Put the Lime in the Coconut

I made this cake for an aquantaince whose adult sons wanted to speak with my mom about financial consulting careers. We had them over right around her birthday so I figured, why not make a birthday cake?!

Coconut frosting going on the first layer

Blueberry Muffins with Lemon Sugar

These are classic blueberry muffins with a slight twist, lemon zest in the batter and lemon sugar on top. The subtle tang of the lemon complements the sweet blueberries and the baking soda-y muffin nicely. Of course I don't like blueberries, so these weren't thrilling to me. That's okay though, I made these primarily to give away--so the fact that I didn't love them was quite helpful. And I got plenty of complements on them, so I assume that they were very nice if you like such things.

Kumquatini~with recipe!

This is a martini made with kumquat simple syrup (see? I told you that it'd be turning up everywhere), a dash of bitters, and a measure of grand marnier. I rimmed the glass with Demerara sugar and tossed in a candied kumquat for good measure. Delicious.

Just for fun, here's the recipe for two small(ish) kumquatinis:

Quinoa Flour Cake with Kumquats

I made this for Passover, but I will have to try it for my gluten free cousins, because it was really good! The quinoa flour made the cake much lighter with a smaller crumb than the average nut flour based Passover cake. Plus the it lent the cake a nice nutty flavor without being overpoweringly nutty.

Candied Kumquats

I see more and more recipes pop up on places like pinterest that use kumquats. Kumquats, a diminutive citrus fruit with an edible peel, happened to appear at my grocery store recently. I had to get in on the kumquat craze, so I bought some. I didn't necessarily think through the fact that, with Passover starting, my recipe options would be somewhat limited. That's okay, I decided to candy them and figure things out later. After all I love candied citrus! 

Brownies with Citrus Salad

I tried the brownie recipe from Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc. It's not the simplest brownie recipe, but it's well worth the extra effort. They were perfect. Richly chocolaty, tender, fudgy but still extraordinarily light. Oh gosh.

Orange Pound Cake Bites

I'm still without a kitchen so I'm going to take the opportunity to talk about some of the desserts I never posted. In this case, I made it before I blogged. It was for my cousin's wedding shower. It had a purple theme and I was asked to make purple desserts--the cake was supplied by another family member.

I made purple spritz cookies, which I believe I previously posted, and this. This is orange pound cake (really delicious orange pound cake, if I remember correctly.) It's topped with little purple (they were more purple in person, I swear) royal icing flowers. The bowl is filled with a purple-ish, mixed berry dipping sauce. It was very nice! (Is it terrible to say that it was better than the official cake?)

Orange Cranberry Scones

I made these a while ago, but I figure I've been posting a ton of scones so why not slip these in. These are simple raisin scones, with dried cranberries substituted for the raisins and some orange zest and extract in the dough. I love the combination of orange and cranberry, and the dried cranberries are especially good because they don't get mushy and overly sweet like raisins when they cook.

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.

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).

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.

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!

Orange Yogurt Cake

I'm trying something new here; I'm going to try to make this blog ever so slightly more like a normal blog where I discuss more than just food. Not that it won't remain food focused. Every post will still start and end with whatever I've baked and many will, I'm sure, never vier from my tied and true formula of discussing the recipe I've used or developed. But in at least a smattering of posts I will talk about me and what happens to be going on in my life.

White Chocolate, Blackberry and Lime Eton Mess

As I understand it, Eton mess was first served at Eton and was a messy dessert of strawberries (or bananas) and cream (or possibly ice cream). Later they started adding meringue to the dessert and thus the dessert we know today--meringue, strawberries, and lightly whipped cream--was born.

I love traditional Eton mess with strawberries, but I decided that after our dinner of onion tart and filet mignon I couldn't just serve plain old strawberries and cream. I decided to substitute blackberries for the strawberries. That's not really much of a change so I figured I'd add some white chocolate (it's so good with blackberries) to the whipped cream. But white chocolate crème d'or, no matter how delicious, mixed with blackberries is no longer Eton mess. So I whipped up some cream with a bit of lime juice and zest (both pretty and delicious) and folded the meringue pieces into that.

Lemon Yogurt Loaf Cakes

The finished mini loaves

This quick bread is made with yogurt instead of butter. This is nice for three reasons: 1, it does reduce the fat and cholesterol in the cake (probably not a lot, but every little bit helps); 2, it make the recipe really easy to execute--no need to cream the butter or melt it and let it cool; and 3, it give the loaf a nice tang, which complemented the tart zing of the lemon. Happily, the yogurt did not make the cakes tough, which I find can happen. In fact the texture was quite nice, tender, springy, and light. They were quite lemony with a subtle tang from the yogurt (as I already mentioned). When the came out of the oven, I soaked them with a bit of lemon simple syrup, which added to the flavor and made the cakes moist and delicious.

What made these extra special was the glaze on top. It's just a simple lemon juice and powdered sugar icing/glaze and it was delicious! Tart but still sweet. It set up nicely but still melted in your mouth. Anyway, who doesn't like a good glaze?

Overall, I thought these were excellent. That said, I really love lemon loaf cakes, this is not the first recipe I've tried and it won't be the last. But I'm sure during the process of trying every recipe I can find, I'll circle around to this one a few times.

Before the glaze set

Lemon Curd Cake

Remember the lemon chiffon cake with lemon curd filling? This was inspired by that cake. I made the same lemon curd filling (and I finally found sheet gelatin so it made life much easier). Instead of lemon chiffon cake, I made the same white cake I used for my wedding cake project. It's such a nice cake and I wanted to see how it came out when baked in cake pans rather than sheet pans (for a project I'm working in...I'll tell you about that soon). The frosting is left over cream cheese frosting from my party (it was on the cupcakes). I think the tang of the cream cheese complemented the lemon curd nicely while the sweetness of the cake balances it out nicely.

For the outside of the cake, I decided to try my hand at that lovely swirl that Baked Brooklyn does so nicely (if you don't know them, check them out). I ordered a cake turntable (finally) but it hasn't come yet so this wasn't easy. The way to get a smooth even swirl up the side and on the top is to hold the spatula nearly still, pulling it up slowly as you turn the cake smoothly on the turntable. At least I think that's how to do it...since I don't have a turntable it's really just an educated guess. As it was I did about the same thing, except I manually turned the cake stand, which is not conducive to anything being smooth and even. But that's okay, because I think it still looks really nice!

Happy Pi Day

I'm a nerd at heart. I'm also a pastry chef (in case you didn't know). So Pi Day is one of my favorite holidays. It combines math (March 14th --> 3/14 --> 3.14, which, of course, is pi) and dessert (pie) into one great holiday.

I happen to be on vacation and am staying with a friend. I didn't want to go crazy in her kitchen (which is a lovely kitchen, but still) so I opted for an ice box pie. This particular recipe comes by way of the William's-Sonoma pie cookbook. It's a cream cheese pie with oranges and a graham cracker crust. I admit the crust is store bought, like I said I didn't want to make a mess in the kitchen. I used heirloom navel oranges on top. they were sweeter and more flavorful than usual navel oranges, perhaps because the were organic and heirloom or perhaps because it's citrus season right about now. The filling's a mixture of cream cheese, lemon juice and condensed milk. It's a delicious, sticky mixture, but it did not thicken or set at all, so it was very messy!

The pie really didn't hold together like a pie when you cut into it (because the filling was too liquid) but gosh was it good! You don't even have to take my word for it: everyone loved it (and ate large helpings). I believe one word bandied around was "refreshing." I think that's a very accurate description of this yummy, citrus-y pie.

I had a little left over filling so I made a few mini pies.