I was at the heath food store recently, perusing through the many bags of Bob’s Red Mill products when I spotted a bag of graham flour. Graham flour? Graham crackers, I thought. So, I grabbed a bag and went home.
Some may think of graham crackers as a childish food. And I suppose they are. I remember sitting around diminutive work tables in elementary school, with a Dixie cup full of apple juice and a teacher’s assistant placing graham crackers on the paper napkin in front of me. I loved the snack then, and I love the snack now. Graham crackers are still one of my go-to snacks when nothing else sounds good. Slathered with peanut butter, they can’t be beat. And I only could imagine that they would be superlative when homemade.
I went home, and did a quick Google search for [...]

Christmas came and went with a flurry. The New Year was rung in with a bash. And now– it is January. I must say, that as ready as I am for the holidays to come, each year, I am equally ready to say farewell!
For me, it is was the holiday of cakes. A bûche de noël for Christmas, and a crepe cake for New Year’s Eve makes for one sugar-kissed girl! I know that the holiday has passed, but here is a picture of the bûche anyways. Until next year!

from Nosheteria

Is it possible that Christmas is already here? It feels like only yesterday that I was laying a butter-drenched cheese cloth over my Thanksgiving turkey, and shoving it in the oven.
This Christmas we’re breaking our Jewish tradition of a day at the movies, followed by a meal of Chinese food. We’re going to Brooklyn to celebrate the holiday with friends who are fabulous cooks in their own right. So, I am off kitchen-duties for this holiday. But I do have one contribution to the meal– dessert. I decided to get festive this year, and make my very first bûche de noël. It has been a process, but with eggs, sugar, and butter as my companions, I have made it through relatively unscathed.
There is the vanilla genoise as the cake. It is so light and thin, perfect for rolling. I decided the filling [...]

Have you ever looked through a cookbook and seen a recipe that was so bizarre, with such a unique list of ingredients, that you could not imagine what it tastes like? It recently happened to me.
I checked out the New York Times Heritage Cookbook by Jean Hewitt from the library. It is an out of print tome from the 1970s celebrating regional American cooking. While glancing through the dessert section from the Midwest, I stopped at Dymple’s Sausage Cake. If I were driving a car, I would have slammed on the brakes so hard, whiplash would have set in. Among the usual list of sugar, flour, and spices, were a few ingredients that made me stop in my tracks. Listed were: lean sausage meat, raisins, walnuts, pulverized gumdrops, and cold, strong coffee.
I read it again and again. There were no eggs, and only [...]

I went apple picking again. Correction– I went apple, crabapple and quince picking, and I went a little crazy. 22 pounds of crazy. The apples are enormous, and delicious, but enormous none the less– imagine the head of a small child, covered in delicate, chewy and edible bright green skin. But apples, unlike so many summer stone fruits, stay fresh for quite some time after picking. Even with this rule in mind, I knew that all of my apples would be needing some assistance in their depletion. So, I made a pie.
I will be the first person to tell you that apple pie is not my favorite; I much prefer the typical pies of summer. I love pie; and I like apples, but I always feel so moderate about an apple pie. So this was a single crust pie that I [...]

Who loves shopping with gift certificates? I do! Gift certificates give you an excuse to buy things that you normally wouldn’t buy. They tinge your shopping with a bit of frivolity. You never buy socks, or wooden spoons, or computer paper with them– at least I don’t. I was given a gift certificate awhile back, so I was sitting at my computer, pondering what to buy at the Sur la Table site, when this amazing pan jumped out at me. A brownie pan that ensures a delectable edge piece? I had to have it.
At the risk of this blog turning into an advertisement for this pan, or a site with glaring evidence of product placement, I just had to show you. For someone like me. and apparently countless others, who love those extra chewy, browned to perfection, crispy edged morsels of brownies, [...]

Maybe you have seen them sitting in the glass case at a Mexican Panaderia, a sweet roll, with a sugar crust, that is often brightly colored. If you’re anything like me, you may have been turned off by the neon hues, and ordered something else. Well, I didn’t know what I was missing. I should have said, “One concha, please!” My mornings would have been a lot brighter.
Conchas are named for their resemblance to a conch shell, and for those of you who have yet to try them, they are a soft, sweetened roll that is topped with a crumbly, flaky, sugar-based shell. Take one bite, and bits of the sugar shell come off, gently spilling down your shirt– what a delicious mess to eat! The roll is very similar in taste to brioche bread, and it is made rich with the addition of [...]

But it tasted kind of awful. Recently I picked up Donna Hay’s Simple Essentials Fruit, and as I was glancing through the pictures (because they really are the best part of her books) a Plum and Chocolate Clafoutis bounced off the page at me. It looked delicious, and made me think why hadn’t I thought of that? Well, I will tell you why– it’s gross! How could something so simple, with well-loved ingredients come out so wrong? So here is picture of my failed, too-dense, overly chocolaty, flat, mess of a dessert. Oh well, you win some, and clearly, you lose some.

from Nosheteria