Classic Chocolate Cake

April is a big birthday month in my family and as chocolate lovers we grew up celebrating with chocolate on chocolate yumminess. This cake is one of those classic, will never go out of fashion, desserts. It’s fudgey and moist and in my mind perfect in every way. We always make it in a bundt tin and pile the center with ice cream or fruit or m&m’s. This year we went with fresh vanilla ice cream, fresh as in it was put in the ice cream maker when we started dinner and scooped directly onto the cake and our plates 🙂

The other twist to this years cake was raspberry jam. Before the cake cooled it was cut in half and jam spread between the two layers, this added a little extra flavor and the warmth of the cake helped the jam seep in. With how rich the actual cake is I like to do a thin chocolate glaze or simply dust with powdered sugar.

Persian Love Cake

My favorite city I’ve ever eaten in is hands-down Beirut. Fresh fruits with breakfast, hummus before every dinner, and desserts infused with rose, orange, and pistachios.  I also love the community created around dining, family style dinners with everyone sharing and taking time to enjoy the meal. Middle eastern foods have amazing flavor and are also meals that you finish feeling a happy full. Not the full but in desperate need of a nap you get from many American meals. For the past few years I’ve spent most of my February in Lebanon and missing those flavors this year I decided to try my hand at it. I turned to this recipe that I came across on instagram from Yasmin Khan. Looking through the pictures from her two cookbooks it quickly became clear to me that these were a much needed addition to my growing cookbook library.

I adapted it slightly to use what I had available (ground cardamom rather than pods and granulated sugar rather than superfine). I also realized when asked while serving this cake that it is dairy free, a pleasant finding if you have any lactose-intolerant friends. It has only a small amount of all-purpose flour in it, I didn’t try making a gluten free version but I think it could work if you were trying for that option too.

Celebration Cake

I love a good cake. And while I’ve inherited quite the sweet tooth, I am not a fan of super sugary cakes. I find the boxed mixes have a taste that falls flat and the store-bought icing often leaves me with a tooth ache from just one bite. This yellow mix is my starting point for many cakes (such as this) and for a new years party I thought what better way to celebrate the end of a decade than by the addition of colourful sprinkles!

Over the past decade my baking and cooking skills have certainly improved as well as my willingness to look things up to get it right and to try to understand what went wrong when I don’t. My top take aways are these;

Back to Basics

Crucial to any good ice cream is the base. Once you’ve established how you make your base, be it vanilla or chocolate, then you can add in nuts, chunks, and bits that make it special. If making ice cream with kiddos that’s the fun part, customizing to their heart’s desire. Then LOTS of sampling to make sure it’s up to par 🙂

If you are new to ice cream making, or if you want to step up your game, I can’t recommend Salt & Straw’s Ice Cream Cookbook enough. It is full of interesting and seasonal flavors but also gets into the nitty gritty of food science. It guides you through how to choose which type of ice cream maker you use, why the size/type of salt matters, how to store to avoid that pesky freezer burn, and each recipe has a “what we learned” section which can be helpful when troubleshooting a flavor that didn’t come out just right.

This base was the starting point for a blackberry cobbler ice cream with streusel chunks (above), a goat cheese blackberry habanero ice cream (delicious as an ice cream and leftover jam is a great addition to charcuterie plates), a Strawberry Honey Balsamic with Black Pepper (easily the best strawberry ice cream I’ve ever had), and their Rose City Riot (a rose ice cream with swirls of saffron cream pictures below sans beet juice coloring).

Middle Eastern dinner

When visiting a friend at her farm a few days ago she gifted me a few end of the season summer tomatoes and fresh eggs. Fresh as in we went out to the coop and collected them while catching up. With these special treats I knew I had to make something that would appropriately showcase them. Immediately what came to mind was to make fattoush, a Middle Eastern salad that is simple and would nicely use up vegetables that I already had on hand. To complement this I thought menemen, a Turkish egg dish, would stay with the Middle Eastern theme and use other vegetables in my fridge. Of course having these meant fresh pita was absolutely necessary to the meal.

Just Peachy

After a series of ice creams with sufficient amounts of sugar added (PB&Fluff, double dark chocolate, and cookie monster) my family was not quite sick of ice cream but was ready for one that seemed a small bit “healthier.” Enter the fruit ice cream, perfectly timed to use up some of our peaches before they got too soft. Reading on recipe’s online it seemed one of the common issues with this flavor of ice cream is that the peach juice adds too much water so the ice cream freezes too solid. I decided to try the Paula Deen recipe which seemed to have good reviews (and even better I had everything required in it).

Irish Soda Bread

At some point in March I am always hit with this home sick feeling for Ireland, I switch out some of my coffee for the traditional Barry’s tea (red box always) and make my mom’s Irish Soda Bread nearly daily. The girls at work are treated almost every night to a loaf or two for snacking as we get report. Like most things in life this bread is best enjoyed fresh with a healthy slathering of butter and a nice jam.I’ve been sworn to secrecy long ago by my mom to not share her recipe but this one is a delicious alternative and one I made for my dairy farmer friend, Henry, from the farm the works for Kimball Brook. The buttermilk adds to the dense and moist bread making it suitable by itself as a meal and the cultured butter is yummy enough to eat all by itself. But it’s winter and it’s cold so a little extra butter is needed to toughen out this weather 😉

Soda bread has long been a staple in Ireland, it is a bread that is made without yeast rather the baking soda mixed with buttermilk acts as the leavening agent. It’s best when made by hand to avoid over mixing.

And don’t forget before placing it in the oven to cut a cross into the top of the bread. According to Irish folklore this helps to ward off evil and to let the fairies out.

Winter Citrus Cake

Working night shifts has an obvious impact on daily rhythm; mornings to mid afternoon become sleepy times, going to sleep before midnight feels like it deserves a congratulations, and food schedule is turned topsy turvey both in times to eat and what is eaten when. Some days anytime between 4p and 9p are breakfast with ice cream as a perfect snack post-shift at 8a. Then again, even on days off some mornings ice cream seems as good a breakfast as any 🙂

When coordinating get togethers with work friends I try to consider where people might be in their often oddly scheduled circadian rhythms. Thus came stumbling upon this cake by The Broken Bread, a perfect dessert for early morning or evening. The light and moist base with a hint of bitterness from the citrus peels is balanced perfectly with cardamom. This is a cake that pairs well with a mimosa, a nice glass of red wine, or coffee. For me I made it first for an early afternoon baby shower and then again for a going away brunch with work friends. Both times I made two layers of the cake and stacked them on top each other and served with a generous helping of unsweetened fresh whipped cream. It’s a late winter cake with bursts of spring as you bite into the nearly caramelized orange slices.

Unicorn Sparkle Princess Ice Cream

An ice cream that looks like this needs a name that brings a smile to your face and gleeful joy to your inner child. I’m thinking this might become a new favorite for some of my mom friends with young kids, as well as their downfall when the sugar high crashes a few hours later..

Just don’t say I didn’t warn you..

I dough

This summer I have been all about the homemade ice cream. Unfortunately I keep eating it too fast to plan out taking pictures for here. Last week I was able to slow down some and get some of the chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream I made for my co-workers birthday. The vanilla base is my go to and throughout the summer I have just added in different chunks and flavors to make each one unique. One of my favorite so far was adding in cherries, chocolate chunks, and pistachios. My updated take on Cherry Garcia!

Chocolate chip cookie dough is a classic crowd pleaser flavor, just so long as your crowd doesn’t mind a little raw egg. Salmonella anyone? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you truly are frightened of the idea of raw eggs then you could adjust the recipe some to avoid them. However for me I buy really good quality (organic, free range) eggs and eat cookie dough all the time so I really wasn’t too worried. I do have to put in my two cents to encourage you to warn people before they eat it so that if they are pregnant, are immunocompromised, or for some other reason really shouldn’t eat raw eggs they know and can make the decision to indulge or not themselves. If you crack open your egg and it looks weird at all just throw it out and use another. If you are going to eat raw eggs and share with friends, better safe then being that person who gave all her friends food poisoning.