I like a good superlative as much as the next person, but I’m not one to throw around words like “amazing” and “the best” lightly when it comes to a recipe. In fact, I probably wouldn’t use them myself to describe this particular coffee cake. I will say, however, that the lucky people who got to sample this used those exact words to describe this moist, tender, light and crazily addictive cake.

Backtracking for a moment, the reason that I wanted to make this cake in the first place was twofold: I had a mostly-unused container of sour cream sitting around in my fridge that was looking for a recipe to work itself into and I had a package of Nutorious nuts that were also looking for a job.

Nutorious is a Wisconsin company that makes gourmet candied nuts. I’m not necessarily a big nut fan, but theirs are really outstanding. They use a mix of nuts and they come in flavors like Cherry Vanilla and Cranberry Orange. It is easy to breeze through one of their bags in no time flat, especially if you have someone to help you much, but the company goes out of their way to point out how good the nuts are in various recipes, so I wanted to try them out in something. I ended up using a mixture of their Original and Cherry Vanilla flavors with excellent results, as the candy coating blended right into the cake. Any candied or sweetly spiced nut will work in this recipe, and you can always opt for plain, toasted nuts, too. Nutorious mixes walnuts, pecans and almonds, so try to use a blend if you’re not using theirs.

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 Flourless chocolate cake is a little bit overdone. And by “a little,” I actually mean “quite a lot.” It was the hottest dessert that a restaurant could serve for a while, but now it has fallen back into a comfortable, but permanent, position beside cheesecake on almost every single dessert menu.
That said, the reason that it became a dessert menu-staple is that flourless chocolate cake is very good and is still very popular. The rich chocolate dessert is difficult for chocolate-lovers to turn down.
As a belated Valentine’s Day treat (as you might guess from the little heart-shaped pans that I used), I baked up a batch of mini flourless chocolate cakes.
Fudgy and flavorful, these cakes are not too sweet by any means. I used a 65% dark chocolate for these and would only go up to a 70% without adjusting the sugar level. I know that it’s popular to get as dark as possible without increasing the amount of sugar in something, but that is one trend that is starting to get old. Of course dark chocolate is good - I just think that desserts still need to have some balance and that you’re always going to find that a slightly sweeter dessert, when compared to a bitter one, is going to be more popular with guests.
I used Reynold’s Fun Shapes pans to get the oh-so-sweet heart shapes of my cakes, but these can also be made in a regular muffin tin.

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Red velvet cake is one of my favorite types of cake. It is a buttermilk cake with a hint of cocoa - just enough for flavor, not enough to make it “chocolate cake” - that has a gorgeous red hue. The red, in theory, comes from the interaction between baking soda and cocoa powder, but more often than not food coloring is added. Some people are put off of the cake by the food coloring, but they’re the ones missing out on a delicious cake.

Instead of going with a regular cake or cupcakes, I opted for cake-like sandwich cookies, more similar to the whoopie pies that I made a few weeks ago than to, for example, Oreos. The cookies are moist and tender and the filling is a mascarpone cream cheese mixture that adds just the right amount of flavor and sweetness. The cookies themselves are actually low fat, although the presence of the filling makes up for that fact. I added a little bit of buttermilk as a nod to the traditional red velvet cakes, but I have to admit that you can’t really taste it. You can, however, taste the cocoa, the vanilla and the delicious filling.

These are best if eaten within a day or two of being made.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!

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Since I love lemon, you might think that I love lemon bars. Unfortunately, this is not true. More often than not, lemon bars are just plain awful. The lemon filling is usually either gummy or too gelatinous and the base is almost always bland, soggy or both. The lemon flavor is rarely as clear as it could be and, while lemon bars shouldn’t be as tart as the filling for a lemon meringue pie, where the meringue acts to temper the semi-tart lemon flavor of the filling, it should still be bright enough that one bite sends the “this is lemon” message to your brain. In short, I usually pass on lemon bars.
Of course, if I make the bars myself, I have no problems eating them. This recipe seems to solve all the lemon bar problems that I just listed, turning out bars that are as close to perfect as I can recall having.
The base is a light and tender shortbread cookie, which crumbles gently into your mouth and retains some crispness in spite of the moist topping. The topping is just thick enough to hold together well and has a bright, but not overly tart, lemon flavor. In fact, the flavor is tempered by the addition of some sour cream, which gives the bar a great mouthfeel.
I used my Baker’s Edge pan to ensure even baking. Don’t have one yet? No worries - just use a 9″x13″ baking pan and plan to take a couple of minutes off the final baking time.
I topped these off with a sprinkling of powdered sugar, but that is entirely optional. The whole batch will be gone in a flash - with or without the extra sprinkle.

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Normally, I wouldn’t crosspost something here at bakingsheet and at Slashfood, but I am so enamored of some of the dips that I have done for the Super Bowl Dip of the Day feature that I couldn’t resist getting them out where they can be seen (and hopefully enjoyed!) by the maximum possible number of people.

This is a twist on guacamole. Ordinarily, I use a bit of salsa to spice up the avocado, but I used some chipotle pepper instead. I whizzed everything together in the food processor to get it extra smooth, as I find the smoother dips work well with not only chips, but pretzels, crackers and veggies - all of which are on my snack table during the SuperBowl.
I actually prefer to use garlic powder in place of fresh garlic in dips and such, especially when only a small amount is needed, but feel free to substitute fresh garlic in this recipe, if you prefer. It will turn out well both ways.

Feel free to read a bit more about this dip here, but rest assured that if you like guacamole, you won’t go wrong with this recipe. And if you really prefer chunky, just mince everything and stir, rather than using the food processor.

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