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 [...]

“Yum. These are amazing. Really good. Scrumptious even,” Brian exclaimed over dessert last week. When we met (way too long ago), my husband didn’t have much of a sweet tooth. In fact, I don’t even remember there being a box of cookies, or the lone candy wrapper blowing around like a tumbleweed in his apartment the first time I visited his abode. This was not the case for me. I always had a little sweet treat squirreled away. Who knew when that bar of chocolate I was saving for a rainy day would have come in handy? And it always did whenever I would start jonesing too hard.
But as the years progressed, sugar, and I, with our very own close personal relationship, began to wear him down. Brian still does not lap up pools of chocolate sauce, or partake of enormous [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about dough lately–kneading it, pressing it, watching it grow, baking it, and of course, frying it. Maybe I should actually amend the previous sentence to read: I’ve been thinking a lot about fried dough lately. There is nothing like a good doughnut, or a fritter, or a beignet. If my doughnut consumption was in direct proportion to all of my doughnut thinking, no doubt I would be an enormous, sugar-kissed young woman waddling towards you, her hands coated in chocolate glaze.
Perhaps it is the shape of the doughnut, that pleasing circular form, that begs for constant thought. It is the ideal form– symmetrical from all angles, but also a continuous surface. You can start at one point on the doughnut, travel a circuitous path, and end up right back where you started. That is if you did not munch [...]

We all know that Dr. Pavlov, with his multitudes of salivating mutts, has very little to do with a sweet Pavlova dessert, besides a similarity in surnames…but this dessert was so scrumptios it had me salivating, bells or not!
The Pavlova is one of those desserts that is only read about in novels set in the turn of the 20th century. Clarice, the young traveller, gazed across the linen table cloth with a longing desperation at Antonio, who firmly grasped his silver spoon, and with utter obliviousness to the torrent of thoughts in Clarice’s head, plunged it into crisp Pavlova, adorned with stiff whipped cream, and mounds of fresh berries. You get what I mean. And I guess it must be fairly clear that I don’t read much from the early 20th century. But with the first of the spring berries showing their rosy faces at the [...]

Psst, come in close; I’ve got a secret for you. Yes, it’s true I’m a California girl, a place where fresh produce abounds, and Alice Waters is the gastronomical mother of us all. And if you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know that now I have moved to New York City, great big city, great big food. But my mother is from South Dakota…land of presidents carved into mountainsides, motorcycle-riding festivals, Jell-o salads, and casseroles. So I guess you could say, I have a bit of white trash in me…and I mean that in only the kindest of terms.
And with this white trash culture, comes white trash cuisine. Last night I may have been munching on a salad of arugula, dates, and blood oranges, but last week, it was all about homemade chocolate bark made with– hold onto your hats– soda crackers. [...]

Never have I been so emphatic about a dessert, and you have to understand that I am a pretty emphatic person, especially about desserts. But these bars, are so stupendous, that I implore you, “Make them please, pretty please, with some shaved coconut on top!”
Last weekend I was out with Brian, and we stopped in for a treat at Amy’s Breads. That is where I ate this sweet-affirming, all American goody, and my life has been forever changed. (Maybe I am being a bit dramatic, but these bars are that good!) Amy simply called them Coconut Dream Bars, but memories of a 7 Layer Cookie Bar that I ate as a child came flooding back to me. There was a restaurant that my family used to go to on occasion, it was known for it ginormous, split-worthy portions, especially desserts. They had a 7 [...]

I admit it, there is nothing I like more than a good Red Velvet Cupcake with Cream Cheese Icing. I also admit that all that red food coloring, the very coloring that gives the cake its charming name, kind of gives me the heebies. The way that it colors your fingers when you pick the cupcake apart, the way it leaves an incriminating red mark on your tongue long after you have consumed the sugary goodness, and really, just the idea of eating all of that food coloring, despite the delightful sweetness of the cupcake– puts a bad taste in my mouth. And so, when faced with the stunning problem of what do when faced with desire to have the cupcake, without all of the mess, I decided to make Brown Suede Cupcakes.
The Red Velvet Cupcake minus the red food coloring, proved to be just the thing to cure my [...]