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.

The Best of 2013

It's that time. The time to look back over the previous twelve months and see where you've been and what's happened in your life, both good and bad. For me 2013 is the year I started grad school. It's also the year I made a wedding (okay, anniversary) cake for a real couple, crafted a TARDIS out of chocolate cake, made hundreds of chocolates for the holidays, and so much more. So here's to 2013.

French Toast with Caramel Sauce

I forgot to post this last year. When our friends came round (and we baked cookies) the girls had a sleepover while the parents got some alone time. Alaina and Tegan are great kids and I wanted to surprise them by getting up early and making a special breakfast. Unfortunately they are morning people (at least Tegan is) so I couldn't really surprise them. But I still banned them from the kitchen, so at least the type of food was a surprise.

New Year's Eve "Party"

I was invited to New Year's parties, but I don't do New Year's parties. Ever. My family has a rule that you must wear stretch waist pants on New Year's Eve. We eat snacks and party food and go to bed at 12:01 (which is earlier than we normally go to bed, but that's not the point...) The point is, this year my mom, my friend Adriana, and myself stayed in and ate our way into the new year.

Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

We had family friends visiting us yesterday and both of their daughters like baking--well one really likes baking, the other likes baking but prefers eating the baked goods. I decided that I didn't really want to use my mixer or generally do anything too elaborate or messy (I guessed that clean up wouldn't be the girls' idea of fun and I didn't want to have a hard clean up on my own.) I've made brownies with them before so, while everyone likes brownies, I thought something new would be more fun. I decided on chocolate chip cookies from Nigella Kitchen. They used melted butter instead of creamed butter so they are quicker to make and have an easier clean up.

Christmas Day

I love Christmas in London! The city is beautiful, everyone seems to celebrate (even Jews like me!), and I have a delicious lunch with my family in Clapham. Jeff is an excellent cook and he made turkey, veg, roasted potatoes, bread sauce, and chestnut stuffing. Yum!

Chocolate Peppermint Cookies

I had left over cookie dough from the chocolate wafer cookie crust I made for my Mississippi mud pie, so I sliced it to bake off. But plain, crisp, chocolate cookies, while very nice, don't thrill me on their own. So I asked myself, "self, what could kick these up a notch?" (I love Emeril!) Since it's the holiday season I figured peppermint would do the trick. I happen to have a jar peppermint "snow" (basically crushed candy canes but with out and of the resulting powder or giant chunks), which I mixed with some plain and some red sanding sugars, to make a topping for the cookies. I make the mixture since the peppermint snow would melt a bit during the cooking process but the sanding sugars would stay nice and sparkly.

Oatmeal, White Chocolate, Cranberry Bars

These are adapted from a blondie recipe in Nigella Kitchen. I disagree with terming these (even before my adaptations) blondies. They really don't resemble a blondie in ingredients or final product. But that's okay because they are excellent anyway! I think, if you did them with raisins they'd be the perfect oatmeal cookie bar. But who wants raisins when you can have dried cranberries and white chocolate? They were delicious and the texture was excellent---chewy, think oatmeal raisin cookie chewy, but still a bit caky. Yum.

By the way, I chose cranberries and white chocolate because they seem like good holiday flavors and I was bringing these bars into class just before winter break. They weren't as big of a hit as the peppermint brownies (but what could be?), but they were certainly very well received!

Peppermint Brownies

Remember the Baked brownies? These are them, but with about two tablespoons of peppermint extract added to the batter. They were just like the usual Baked brownies--fudgy, rich, dense, chocolaty, and delicious--but with a rich yet subtle minty undertone.

Thanksgivukkah

As I'm sure you heard, Thanksgiving and Hanukkah overlapped this year (on the 28th of November), a rare occurrence that (apparently) complicated things for American Jews who had to have celebrations two nights in a row. Since I'm currently studying in the UK, I had class on Thursday until 6:00pm, so no chance of a proper Thanksgiving regardless of the timing of Hanukkah. So we combined both celebrations and pushed them until Saturday so that our British family (who had to work Friday) could come over, enjoy the day, celebrate Hanukkah and, of course, eat lots of turkey.

TARDIS Cake and Jammie Dodgers

Hi everyone. I'm Mercedes and I'm a nerd. I love Doctor Who (as you may have noticed when I dressed my yorkie up as the Doctor for Halloween). As you can imagine, I was very excited about the 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who that aired last weekend. In celebration of the landmark episode I made my dog dress up again--she was not happy--and I baked quite a bit.

I've Redecorated

I've changed the desktop and I hope you like it (and get the rather obscure reference to Doctor Who).

While doing my readings for my political communications class this week, I found out that Blogger was the first blog site. Today in class my professor mentioned that fact and said that he was sure all us young, tech-savvy students would no doubt be using wordpress or the like. Nope, I still use blogger. And I don't plan on changing. It's simple, it's easy to use, and a blog is a blog is a blog, so why would I go through the hassle of switching platforms... (Anyway I'm definitely above the average age of the students in that classroom and, while I pretend to be, I'm not all that tech-savvy.)

Fresh Currant Scones, take 2

After my success with my fresh currant scone recipe I decided to try a new scone recipe that calls for fresh fruit. It is one of the few recipes from the FCI's pastry cookbook that we didn't learn in class, so I've been wanting to try it out. I used fresh currants in them although the recipe doesn't specifically call for them.

My Favorite Holiday

I love Halloween! It's my favorite holiday. You get to dress up in silly costumes and eat sweets without feeling stupid or guilty (respectively). Because Halloween fell mid-week, I got to celebrate it twice! Once with my friend Katy and her flatmates--it was a Halloween party crossed with a birthday party for Katy's flatmate Lucy. The invitation said come in fancy dress (that's British for come in costume) or come dressed as Lucy. So I decided to try out a costume I've been wanted to do for a few years: Lucille Ball. I found a close to perfect Lucy dress at a charity shop near me. The pearls and pumps were mine already. The real effort was getting my wavy red hair curly and pinned up (I think I used over 30 bobby pins!) The party was good fun even if I don't think any of the Brits there knew "I Love Lucy."

Baked Brownies

I know I've made these before, and I'm sure I've posted about them (or variations thereof). But they never fail to be pretty much perfect in every way. In fact, these are probably my favorite basic brownie--I know I've said at before about other brownies and I may well say it about another recipe some day, but I think these are the best. They are fudgy and richly chocolatey. They are really easy to bake and the recipe makes a 9x13 inch pan---rather than a 9x9 pan---and more brownies is always better! I made these with a friend for our mothers and they were a hit! I actually spaced, we were chatting while baking, and added the eggs before the sugars. I was a bit worried it'd make the brownies cakier, but it didn't...just one more reason to like the recipe; it's resilient!

Plated Dessert for the Jewish Holidays

I made this dessert (honey milk chocolate semifreddo on apple almond cake with caramel apple sauce, milk chocolate almond bark, marzipan and nougatine) for the Yom Kippur break-fast meal this year. Yom Kippur was in mid-September, but I guess with all the excitement of starting school, I forgot to post this.

The beautiful thing about this dessert is it could be for almost any Jewish holiday! I had been away from home for Rosh Hashanna so I decided to use the traditional flavors from that holiday--apple and honey--as inspiration for my dessert. Since some of my cousins can't eat gluten- the whole dessert is gluten free and is therefore suitable for Passover (obviously if you keep Kosher there are other considerations besides leavened goods and flour, but in my household that's pretty much the extent of Passover.)