Lemon curd is a thick and custardy combination of lemon juice, sugar, eggs and butter. It typically has a silky smooth texture and a bright, zesty flavor. It goes well with scones - especially as a contrast to buttery clotted cream - and is often used as a cake filling, tart filling or as a sauce or side for other desserts. For a citrus lover, few things are tastier.

Lemon curd tastes so good that it’s hard to stop at only a few bites. Unfortunately, the rich consistency of lemon curd primarily comes from fat and, although the zest of the lemon makes the curd taste lighter, most versions are far from health food and you really shouldn’t overindulge - especially if you’re serving the curd alongside butter and cream-based traditional scones, as well.

In Chocolate and the Art of Low Fat Desserts (sadly out of print, but often available used), Alice Medrich includes a recipe for a lightened up lemon curd that is absolutely fantastic. I’ve been making it for years and, happily, don’t feel too bad if I eat half the batch in one go. The curd has a silky smooth texture and great lemon flavor. In fact, it is much brighter than many lemon curds I’ve had. The recipe is easy to make as long as you have one or two fresh lemons around. I’ve also adapted it to make lime curd before with great success. (more…)

Apples are not the first fruit I think of to go into bread pudding. For some reason, things like cherries, raspberries and especially various dried fruits seem like more obvious choices to me, despite the popularity of the apple as a baking fruit. They are softer and, in the case of dried fruit, more absorbent. Both seem like better matches for a custardy and tender bread pudding than a crisp-tender baked apple. But I am not one to let minor culinary prejudices get in my way when I have an idea in my head and when the combination of bourbon and apples called to me, I decided to try them in a bread pudding together instead of going with a standby apple dessert, such as a cobbler, pie or crisp.

And I’m certainly glad I gave this particular dessert a try because it turned out better than I had hoped - and I think it converted me to someone who likes apple in bread pudding! The apples were lightly caramelized before being mixed into the custard and bread mixture that is the base of the pudding, which gave them a bit of extra time to soften up before the dessert went into the oven. The fruit ended up with that perfect crisp-tender texture that you want in a baking apple and added a nice contrast to the very soft bread pudding base.

Apple and bourbon always make a good combination - particularly when cinnamon, nutmeg and vanilla are also tossed into the mix - so the flavor of this dish was delicious. I used a fairly plain and soft white bread (store bought, sandwich-sliced potato bread, to be exact) and I did not bother to “stale” my bread, since I don’t find that doing so makes a big impact on the outcome of the pudding. The dessert will be slightly more indulgent if you use a butter and/or egg rich bread, like brioche or challah. Cinnamon swirl bread would be a pretty good choice, too.

Serve warm, either plain or with ice cream. If you want to take it really over the top, though, mix up a bit of the butterscotch sauce I made and spoon it on while hot. It’s not as thick as anything you’ll find at the ice cream parlor, but the flavor is great and it really makes this dish addictive. (more…)

There are an unlimited number of dessert toppings out there to choose as a finishing touch for your scoop of ice cream or piece of cake, especially as more and more restaurants (and recipe-writers) are experimenting with combinations of salty and sweet things. But there is one thing that tends to shift the scales in the dessert-topping war: booze.

Ok - I’ll admit that I wouldn’t take a dessert based on it alone, but I think we can all agree that there is some glamour attached to a spiked dessert. There is one celebrity chef out there famous for ”boozy” desserts and just about every other one has, at one time or another, made a big show of adding rum, kahlua, limoncello or coffee liqueur to a dessert. There is really no need to make a big show of it, but liqueur does add a grown-up taste to dessert that you won’t come by in any other way.

These boozy, sugary berries make a delicious topping for ice creams and cakes and are both quick and elegant. All you do is make a thick sauce with Baileys (or kahlua would be nice, instead) and toss it with sugar and fresh raspberries. The Baileys taste is subtle and the sugar adds a nice glaze to the berries. Just try not to snack on too many before you get around to serving them!

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Sometimes, I get tired of plain or simple buttermilk pancakes. Part of the reason is that I like a lot of variety in my foods and a part of the reason is this blog. Not that I’m begrudging my own blog anything, but posting does keep me from repeating myself too often.

I stumbled upon this pancake recipe on Epicurious when I was looking for a way to use up some blackberries that were sitting on my counter. I like blackberries in things like cobblers and smoothies, but I’m not a huge fan of eating them on their own as, more often than not, they’re too tart for me to want to eat a whole handful at a time. A sauce seemed like a good way to sweeten them up and the syrup recipe that went along with the pancakes sounded perfect. Not to mention that it was incredibly simple. Of course, once I was making the syrup, I just had to try out the pancake recipe.

After some heavy “tweaking,” I ended up with some delicious and hearty pancakes that are not entirely unlike the original recipe. They have a fair amount of texture from the inclusion of cornmeal and are not very sweet at all when they are eaten on their own, but go fantastically with any kind of syrup. Butter would be a nice touch with these, too, since there is very little fat in the recipe.

The syrup is chunky and rustic, but too thin to be called a compote. The maple syrup pairs surprisingly well with the blackberries. It was much less sweet than plain maple syrup because of the tartness of the not-too-sweet berries. When I tasted it on its own, I thought that it might not be quite sweet enough (I like my syrup sweet!), but it actually went very well with the pancakes.

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I love citrus curds. Lemon, lime - even orange. They’re velvety, slightly sweet, quite tart and the perfect topping for a wire variety of baked goods.

I am not going to claim that this is the best use for a curd because I still think that my spoon is the finest vehicle, but it is a darn nice way to eat it. A crisp buttery cookie makes a great shell for the lime curd, though, like all cookies with moist fillings, the crispness does not last for more than a day. It gives way to a moist, buttery, crumbly cookie that melds into the curd in a very appealing way.

I used Alice Medrich’s recipe for lemon curd and simply substituted lime juice for lemon juice. I didn’t believe that a curd without butter would work, either, but it’s great! Tanvi adapted the recipe to a lighter lemon curd a while back, reducing the sugar from the original. I advise against reducing the sugar in this recipe if you are going to use limes, unless your limes are far less tart than mine. If you have a strong aversion to tartness, you can add one more tablespoon of sugar. Next time, I think that I will stir some lime zest into my curd, which I forgot to do this time, to emphasize the fact that this is lime and not lemon. The vanilla flavor came through wonderfully after refrigeration.

The cookies are easy and versatile. I made them in the “thumbprint” style of cookie here, but you can roll them out or refrigerate the dough and slice them later. The dough produces nice, crisp cookies when unadorned. You can also use jam when making little mini-tarts here, but the lime curd makes them zesty, bright and addictive. esides, you can eat more than one tart and feel good about it. How often can you say that?

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I love strawberries and I prefer to eat them fresh than to use them in a cake or muffin when I can. As summer fades, though, so decreases the availabilty of good fresh strawberries.

Balsamic vinegar makes a great contrast to sweet fruit. This isn’t a breaking trend, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Though you can certainly do this with perfect, incredibly ripe strawberries, I actually prefer to use slightly less than pristine fruit. The balsamic flavor boosts the sweetness of the berries. Use 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar per cup of sliced berries. Let the mix marinate in the fridge for a few hours, then spoon over yogurt or ice cream.

Use any balsamic, but the best choice - my opinion, of course - is a berry flavored vinegar, like the strawberry balsamic at Trader Joes or a berry balsamic from the St Helena Olive Oil Company.