After seeing both Anne and Jennifer mention the idea of café brulé, I just couldn’t resist giving it a try myself. The drink can be any of your ordinary, foamy, steamed milk-topped favorites and is sprinkled with a fair bit of sugar before applying a kitchen torch to caramelise it into a crème brulée look-alike. I love the idea and I loved using my kitchen torch on my coffee even more, though I would recommend scattering the sugar further over the foam than I did, let is caramelise into one sheet of sugar.

The coffee is really what is special about this drink, though. It is my recreation of Trader Joe’s seasonal coffee offering, their “Wintry Blend”. The whole bean coffee has whole cloves, red and green peppercorns and small pieces of cinnamon that get ground up with the beans in your coffee grinder. The resulting coffee is deliciously spicy.

Now, to make this yourself, you might have to play around with proportions. I suggest starting light on the spices and working up, since no one wants to actually taste pepper in their coffee. Once you get it down, though, the coffee is warming with a perfectly wintry smell and a hint of spicy flavor. It is nice black, with sugar and/or milk, so don’t feel that it isn’t worth a try if you don’t have a way of steaming milk at home. If you don’t grind your own beans (a practice I highly recommend), just add a dash of cloves, cinnamon and a grind or two of pepper to your coffee grounds before you brew a batch and you’ll get a similar result.

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Popcorn has been around for about 5000 years. At a site known as the “Bat Cave” in New Mexico, an anthropologist and a botanist, along with several graduate students, discovered layers of prehistoric “trash” stretching back thousands of years, which contained all manner of corn cobs and even popped corn. There were many unpopped kernels so well preserved that they popped when placed in hot oil by the scientists.

Popcorn balls are a food around which legends have sprung up, though the truth is probably that it was easier for shop owners to sell popcorn in pre-measured amounts than it was to sell it loose. In fact, they were one of the most popular candies around the turn of the last century, when popcorn was enjoying huge popularity. Since the most popular time of year for popcorn is late fall, it is no surprise that popcorn balls quickly became favorite holiday treats. Though not as popular as they once were, popcorn balls are still a tasty treat and have a sort of retro cache about them that keeps bringing people back for more.

I think that popcorn balls are an easy way to eat popcorn. They’re not as fussy as many caramel corn recipes are, but they have a similar flavor. They also look very beautiful and will keep in an airtight container for at least a week or two. All you have to do is cook the syrup with a candy thermometer and stir it into the popped corn.

From start to finish, these take about 15 minutes. The maple syrup gives these a wonderful flavor, though you should be able to use molasses or treacle if it isn’t available to you. By cooking the syrup only to 250F (121C), which is hard ball stage, the sugar is still pliable enough to work with easily and the balls will not be too hard, which would make them very difficult to eat. I personally think that the dried fruit and nuts are a nice touch, but feel free to be a purist and leave them out.

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After seeing an article in my local newspaper for Martha Stewart’s Dried Fruit Focaccia, I wanted to make it. I love focaccia and one that is lightly sweetened and packed with dried fruit sounded delicious in general, as well as seeming like a good winter bread.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the recipe in my rather large pile o’ newspaper clippings and, eventually, opted to abandon my search and just wing it. To my dough I added dried tart cherries and golden raisins, both of which I remembered seeing in Martha’s version (which I finally found here, if you’re curious), and some cinnamon. I didn’t use sugar, used far less oil and ended up with a smaller bread than Martha’s. But, particularly considering I looked at the original recipe for about 30 secondes, it came out really well and was a very tasty bread. Since it is thinner than your average focaccia, it is also crisper. In fact, I discovered that this makes excellent toast, tasting just like cinnamon raisin bread - hardly suprising given both the cinnamon and the raisins in the recipe. The cherries were particularly delicious.

To get a softer version of this bread, I would shape this into a round, 9-inch focaccia, pressing it into an oiled cake pan. This would be thicker than my rectangular version, but at least equally tasty. Cooking time for a round will be the almost the same, but closer to the higher end of the range.

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I think that the Hershey’s website is a little misleading.

I decided to make brownie bites like the ones Santos made last week. The recipe she used was a little too rich for me, calling for four sticks of butter. Admittedly, it made more than a few brownie bites, but still…. I went with Hershey’s recipe instead. Their photo shows brownies with a nice, crackly crust and these do not get crackly. I rather think that you need to use butter to produce a crust like that, not oil. I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they accidentally posted the wrong photo.

The recipe was easy. I wanted them to be chocolatey, so I substituted bittersweet chocolate chips for the peanut butter chips suggested. I was suprised to see that the mini muffin wrappers held their shape when I just set them on the baking sheet, unsupported by a muffin tin. If your wrappers are thin, however, double up on them.

These were still quite tasty, even if they didn’t turn out they way the Hershey photo promised. They were rich little chocolate cake bites studded with chocolate chips. Each one was a bit more dense than your usual cake and the top crust was a little crisp, so I feel they were brownie-like in taste, if not entirely in appearance. I enjoyed them, particularly when they were warm and the chocolate was melty. The effect is easily produced with a few seconds in a microwave. I topped them with bits of my homemade marshmallows, but a mini marshmallow or a sliced up store-bought marshmallow will work just as well.

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We all know that nothing says Christmas like a cat, curled up by the fire with a pointsetta in the background. Except for trees, mistletoe, eggnog, piles of food and (my favorite) marshmallows and cocoa. But having your cat around, especially when he’s has just returned after beeing missing for days, makes the day all the more special. I’m glad Kiri is home, Clare! Phoebe is more than happy to share her Christmas toys, consisting of bits of wrapping paper and ribbon, with him.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Pears are funny fruits. Much like bananas, when you have a group of them, they seem to ripen all at the same time. Unlike bananas, they also have a very short window in which they are perfectly ripe, firm but yielding to the touch. I frequently get pears as gifts, particularly this time of year and as I can’t seem to resist buying them in fairly large quantities when the price is right, I will occasionally be forced to eat many pears in a day or two. Poor me.

Once in a great while I will tire of eating pears plain and begin to hunt around for something to do with them. Pears and cheese, pears in soup, pears in my oatmeal, pear sauce. I don’t usually add pears to my baking because they don’t hold up as well as firmer fruits, like apples, but a recipe from Everyday Food caught my eye. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any granola for the topping and and wasn’t going out to get any. I ended up reducing the baking time and temperature, but making similar muffins.

Before I bit into one, I worried that I hadn’t put enough spice into these muffins. As I tasted and chewed, I completely forgot about the spices. These muffins managed to taste just like my pear clafoutis, less custardy by default, but strikingly similar. The pears were soft and gave a lot of moistness to the muffin. The relatively delicate flavor of pear was strong, which I loved. There simply aren’t enough pear-flavored things.

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