The leading authority on basketball cupcakes and Basil-Lime martinis…
Another fabulous recipe from Gourmet magazine (Boo, hoo!) Recipe here.
This is an all-around winner: sweet and creamy and rich and cool. I mean, really, who doesn’t like chocolate pudding? Add fluffy whipped cream and flaky pastry and it becomes transcendent.
Mmm…very rich and tasty and very impressive, although pretty easy.
Recipe here.
This is another great one from my much-mourned Gourmet (Boo Hoo!) magazine.
Very easy to make and quite good.
Recipe here.
Christmas Cookie Tray
(I forgot to take a photo of the Seven-Layer Cookies, alone, so I only have them with the other cookies on a tray that I prepared for Christmas Eve at my mother-in-law’s, but you can still see how pretty these are. The photo on epicurious is even better.)
from bottom to top:
(click on name of each cookie for recipe)
This year was the first time that I made these traditional, Italian cookies from the beloved and departed Gourmet magazine (the other three on the platter, above, are time-tested family favorites,) but they will most likely be a new yearly addition to our holiday planning. They are rich and VERY sweet and a little finicky and time-consuming to make, but they are almond-y moist and deliciously sweet. They are quite good with the apricot jam, but would also be good with seedless raspberry or maybe even strawberry or cherry preserves, instead. The heating/straining step seems tedious, but I do believe that it’s necessary for easier spreading and to ensure that the layered bars remain intact. These cookies are breathtakingly colorful and gorgeous on a cookie tray. The colors are very intense and vividly eye-catching. If you are disturbed by the amount of food coloring, you can make them all white (it won’t change the flavor,) but I do think that the colors are part of the appeal (and, I’m sure, have some symbolic “colors of the Italian flag” meaning, like a Caprese salad.)
These bars, from Food & Wine magazine, are OUTSTANDING. They are loaded with fiber and the pecans add a little bit of protein. They do have a fair amount of fat (butter) and sugar, but aren’t as bad as some cookie/bar recipes. We LOVED it with the raspberry preserves, but it would also be great with grape, blackberry, blueberry or any other robustly-flavored preserve or jelly. I have a little bit of dulce de leche left over from another recipe and I’m tempted to make a batch with that…we’ll see!
The butter in these bars can go rancid/stale tasting pretty quickly, so I would refrigerate or freeze them if you’re not going to eat them all in 3 or 4 days. The recipe says 1 week, but I think that’s a bit of a stretch. I LOVE the little tang of saltiness that an entire teaspoon of kosher salt provides, but if you are very sensitive to salt, you might want to cut back a little.
As I have mentioned before, I am a sucker for anything citrus-y. I would choose a good lemon meringue pie or lemon bar over the fanciest chocolate dessert any day, so when I saw this recipe on Martha Stewart’s website (*), I knew that I had to try these.
These were absolutely DELICIOUS. The citrus flavor is nice and tangy, but still subtle enough for this to be a SUGAR cookie, not a LEMON cookie. This is the easiest dough to work with that I’ve ever seen in my life; it was smooth and soft, without being sticky at all.
The ice cream scoop directions made it VERY simple. My scoop may be a little bigger than Martha’s, though, because I ended up with only 24 cookies, rather than the 30 that she yielded. Actually, if I make these again, I will use a smaller scoop (1 inch?) and bake them for a few minutes less, because using the bigger scoop yielded massive, monster cookies almost 4 inches across (fun for a party or event, but a little big for an everyday treat.) The one good thing about the larger size, though, is that it gives more of the chewy cookie interior, while a smaller cookie would provide more of the crunchier exterior.
I’m not exactly sure about why the directions say to brush the unbaked cookies with water, but I did it and they turned out well, so why mess with a good thing? I used citrus-colored (orange, green, yellow) sanding sugar on a couple of them, just for grins. The water made an interesting glaze-y design on those cookies that wasn’t evident on the ones with the clear/white sanding sugar (I used coarse sugar, because that’s what we typically like on muffins, etc.)
* I came across the recipe because I bought some Boyajian lemon oil to make these cookies and was looking for other recipes that would call for it.
Pondering a purchase of the citrus oils, but not sure whether or not it’s worth it? If you love to bake and either LOVE citrus as I do or love experimenting with all different flavors, then you MUST buy them (you’ll need the orange oil for when I post my chocolate-orange truffle recipe soon). If you’re not a big baker, you may not find enough uses for the oils to justify the money and effort to buy them. They are a little hard to find, even in Austin, however you can order them directly from Boyajian’s website. Locally, the only place that I’ve found the 3-oil set (3 small bottles that will last a LONG time for about $10: one lime, one orange and one lemon) is at Sur la Table in The Domain. Central Market sometimes has the lemon and orange, sold individually, but does not carry the lime oil. Williams-Sonoma used to carry them, but no longer does.
A couple of the recipe commenters on Martha’s site complained about the fact that Martha specifies “drops” of oil, but the bottles don’t come with droppers. Check around at a craft store (or possibly even a drugstore?) for small little eyedroppers that can be washed and reused. Make sure to clean them thoroughly, if they’re plastic (a glass one is even better, if you can find one), because the citrus oils are VERY strong and acidic and can actually melt plastic (think about it – this oil is the active ingredient in those cleaners like Citra-solve, etc…it’s STRONG STUFF!)
It seems like doughnuts are everywhere lately, maybe because lots of the food blogosphere is involved in testing recipes for Lara Ferroni’s new doughnut book (coming next Fall.) It seems like every food blog that I read is talking about doughnuts, posting recipes for doughnuts, etc So, I’ve had them on the brain lately, as well. It was kismet when I saw
this recipe on Serious Eats and just happened to have a bit of leftover buttermilk in the fridge. These require quite a bit of advance prep (the dough must be made, then chilled, then cut out, then chilled again, then brought to room temperature and then fried), but they were quite yummy and not overpoweringly sweet. The only criticism that I have was that the glaze was a little…meh. Just nothing special about it, just sweet. Next time I might use buttermilk to make the glaze instead of water (or maybe just regular milk or cream) and would add a pinch of cinnamon and maybe a drop or two of vanilla, just to give the glaze some character of its own.
Cut out dough, waiting to be fried.
Completed doughnuts (well, there might be just one or two missing…)
Girl HATES peanut butter. She had an allergic reaction to it as a toddler and was told not to eat it for so many years that, even when she outgrew the allergy (it’s rare to outgrow an allergy, folks, so don’t give your kid something that they’ve been previously allergic to without a doctor’s supervision; we tried it in the allergist’s office, Epi-Pen at the ready…six years after the initial reaction,) she was still a bit leery of it and never developed a taste for it. It’s only in the past few years that she’ll tolerate other nuts, but she does now LOVE pecans and will eat almond or cashew butter. Peanuts, however, are still a powerful “NO.” At least she no longer has to be segregated at the “peanut-free” lunch table, which is a very good thing.
Anyway…Girl was away at a sleepover last night, so I decided to make this pie for Hubby and Boy, who are MAJOR peanut butter lovers. I made it a few weeks ago to take to a friend who has been sick, and it looked wonderful during assembly, but I didn’t get to taste any of it, so I figured a do-over was overdue. (Ha! I crack myself up!)
The pie is fabulous (recipe here) and rich. The vanilla pudding layer is VERY flavorful and the bananas stay surprisingly fresh after a short orange juice bath. The peanut butter layer is just a little salty and tangy. Mmmm…very nice.
The pie isn’t difficult or terribly time-consuming to make, but it has to be made in stages and requires chilling time in between the steps, so it definitely can’t be made at the last minute. In fact, if you’re planning to make it tonight, you should start the prep by at least noon, because it requires a total of 4 hours of chilling (plus some cooking/baking time.) If you don’t start early, you’ll be eating dessert at 11 pm.
Worth the effort, though. Hubby liked enough that he went back for seconds before bedtime. Enjoy!
Hint: 6 ounces of Nilla Wafers = 46 wafers, for anyone that might not have a kitchen scale.
I saw Ina making these treats (recipe here) on a recent episode of her show and was very intrigued. They looked like little pecan pie squares, in a portable form. They were easy to make and were VERY tasty. You must have a very large pan to bake them in (I used a half-sheet pan,) and they make a TON of squares. I found them to be so rich that Ina’s suggested serving size was too large, so I cut them smaller and was able to get over twice as many servings out of the pan. I gave some away to friends who were taking Girl to their lakehouse over Labor Day weekend (a snack for the road trip,) and some to my parents. Hubby, Boy and I ate some over a period of a couple of days and I still have quite a few of them in my freezer. So, I guess I wouldn’t plan on making these again unless it was for an “occasion,” because the recipe makes SO many that one family wouldn’t be able to eat them all (at least not without hurting themselves!) before they got totally sick of them. They are delicious, though, and would be the perfect thing to bring to a family reunion, potluck, bake sale, etc…where you know that you’ll need to feed a crowd.
Instead of dipping one side of each square in chocolate, I just lightly drizzled melted chocolate over the whole pan. Mmmmm…rave reviews from all that we shared them with.
I was looking for something to make for the kids to eat after school to give them energy before heading off to after-school extra-curricular activities (it seems like the kids are always STARVING when I pick them up from school!) These (recipe here) cookies from Cooking Light magazine were easy, yummy, healthy, and made with things that everyone already has on hand.