Another week, another handful of amazing recipes from other bloggers. Have you noticed that even bloggers who don’t regularly bake tend to use their oven a bit more in the fall and winter? There’s sure to be many more inspiring recipes as the weather cools down even more this season.
- An all-purpose cornbread recipe is always good to have on file as the weather gets colder and soups and other cornbread-friendly foods find their way on to the table. But variety is good, too, and the Feta and Chive Cornbread from A Year in Bread looks like it has just enough extra flavor in it. The recipe is helpfully given by both volume and weight, in standard and metric.
- I’m not personally a big nut fan, but I was sold by the photos and description of Vanilla Cashew Sorbet on Jumbo Empanadas. The sorbet is vegan and nondairy, made with cashews, maple syrup and vanilla beans. It looks as creamy as “real” ice cream and Brilynn says that it “tastes so amazing you’ll forget it’s not full of animal product goodness.”
- A Self-proclaimed Foodaholic made up a good-looking batch of Citrus Poppyseed Cupcakes, a variation on a plain vanilla cupcake that uses orange and lemon juice, orange and lemon zest and a few blue poppyseeds. The cupcakes look like they have a light, fluffy texture and would be a nice change from plain chocolate and vanilla.
- All summer, YumSugar has been putting together variations on the ice cream sandwich. They just posted their Ice Cream Sandwich Roundup, featuring 14 amazing sandwich ideas. Coconut Macaroons with Creme Brulee Ice Cream and Dulce De Leche Ice Cream with Chocolate Covered Graham Crackers particularly appeal to me.
- I know a lot of people who adore banana cream pie, but the pudding-and-whipped cream combination can be a little over-the-top at times. The Banoffee Tarts made by Applemint keep the creamy and banana parts of a banana cream pie and make it a little more interesting by adding toffee, for a deeper flavor, into the mix. Additionally, the tarts are small and look very elegant, a nice twist on comfort food.
- Finally, Happy Home Baking baked up a beautiful loaf of Pumpkin Bread that would be an outstanding addition to any holiday meal. The bread is slightly sweet, with a light and fluffy texture, and is topped with pumpkin seeds to make it more visually interesting than a plain loaf. I have to admit that the pumpkin seeds on a round, golden loaf make it look a tiny bit like a giant hamburger bun, but the overall effect is absolutely charming and wouldn’t stop me from taking a slice or two.
People have always gotten along just fine by “eyeballing” the amount of cream or milk that they add to their coffee. But why estimate when you can get your cup of coffee or tea just the way you like it every time without guessing? One solution is to emulate a few of the more precise coffee drinkers out there and measure the exact amount of milk that you want in your mug. A better solution – one that allows you to add a few new mugs to your collection – seems to find us in the MyCuppa Mugs. There is one mug for coffee and one for tea, and each is lined with color-coded stripes that guide you into getting the perfect color (milk to coffee/tea ratio) in your cup.
If, like me, you take your coffee black, you might find the mugs handy for when you are pouring a cup of coffee for guests or for your spouse. I know I can’t be the only one who finds the directive to “just a few splashes milk” to be confusing, especially when to some people that means to add a little bit of milk to their coffee, and to others, it means to add a little bit of coffee to their milk.
Have you ever come home from a wonderful dinner out and bragged about how much you paid for dessert? Unless your dessert was complimentary, I’m willing to bet that you’re much more likely to discuss the dessert itself and not its price – especially if it was on the expensive side. But that doesn’t stop luxury resorts with high-end restaurants from adding ever more expensive desserts to their menus.
The restaurant at the Fortress resort in Sri Lanka has just created a $14,500 dessert, for instance. In addition to generating publicity, the resort said that their goal was “to create a one of a kind dessert that is intrinsically linked with the destination, offering both long lasting memories and a keepsake of the experience.” The “keepsake” is an 80-carat aquamarine stone that sits on top of the dessert which is “a combination of a gold leaf Italian kasata, flavoured with Irish cream and served with a mango and pomegranate compote and a bubbly-based sabayon enlighten” – a delicious combination, without a doubt, but not one that could justify the price without something alongside.
The Fortress’s dessert is said to be the most expensive in the world, although it’s only a matter of time before someone sticks an even larger stone on their dessert plate and takes the title away. For now, I’m just left to wonder who – if anyone – buys these desserts, when you can get something just as tasty for far less money and can probably get a better deal on a nice gemstone at a jewelers than from the dessert menu.
Halloween is not a holiday that is as baking/cooking oriented as some others are. The holiday prep in stores tends to focus on candy and decorations, and virtually no one would consider baking something homemade to hand out to trick-or-treaters (unless they were already quite familiar with the children/family in question) because the treat that they had worked so hard to put together would very likely be thrown away, untasted, by suspicious parents. But this year I’ve noticed that there are a few more Halloween-themed baking options than usual – a welcome development for someone like me who wants to do plenty of seasonal baking, for me, my friends and family, and is still planning to give out store-bought candy to any costumed kids who wander by on the 31st.These 3D Halloween Cookie Cutters are a new release from NordicWare, which has been expanding its line of 3D cookie cutters rapidly to include most holidays and seasons. The set includes 12 cutters to make 6 three dimensional cookies: a ghost, a pumpkin, a scary cat, a haunted house, a witch and a scarecrow. The cookies work because each shape is notched, and once the cookies are baked, you simply slide one half of a pumpkin cookie into its counterpart for a cookie that will stand on its own.
The only potential downside is that you really have to use the recipe that comes with the cookie cutters to guarantee success, but if you’re willing to take a chance on a few less-than-perfect batches, you can play around with flavors (adding spices, extracts, etc.) a bit for some variety.
I like the idea of an everyday cake, a delicious cake that you can whip up on relatively short notice that is simple enough that you’l want to make it even when you’re on your own, but could still be served to company in place of something more elaborate. I don’t know all that many people who keep freshly baked cakes at the ready these days, either for themselves or for guests (myself excluded, as I almost always do have something freshly baked sitting around), but it’s the kind of thing that my grandmother and her friends might have done years ago, giving such a cake a sweet and nostalgic feel.
This Marbled Banana Bundt Cake really fits my idea of this type of cake. It looks fairly plain, with its shiny brown crust concealing a vanillla, chocolate and banana interior, but still elegant because of the shape of the bundt pan it was baked in (a fancier pan would produce a fancier cake, of course). The only time I wouldn’t have the ingredients on hand is if I happened to eat all my bananas before they reached the “very ripe” stage usually associated with baking, or if I ran out of sour cream, so 9 times out of 10, it would be an easy last-minute cake to whip up.
The cake itself has a beautiful texture. It is much lighter than your average banana bread, but is still very moist, thanks to both the banana and sour cream in the cake. Although it can easily be served after a meal for dessert, it goes wonderfully with a mug of coffee or hot chocolate in the morning. The swirl has a strong chocolate flavor that works well with the banana, but it can easily be omitted if you prefer to have just a plain banana cake. One other variation would be to stir about 1/2 of chocolate chips into the batter before baking it for even more chocolate.
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