When it comes to scones, it’s hard to beat a perfectly made plain one, served with fresh preserves and butter (or clotted cream or whipped cream, if you prefer). But while a plain scone might epitomize the category, I have to say that they’re not really my go-to scone for a couple of reasons. First, it’s hard to find a good one, let alone to find a shop - at least here in the US - that carries them on a regular basis. Most bakeries and coffee shops stock scones that are studded with fruit, glazed with frostings or otherwise spiced up. Second, I really like the scones that come with add-ins - provided that they’re quality scones, of course.

Blueberry is my top choice, just as blueberry muffins are generally in the muffin category. When I make scones at home, I will almost always use dried berries. Fresh berries have a lot of flavor, but they also have a lot of moisture and I feel that this excess juice really interferes with the light and tender texture of the scone. Dried berries pack just as much flavor and sweetness, but in a smaller and more baker-friendly package.

The ultimate goal with a scone is to make sure it is not heavy and dense. The method for making the scones to this specification is a simple one: rub the butter into the flour with your fingertips. It’s not really necessary for the scone to be flaky in the same way that, for example, a pie crust is. This means that you don’t really need to hem and haw over whether your butter is cut in enough or too much; as long as you cube the chilled butter and mix it in halfway decently (and I’m sure you’ll do better than that!), you’re going to get a good result.

I mix the batter and drop it in dollops onto a baking sheet. They might not be as pretty as scones that are rolled out and cut, but they’re much easier and there are more peaks and valleys on top for the dusting of sugar to adhere to, anyway.

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I have a little bit of a thing for Peeps. Part of the reason I like them is that the sugar-coated marshmallows are fun to eat. The other part is that they’re simply too cute to resist. Peeps were the very first thing that sprang to my mind when I spotted Wilton’s Mini Bunny Cake Pan because the shape of each cake cavity is almost identical to that of a bunny-shaped Peep.

The nonstick pan has only six bunnies, each of which is a bit smaller than a regular cupcake mold. The bunnies turn out to be about 4-inches long and 1 inch (or so) high. You’ll have to play around with the exact number of bunny cakes you can bake with a regular recipe, but Wilton predicts that you can expect to make 18. Be sure to let the pan cool well before refilling.

To get the look of a Peep for your cakes, use a white cake recipe, white frosting and buy some yellow and purple sanding sugars. Coat the baked cakes in frosting and dip into the sugars, making sure to cover the sides and top completely. When set out on a serving tray, they’ll look just like their marshmallow counterparts!

If you’ve never had a French dip sandwich, you’re missing out. The sandwich starts out with beef that is roasted until extremely tender, which is then thinly sliced and put onto a not-too-crusty roll, either with or without cheese. The juice from cooking the meat is collected, seasoned and poured into a small dish. As you eat the sandwich, you dip each bite into the juices on the side, making the meat extra juicy and getting a huge boost of flavor.

The sandwich is not french at all. The name comes from the fact that it is made with a french roll - a medium sized white bread roll that resembles a baguette with a softer crust and makes good sandwiches in general - and it is dipped into beef juices as you eat it. Dipping does not make the bread soggy, much as dipping a cookie into a glass of milk does not make it soggy as long as you pick up the cookie and eat the milk-soaked bit immediately; prolonged soaking will cause sogginess, but that is why the sandwich is called a dip and not a soak.

I love this sandwich, but not all restaurants do it well, so I’ve been wanting to try and make it at home for some time. I started with an extremely popular recipe from Allrecipes that calls for using a slow cooker to make the meat tender. I used the same technique, but changed some of the flavoring ingredients and used a different cut of beef. The result was amazing. The beef was incredibly flavorful, as was the “au jus” that the recipe produced. I made three huge sandwiches with it but if I had used smaller rolls, I would have been able to easily satisfy 4-6 people. This is definitely a new staple recipe for me.

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• First up this week is Simply Recipes‘ Meyer Lemon Marmalade. Not only was I contemplating doing this myself all week, but I was actually just given a freshly packed jar from the Davis, California farmer’s market. Not to knock the farmer’s market version, I’m pretty sure that Elise’s recipe is even better. I’ll still live with what I have at the moment before making a batch myself, though (fridge space is at a premium these days).
• Culinary in the Country baked some rather unusual Crunchy Sesame Cookies this week. They’re similar to peanut butter cookies in that a nut butter - seed butter, in this case - is the base of the recipe, but golden syrup and cornstarch really lighten things up and give them an addictive, crunchy quality.
• Bacon might be good as a garnish on its own or crumbled up, but if you’re looking for something a little extra, try making Not Martha’s Bacon Curls. Uncooked bacon is wrapped around a cylinder of aluminum foil and baked until crisp, then the foil is removed, leaving you with a neat little curlicue.
• Chocolate and Pierre Herme. Do you really need any other words to sell you on a chocolate cookie recipe? The Chocolate Sables at Food Beam are beautifully simple cookies. The dough is very rich, and so produces a cookie with good flavor that melts in your mouth. It makes a wonderful presentation because it is piped onto a baking sheet. Tres elegante!
• And finally, because we’ve just had a break in the cold and wet winter weather here in Southern California, I can’t resist taking a little ice cream break. The Green Tea and Ginger Ice Cream at Ice Cream Ireland sounds not only like it is a flavor match made in heaven, but one made for springtime, as well. I’m hoping the weather holds out for at least a few more days, so I don’t have to save this one for later in the year!

When I bit into a piece of the Choxie Dark Chocolate Espresso Bar I recently picked up at Target, I was immediately reminded of something. The bar was made of smooth, exceptionally well-balanced dark chocolate. The chocolate had a nice cocoa bitterness to it and a distinctly fruity flavor that played very well with the ground up coffee beans also present in the bar. The beans gave a tremendous amount of coffee flavor and, even though you can clearly feel the bits of bean in the bar, it takes nothing away from the overall impression of a well-made, quality chocolate. It took me a while (and another two pieces of chocolate) to realize what, precisely, I was being reminded of. 

The last time that I took a trip to Hawaii, I was fortunate enough to have been able to take a tour of Greenwell Farms. It is a family-owned coffee farming, processing and roasting company that turns out some amazing Kona beans - some of which I’ve even roasted at home myself. They also put out the very best chocolate covered espresso beansI’ve ever tasted, which are made with excellent chocolate over their top-quality peaberry coffee beans.

The Choxie bar tasted almost the same as the Greenwell beans, and they even use peaberry (double coffee beans, essentially) in the bars. The proportions of coffee bean to chocolate were different, but the quality and overall similarity in the choice of chocolate was impressive. The beans, while still my favorite, are not as easy for me to come by as the Choxie bars, so I think that the bars are going to be my new stand-by treat because they’re both tasty and very available (at Target, as Choxie their up-market house brand).

Toothpicks are the gold-standard of cake testing. Most, if not all, recipes call for them and even though there are other ways to test for doneness (for instance, lightly pressing the top of a muffin/cake to see if it springs back into place), checking to see if a toothpick inserted into the center of a baked good comes out clean is consistently reliable. But many cookware and kitchen stores stock actual “cake testers” - are these better than old, reliable toothpicks?

The answer really is no. Performance is similar, and it’s unlikely that you’re going to have any real problems from using a metal cake tester, but the reason why the idea of toothpicks as cake testers has been around so long is that it works extremely well. The slightly textured wood of the toothpick makes it easier for the toothpick to “grip” little crumbs, giving you a fairly accurate idea of doneness, while a metal cake tester can be too smooth to do so. Arguments for cake testers say that they’re cleaner because you can wash them. Toothpicks are disposable and are only used once, so that doesn’t hold up. They also say that they’re longer and work with a wider variety of baked goods - which is true, but you can just as easily use a bamboo or other wooden skewer for a deep cake in place of a toothpick.

It comes down to personal preference, but you’re not going to get drastically better outcomes with a cake tester. I’ll stick with toothpicks, myself.