When you have fresh berries around, a clafoutis is a great way to showcase them. A clafoutis is a French dessert that is somewhere between a cake and a custard. It is just firm enough to slice easily, as cakes are, but it is based heavily in milk and egg, and has a lovely custard flavor and texture to it. The vanilla-scented batter is a great backdrop to all kinds of fruit. Pear Clafoutis is one of my favorite variations, but I’ve used blackberries for this batch.

Fresh blackberries go very well with the vanilla custard flavor of this dish. They’re bright and have a nice sweetness to them - and I have to admit that their beautiful purple color is offset very well by the pale clafoutis. You can use frozen berries, but your clafoutis will take a few minutes longer to bake and the berries might loose a little bit of their texture as the dish bakes. I think that fresh berries are your best bet, and you can easily mix in some blueberries or raspberries in this, too.

This clafoutis batter mixes up very easily in just one bowl (or in the food processor) in about 2 minutes. It has very simple ingredients, so as long as you have berries on hand, you can quite literally start putting this together on a moment’s notice. When you pull it out of the oven, you’ll notice that it rises like a souffle, thanks to the number of eggs in the batter. It will fall slightly as it cools, so don’t worry if yours doesn’t remain puffed up after it finishes cooking.

You can serve this dish warm or chilled, it is very tasty both ways. It can be made a day in advance, but it really looks and tastes its best within a day of making it, so I would try to make it the day you will be serving it if possible.

(more…)

• Food Blogga’s Banana Apple Cardamom Cake with Cardamom Icing sounds like it might be a simple cake - and it is easy to make - but it is far from simple where flavor is involved. The cake includes lots of spices, vanilla, honey, shredded coconut, coconut milk, raisins, apples and nuts. It has something for just about everyone, and the nice thing about it is that you won’t really realize this until you cut into the cake.
• Granola makes a great addition to a batch of chocolate chip cookies. It adds a lot of flavor and more crunch that you might get from additions like toasted nuts alone. Dandy Sugar’s Granola Cookies with Toasted Coconut, Almonds, and Chocolate have a lot of other great flavors on top of the granola, too. The coconut and almonds add a lot of nuttiness, and this is going to be even better if the granola you choose to work with incorporates some of these flavors already.
• You don’t have to miss out on scones entirely if you need to stick to a gluten-free diet. The Chocolate Chip Scones that Gluten Free Goddess whipped up are made with sorghum flour, millet flour and tapioca starch. They’re a bit more cake-like and crumbly than your average gluten free scone because these are also vegan, so there is no egg in the recipe as a binder, but they still make a warm, satisfying addition to breakfast with a cup of hot coffee or tea.
• I usually bake biscuits to use as a base for my strawberry shortcakes, but I’m not opposed to using other types of cake as a base for this lovely summery dessert. Comfy Belly uses a moist, almond cupcake for the base of these Strawberry Shortcakes. The cupcakes are turned upside down and sliced in half horizontally, before being filled with creme fraiche and fresh berries. It is light, sweet and the presentation is great. You could mix it up with different flavors of cupcakes, as well.
• Maple fans will want to mix up Not Derby Pie’s Maple Yogurt Pound Cake straight away. This ultra-moist cake uses flavorful grade-B maple syrup as its primary sweetener and uses yogurt to add a subtle tanginess and moisture to the cake. It’s a simple cake that whips up in a single bowl, so you can make it on short notice and enjoy the smell of that maple syrup filling your kitchen while the cake bakes.

Two of the most observed traditions of St Patrick’s day are probably pinching someone who isn’t wearing a bit of green and knocking back a couple of green beers. Ok - those probably aren’t the most popular St Paddy’s Day traditions, but they certainly seem to be ones that people enjoy! I personally like to celebrate with a little bit of Irish Food, like corned beef, braised cabbage and some homemade baked goods.

I’ll always do an Irish Soda Bread. These loaves are easy to make, since they’re leavened with baking soda and not with yeast. there are many variations on the traditional loaf, and I like mine slathered with Irish Butter. Soda Bread Farls are another great variation on this type of bread, baked directly in a skillet instead of in an oven.

Irish cream makes an appearance in many of my desserts for St Patrick’s Day. Irish Cream Brownies and Bailey’s Cheesecake Bars aren’t exactly traditional desserts, but they’re delicious none the less. Irish Coffee is a good pairing with an dessert.

I would do more green desserts, but green is one of those colors that doesn’t always flatter foods that aren’t naturally green. That said, there are some green dessert ideas out there. Homemade by Holman made some absolutely amazing Shamrock Sandwich Cookies. These dark green cookies are soft and cake-like, so these sandwiches are really a variation on whoopie pies. The secret to making them is piping out the cake batter into clean shamrock shapes before baking them. Nutmeg Nanny whipped up some Green Velvet Cupcakes for the holiday, too. Like the whoopie pies, these also use green food coloring with great effect. Keep in mind that it is a good idea to go with a lot of food coloring; the brighter the color the better your green sweets will look.

Most measuring spoon sets have just four spoons: 1/4 tsp, 1/2 tsp, 1 tsp and 1 tbsp. With these four spoons, you can get done all the measuring you need to do for most recipes. That said, there are plenty of times when you might end up with a measurement that doesn’t fit neatly into one of these sizes. For instance, an old recipe might call for “a pinch” of something, while a big recipe that you’ve cut down for a smaller batch might end up needing 2/3 of a teaspoon. I will divide or estimate as needed to make these sizes work with my existing spoons, but it is much more convenient to have measuring spoons that encompass these unusual sizes. This set of Odd Size Measuring Spoons covers just about all the measuring spoon bases you might need. The set includes a “pinch”, 1/8 tsp, 1/4 tsp, 1/2 tsp, 2/3 tsp, 1 tsp, 1 1/2 tsp, 2 tsp and 1 tbsp measures, all clipped together for easy storage. I’ve seen several other off-size spoon sets that don’t include the standard measures along with the unusual ones, so it’s nice that this set will do it all. Each spoon is also marked with milliliter equivalents, which is handy if you use European/international recipes that don’t rely on teaspoons for measurements.

Pomegranates are packed with antioxidants, which means that there are a lot of potential health benefits packed into each fruit. Pomegranates are a bit difficult to eat, since each little seed - although tasty - doesn’t have a lot of juice or flesh surrounding it, so it takes quite a while to consume one. This is where pomegranate juice comes in, making it easy to enjoy the flavor of pomegranate without the work involved in eating a whole fruit. The juice can be used in many different types of dishes, and while I often see it reduced in a sauce, I used some to sweeten up a chocolate bundt cake.

This cake is moist, chocolaty and has a tender, but slightly dense, texture. It’s a great bundt cake because it’s easy to make and each slice is satisfying to eat. I used pomegranate juice as the primary liquid in this cake, where I might use milk, buttermilk or coffee in another chocolate cake. There is a lot of cocoa powder in here, so you can’t directly taste the pomegranate flavor in the cake. You can definitely tell the juice is there, however, because there is a lovely fruity sweetness to the cake that adds some complexity to the flavor. Not wanting to skimp on the chocolate, I incorporated some chocolate chips into this cake, too.

I used POM Wonderful pomegranate juice in this cake, because it is pure pomegranate juice and not simply flavored white grape juice. Definitely take the time to look for pure juice when you make this cake, both for that fruity flavor and for the antioxidants (don’t forget that there are also plenty in the cocoa powder in this cake!). It’s pretty easy to justify having a second piece when you can say you’re doing it for health reasons!
(more…)

Some women, it is said, like to cook.
This book is not for them.

This is how The I Hate To Cook Book starts out. The cookbook, first published in 1960 (a 50th anniversary edition of the cookbook is being released in just a few months), has been a hit with home cooks ever since. The cookbook does contain more than 180 recipes, but its biggest selling point is that it is witty and fun to read, with a fantastic tone that will make you want to read every recipe just to hear what author Peg Bracken has to say. It reminds you that it is ok to have realistic goals in the kitchen - such as getting through dinner with a minimum amount of work, or finding to easiest possible dish to bring to a potluck - rather than needing to aspire to be the next Martha Stewart with every dish that you make.

The book has 13 chapters, with the last two covering household and kitchen tips rather than adding too many more recipes. The chapters have titles like “Company’s Coming, or Your Back’s to the Wall” and “Desserts, or People Are Too Fat Anyway.” The recipes are very detailed with the sort of instructions that will make sense to even a non cook, such as “cook until it’s the color of a nice camel’s hair coat” can easily follow. Don’t be fooled by all the joking in the book, however: Peg Bracken was a good cook (whether she wanted to be or not!) and these are good recipes.

Since this is an older cookbook, some of the recipes are a bit outdated, but most are just as current as those you’ll find in any other all purpose cookbook. There are no full-color pictures (at least not in my 1960 edition) to show you want the recipes should look like. It has plenty of lovely pen and ink illustrations by Hillary Knight that will make you smile as you go through the chapters.