French Toast with Maple Hazelnut Butter

Who doesn't like breakfast for dinner? Especially brioche french toast with sautéed pink lady apples and maple hazelnut butter. I'm not sure any more needs to be said. (Although I should note that I was lazy and used all natural jarred hazelnut butter and stirred in good quality maple syrup--rather than making the nut butter from scratch.)

Chocolate and Pear Tart

My friend, Katy, had me over for dinner ages ago and made me this delicious chocolate pear tart from Martha Stewart. Turns out I have the recipe and, since it is gluten free, I figured I'd make it for the cousins. As when Katy made it, it was a hit!

Chocolate Cake with Vanilla Bean Buttercream

I'm Mercedes and I'm a stress eater. Just about two months ago, I was writing multiple term papers and, unfortunately, was deciding if we had to put my cat to sleep (we ended up having to.) She was quite old and had been healthy until about a week prior when her kidneys started shutting down. The vet was trying a few things that would keep her quality of life up and hopefully give her a few more weeks or months.

Pumpkin Scones with Brown Butter Glaze

These are my usual pumpkin scones (via Alices's Tea Cup) but miniature and topped with a lovely brown butter glaze. The nutty brown butter complements the pumpkin nicely and who doesn't like a scone with glaze?

Christmas Cake

Whoops, as with the Christmas candy, I completely forgot to post the rest of the photos of the Christmas cake I made last year. I made the same chocolate and orange cake I'd done the year before (since it was a hit) and kept the marzipan decorations because the family loves marzipan. I wanted to do something different for the decorations. After much Pinterest searching, I decided to use quilled snowflakes as decoration.

Christmas Candy

Remember I mentioned that I made chocolates for Christmas in 2013? Probably not since it's been ages. But I finally remembered that I promised to tell you about the chocolates I made and miserably failed to uphold said promise, posting about only two of the half dozen candies I made. Sorry. To make up for it, I will finally tell you about the other four. All in this one post. From my least favorite (don't get me wrong I liked them all) to my favorite:

Mocha Scones

I love a good scone (as evidenced by my scone kick of late.) A good scone should be light and flakey, rather liked a good biscuit. It need not be terribly moist (in fact I typically prefer a dry, flakey scone.) It should not be dense. It should taste like something other than butter and flour (though that's a good start) and they should never be overly sweet. If scones have additives (like chocolate chips or dried fruit) they shouldn't mar the texture. They should have something on top (a simple egg wash will do.) I love a good scone--but I'm very particular about what makes a scone good.

In this case I made my favorite scone recipe from the FCI, with a few key alterations. I substituted a substantial amount of cocoa powder for some of the flour and tossed in a handful of mini chocolate chips. I also added some powdered espresso powder to the mix. For the topping I added an extra coffee kick by mixing some coffee extract into the heavy cream before I sprinkled a healthy amout of sugar on top. The perfect chocolate scone!

White Grapefruit, Strawberry, and Basil Scones

I've been on a scone kick of late. They are simple to make, great to freeze, and delicious. But they can be a bit boring. So I made these. They have white grapefruit juice and zest mixed with milk to create a makeshift buttermilk replacement--citrus replaces the acidity of the buttermilk in the recipe and the milk adds the necessary moisture and fat. Before I added the grapefruit, however, I steeped the milk with some basil leaves. (I love basil, mint's savory cousin, with citrus and berries.) So the grapefruit and basil milk with strawberries made otherwise dull scones something really interesting and quite delicious, if I do say so myself.

I've done a bit more scone experimentation recently, so I'll post them soon.

Brownie Bites

Have you ever had 'two bite brownies'? I love them! Admittedly they aren't the best brownies in the world (they are quite good...but they are still store-bought). But the size is perfect, as is the fudgy texture. I've been trying to recreate them with a better brownie, however I've had trouble with the texture for that size. Of course I've tried to recreate them with good but not great brownie recipes (remember the great brownie showdown? I like all these recipes, but I've found better ones since.)

Triple Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies~With Recipe

These are exactly what they sound like: oatmeal cookies with three types of chocolate. I used one of my favorite normal chocolate chip cookie recipes (I like the recipe because you don't need an electric mixer) and substituted steel cut oatmeal for some of the flour. Instead of one type of chocolate chip, I used white, milk and dark chocolate chips. And a lot of them.

They were chewy and delicious! Not too oaty, but still noticably an oatmeal cookie. Plus you can't go wrong with three types of chocolate crammed into one cookie!

And because I'm so sweet, here's the recipe:

Passover Dessert

After such a lovely dinner it's hard to know how we had room for dessert. But we did. Unlike the dinner, the desserts were all gluten-free, not just unleavened. So everyone could eat everything. And everyone did.

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.