I mentioned, I made chocolates for Christmas. One of my favorite yuletide chocolates is the mendiant--a chocolate disk it the dried fruit and nuts. But these are time consuming. And chocolate bark is basically the same thing, but easier to make. So tempered some high quality dark chocolate and white chocolate and got to work.