Posts tagged bake shop
LIGHTEST LEMON RICOTTA PANCAKES

We’re two months deep into a New Year, and tons of the things I planned on bringing you in January and February faded behind the blur of snow days and school closings, two weeks of construction (we have new wood floors!!) and occasional escapes to the mountains to ski. I am learning to have a looser grip on all the things I’ve planned (including my kids staying little forever) and riding the wave. I like this looser version of myself, but it’s not always quite as productive.

No matter, sometimes time gives us new and necessary inspiration. So let’s get right to it—these Lemon Ricotta Pancakes are light, ethereal, beautiful and easy to make—and they really take to any topping you can think of.

I made them during a blustery white squall last week that left us with another dusting of powder—and they are very apropos apres ski feeling fare (something about the lemon! And Egg? And the souffle-like quality of the egg whites folded in? We pretended we were in Austria).

Read More
ICED SNICKERDOODLES + (A SNICKERDOODLE CAPPUCCINO)

Iced cookies. Every child’s dream—according to the rate at which my kids put back every frosted cookie they’ve ever seen. I don’t make iced cookies very often. Usually, we like our cookies just shy of indulgent; you can justify eating more of them that way (yes?). Come the holidays, though, all bets are off. What’s a cookie box without a little frosting?

I didn’t grow up with snickerdoodles. My mom was a chocolate chip purist, with crispy iced sugar cookies in perfect shapes thrown in for holidays—-but a good snickerdoodle reminds me so much of the chew of my grandmother’s soft sugar cookies, which she kept in a red-ear-tipped kitty cookie jar on her kitchen counter (which now sits on mine).

By definition, a snickerdoodle’s “flourish” is it’s cinnamon sugar coating, so there’s little need for more. Snickerdoodles tend to loose their luster on holiday spreads, though; they’re a bit, brown, ya know? Why not frost them? And then add more cinnamon sugar? After all, many of us have elves to feed.

Read More
GLAZED APPLE CIDER DONUT CAKE

Last month, we took our kiddos up the mountain to fish and shoot bows. It was a sparkling fall day, crunchy leaves and just enough breeze to make it feel like legitimate sweater weather. Matyas caught a fish. Greta got a bullseye. I got my feet wet. As in, really wet. In all the excitement of trying to help Matyas reel in his first ever fish (read: BIG excitement!), I walked right into the pond.

We had planned to go out for cider donuts afterward, but wet feet foiled our after-party. We detoured straight for home, everyone’s sweet tooth still kicked into high gear. There were words. Some boys (and grown men) don’t deal well with disappointment.

You shouldn’t feel too bad for them—we’ve had our fair share of excellent apple cider donuts this season. But when I ran into a Bourbon Bundt Cake recipe that looked wildly tender, it struck me as an easy remake: cider donut vibes, but with tender chunks of apple baked in. Good news—it worked (!), maybe a little too well. We ate the whole cake in one sitting.

Read More
OLIVE OIL AND MANDARIN CAKE

The holidays will look different this year, but I can’t help but want to keep it magical —inspiring me to put on the ritz a little more, even if it’s just for my own family, at home — like serving one or two beautiful home-baked cakes, with a pot of cinnamon tea or wine for the grown-ups, and a simple spread of cheese and nuts and winter fruits.

For the sweets, I want something that doesn’t feel every day--something that screams holiday, without a lot of fuss. There is an elegance to an olive oil cake, especially one layered in shingles of shiny rounds of citrus that makes it an instant holiday centerpiece. But good looks are only part of the story. I only want a pretty cake that has the texture and flavor to back it up.

This cake wins in all categories.

Read More
CHOCOLATE BANOFFEE PIE

Years ago my friend Robert gave me a stack of two slim French baking books that are just divine—one called Caramel and the other, Chocolate. They are the kind of books with simple recipes and even simpler list of instructions, the kind where the photographs look mouthwateringly dreamy, but the recipes more of sketch, than a list of actual instructions for how to achieve such results.

It’s been nearly ten years since I had looked at them, but one day recently, I flipped through the book and landed on the same page I’d marked all those years ago—BANOFFEE PIE.

Read More
VEGAN PEANUT-BUTTER-MAPLE COOKIES (GLUTEN-FREE)

I bought a jar of Jiff peanut butter yesterday. If you’re here, you probably already know I’m not exactly the Jiff kind of mom. My kids have been raised on freshly ground, natural (read: not sugar, no additives) peanut butter, and even that as a sometimes treat.

But I was a 1980’s Jiff kid, through and through—Jiff on white Wonder bread, with Smucker’s grape jelly. Honestly, what is better?

Read More
OATMEAL YOGURT PANCAKES WITH BLACKBERRY CRUSH

THIS, FRIENDS, is the very first recipe I ever wrote for my first solo cookbook, The Newlywed Cookbook, many moons ago. While pancake consumption is up 200% in our house (thanks, quarantine), I thought it was high time I share it with you here.

This fluffy, sustaining pancake is as delicious as it is beautiful—and super special to me, because I created the recipe while writing the proposal for my first book, holed up in a friend’s cabin in the woods. I was there for a long weekend with my then very new husband, Andras, aiming to write a book proposal in just three days, stopping and taking breaks only to feed and walk laps around the garden (feels kind of like these days were in, now)…

Read More
MAKE-AHEAD LASAGNA FOR A CROWD

2020 was supposed to be the year of the Lasagna. Currently, it’s looking more like the year of the bean (or rice, or insert-any-other-pantry ingredient needed to get through a three week quarantine at home). Beans are great, but how many of you can get your kids to eat beans two nights in a row? Not me.

With very few exceptions, we’re all home with our kids for, like, weeeeeeeks—and it seems to me like they are ALWAYS hungry. Lasagna is the kind of food that can keep a family fed for many nights in a row, happily. But it has other perks, too: namely, that you can prepare the whole thing a day before, and store it in the fridge overnight to have ready to pop in the oven an hour before dinner (just before the kids start to whine)…

Read More
GLUTEN-FREE CHOCOLATE CHIP BANANA BREAD

Did anyone else grab bananas by the armful on their last half-calm, half-frantic cruise through the grocery, that last time you went solo, the kids still in school. Maybe you kept your gloves on the whole time—the Coronavirus was already getting real, but not quite in your own backyard yet. Maybe you still bought strawberries and kale, but just in case everyone was right, you still stocked up on rice and beans and pasta and all the 28-oz cans of San Marzano tomatoes your shelves could fit. And bananas, obscene amounts of bananas.

Read More
A TIRAMISU FOR THE AGES

Tiramisu is my dad and my husband’s favorite dessert--two of the people I love feeding most. But  I didn’t make it for years, somehow recalling it from culinary school as a laborious task. How wrong I was. One night, I decided not to bring home the tempting piece hanging around in the Italian bakery window I passed on my way home from work, and instead make it myself. It was a slam dunk.

News  flash: tiramisu is not only easy (provided you’re not making ladyfingers yourself), it is a built-in make-ahead. You can make this a day ahead, or even two, and still come out looking like an absolute star the day you serve it. Try it for yourself. 

Read More
CHOCOLATE ALMOND WHISKEY CAKE || A CHRISTMAS BUNDT

I’m a bundt girl. Like, if my twenties were three-layer sponge cakes with silky butter creams and fresh cascading flowers, the following decade has been more bundt—still beautiful, but wildly unfussy—the kind of cake that turns heads with its smarts, as well as its style.

There have been plenty of layer cake holidays in my years— and years for epic bouche de noels with lovingly crafted meringue mushrooms— but this year I’m craving something a bit fairy tale, like Christmas in Brugge or a small German village. A cake that’s more Hansel and Gretel than Marie Antoinette.

Enter this all-butter-bundt, flecked with chocolate and spiked with whiskey. It’s tender and moist, but with enough structure that it can be wrapped and gifted to neighbors and friends in the days ahead. A brown-paper-package tied up with string, with the heady aroma of chocolate—that, to me, is Christmas.

Read More