This recipe is probably from a lovely little Italian grandmother who not only makes the best tiramisu, but also the greatest pastas and tomato sauces. However, the live demonstration in my kitchen was done by an Italian man in his twenties. Nonetheless, I can guarantee that the recipe originated from a rustic kitchen in Italy, because this man eyed me with suspicion as I laid out my colourful measuring spoons, and was fascinated with my KitchenAid’s ability to improve his efficiency tenfold.

It was super refreshing to have someone else take control of my kitchen to show me something new. Not only did I get a chance to scribble furiously on my notepad, but I was also able to click away on my camera freely to get some action shots of the process.

After chasing this man with “how many spoonfuls of sugar?” and “can you please throw that into this lovely measuring spoon before dumping it in the bowl?”, I think I might have a recipe for you. Try it, and let me know what you think!

Ingredients

• 6 eggs, whites and yolks separated
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 500g carton of mascarpone cheese
• 6 tbsp sugar
• Two packages of Savoiardi cookies, also known by North Americans as ladyfingers
• A giant pot of coffee – at least 8 cups from your coffee maker. Espresso would make your Italian grandma proud, but drip coffee would do if you’re in Canada
• A little bit of cocoa powder

The “Right” Way to Assemble Your Tiramisu

1. In an electric mixer with the wire whisk attachment, whip the egg yolks and 2 tbsp of the sugar together until it’s light butter yellow. This should take about 5-8 minutes, and can be done at medium-high speed.
2. Meanwhile, whip the egg whites and salt together in a separate bowl, using an electric handheld mixer, until soft peaks form.
3. Add 1/3 of the carton of mascarpone cheese to the egg yolks mixture and continue to whip for about 3 minutes on medium-high speed. Then add in 2 tbsp of sugar and whip for about 3 minutes. Repeat this step. You should finish with the last 1/3 of carton of cheese.
4. Incorporate about 1/2 of the egg white mixture into the egg yolks and beat for 3 minutes on medium-high. Then add in about 2 tbsp of egg yolks at a time, whipping for about 10-15 seconds between each addition, until all of the remainder of the egg whites have been added.
5. Once everything’s been added, taste the mixture to make sure it’s lightly sweetened, but not too sweet. You can adjust at this point if you think you need more sugar, but we found that at 6 tbsps, it was just about right. Tiramisu isn’t meant to be a super sweet and dense dessert! Whip for another 2 minutes on medium high.
6. Dip the cookies quickly in a shallow pan full of coffee, and then arrange on a dish. Usually the Pyrex glass ones would work well. Drizzle the tiramisu cheese mixture over your layer of cookies lightly just until a thin layer covers the cookies evenly. Repeat until you get to the top of the pan, and finish off with the layer of tiramisu cheese.
7. Refrigerate for at least 12 hours prior to eating. Just before serving, dust some cocoa powder on top and if you’re feeling really decadent, maybe also some chocolate shavings.

Enjoy!

I just think it’s so quaint when someone refers to that cake that they always had at family gatherings. The “it” cake of the family, if you will. Growing up, my birthday cakes have been interesting and wildly different every year depending on geographical location and later on, the temperamental weather in May in BC. Suffice it to say, my family doesn’t have a go-to cake for functions, despite the fact that my mom is a pastry chef. (She only became an official pastry chef in the last 8 or 9 years, to be fair.)

A few years ago when Private Practice first came on and I discovered that there was a doctor show I could watch without feeling nauseous, I checked out the website on ABC. I was delighted to find chocolate cake recipes posted on there, as a tie-in to one of the episodes. There were three recipes, and one immediately caught my eye – “Holy Mother of Chocolate Cake”. I don’t remember anything about the other two recipes, but I’m so glad this was the one I hastily wrote down on a piece of paper before I went grocery shopping for ingredients. It has now become the “it” cake in the family, as most of my family fondly refer back to the last time we had it whenever we talk about cakes. Naturally, with Alex’s birthday just around the corner, this was the cake he asked for.

The cake is very moist and rich, but is not dense at all. Inside the punch of flavour, there is a lightness to it that makes it easy to devour a giant piece before you realize what just happened. Because of the moisture and the richness, it’s not a cake meant for typical butter-and-icing-sugar icing, either. Nor did it work out well with meringue buttercreams. There are a few ways to dress it up or down, but my favourite way remains the orange whipped cream that I concocted serendipitously the first time I made the cake.

Holy Mother of Chocolate Cake

• 3 oz. semisweet chocolate – I used Lindt 70% cacao
• 12 oz. / 1 1/2 cups hot brewed coffee
• 22 oz. / 650g sugar
• 13 oz. / 370g all-purpose flour
• 6 oz. / 170g cocoa powder
• 2 tsp. / 10g baking soda
• 3/4 tsp. / 2g baking powder
• 1 1/4 tsp. / 6g salt
• 150g / 3 large eggs – mine came to 170g when I measured, so I actually scooped out 20g before I added the other liquids. The extra 20g wouldn’t have made a huge difference, except you’d probably get a slightly denser and heavier cake (not necessarily a bag thing)
• 3/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1 1/2 cups buttermilk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

1. Preheat oven to 300°F. Grease and flour two 9″ or 10″ cake pans, and line the bottoms with parchment paper.
2. Break up the chocolate into small pieces, then mix with the hot coffee. Stir until smooth. Set aside to cool.
3. In a large bowl, sift together the sugar, flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.
4. With the paddle attachment on an electric mixer, beat the eggs on medium speed for about 3 minutes until light and fluffy. Slowly add the oil, buttermilk, vanilla, and melted chocolate mixture to the eggs, beating until well combined and smooth.
5. Add the dry ingredients in parts, beating to combine with each addition. Don’t over mix once it’s all integrated.
6. Pour batter into the pans and bake on middle rack for about an hour. When it is done, your kitchen will smell really, really, really chocolate-y. (As in, this should be the new thing to pop into ovens when you have an Open House.)
7. Remove pans and let cool in pans until the pans are no longer warm to the touch. Cool completely on a cooling rack before handling, or else it likes to fall apart.

Orange Whipped Cream Icing: whip a 500mL carton of whipping cream until stiff peaks form. Stir in the zest of an orange and 2 crushed up Crunchie chocolate bars (the honeycomb gives it a light toffee flavour and sweetness. So if you don’t have access to Crunchie, find some honeycomb to mash up!). Cover and chill in fridge until ready to use. I recommend allowing the topping to sit for at least 24 hours before consuming, either as part of the cake or prior to icing, so the flavour can develop.

Orange Chocolate Topping: in a food processor, chop up 1/4 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips with 1 tbsp granulated sugar and 1 tsp. orange zest.

To finish the cake for a family gathering, I usually ice it with the orange whipped cream and leave it at that. The cake really shines on its own that not much else is needed. The sprinkled topping, though, works great if you want to give it a bit more oomph and also a bit more crunch when you eat it. It’s just that I hate cleaning additional appliances so I avoid this step when I know I can get away with it.

The orange whipped icing also isn’t the prettiest to look at. So for Alex’s cake that he took to the office, I covered it up with a new invention of mine – chocolate orange ganache. YUM!

Chocolate Orange Ganache – in a small heavy-bottomed pot, warm up just over 1/2 cup of cream, and the zest of an orange, on low heat. When the cream is warm and slightly bubbling around the edges, strain the liquid through a fine sieve to get rid of the orange zest (you don’t have to, but I prefer my ganache to be smooth, so I did this). Immediately pour the cream over 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate, stir until everything is melted. When the mixture is about room temperature, pour over the cake (it would be helpful to put the cake in the freezer when you start this process – it helps the ganache set quickly). Smooth out with a large spatula and voila! When the ganache is set and just before serving, sprinkle the orange topping on top.

Enjoy!

This is one of my favourite Barefoot Contessa Recipes, adapted to a personal pan size for those “emergency brownie days”. Emergency brownie days in my books are usually also accompanied by vodka, if it happens to be available in the fridge. That’s how I concluded brownies were probably, most likely, created by stressed out women everywhere. Women who have been pushed to decide that just chocolate simply wouldn’t do; chocolate and butter and sugar together would be soooooo much better.

Extremely Chocolate-y Brownies
adapted from the Barefoot Contessa Cookbook

Ingredients

• 2.5 oz. unsalted butter, melted
• 3.5 oz. semi-sweet/bitter-sweet chocolate chips, melted
• 1 large egg
• 1/2 tbsp. instant coffee granules
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup + 1 tbsp. sugar
• 1/4 cup + 1 tbsp. flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• a small pinch of salt

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Celsius. Line a small brownie pan, 6″ cake pan, or loaf pan with butter and flour, and put parchment paper on the bottom – since this is a “personal pan” brownie recipe, you don’t need a regular brownie pan.
2. Combine butter, chocolate, egg, instant coffee, and vanilla together in a bowl. Whisk together until mixed well.
3. Add in the dry ingredients, and whisk until everything is incorporated.
4. At this point, you can chop in nuts or extra chocolate chips. If you do, toss them together with a tbsp. of flour first so they don’t all sink in the batter.
5. Pour batter into pan and bake until the top starts to crack and a tester comes out clean.
6. Forget about cooling. Grab a spoon and dig in. Have vodka ready if necessary and available.

After reading Alexis Stewart’s post on making this Heaven and Hell Cake from Saveur.com, I wanted to give it a whirl, too. Since then, I’ve whirled at least three times to get it right. Today, I can finally share something.

The reason why it’s called Heaven and Hell Cake is because the cake layers are alternating Angel Food Cake and Devil’s Food Cake. The filling is a light peanut butter mousse, and the whole thing is finished off with chocolate ganache. First of all, whatever you do, do not follow the Saveur.com recipe blindly, especially on the peanut butter mousse. I learned the hard way that my KichenAid isn’t even big enough to handle all the ingredients.

Anyway, long story short, I re-made it and re-made it again. I got the peanut butter mousse after toying with some recipes I found online, and finally got the Angel Food Cake, too, thanks to a handy-dandy book of mine.

The recipe yields enough for a 6″ cake, and the whole process will take a lot of work because of the different layers that go into the final product…this isn’t meant to be an everyday cake, but a fancy once-in-a-while thing.

Ingredients

Angel Food Cake

• 3 oz. egg whites (I buy cartons of egg whites rather than ending up with a bunch of yolks)
• 1/4 tsp. cream of tartar
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 3 oz. sugar, divided into 2 equal portions
• 1 oz. cake and pastry flour

Devil Food Cake

• 5 oz. all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 2 oz. softened unsalted butter
• 4.5 oz. brown sugar
• 1 large egg
• 3 oz. melted unsweetened choclate
• 2/3 cups milk
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

Peanut Butter Mousse

• 1/2 cup whipping cream, whipped
• 2 oz. (1/4 package) cream cheese
• 2.25 oz. icing sugar
• a pinch of salt
• 1/4 cup + 2 tbsp smooth peanut butter

Directions

1. For the Angel Food Cake, set the oven to 350 degrees Celsius. Line the cake pan with parchment paper everywhere – the edges and the bottom. Angel Food Cake tends to do better with parchment than the regular old butter-and-flour set-up. Sift the flour and 3 oz. of the sugar together. Set aside. Whip the egg whites in an electric mixer on medium speed with a wire whisk, until bubbly. Add in the salt and cream of tartar, and continue whipping on medium speed until the volume starts to double and the mixture is turning white. Drizzle in 3 oz. of the sugar and continue whipping until very soft peaks begin to form. The worst thing to do with Angel Food Cake is to over-mix the egg whites, which in turn makes the cake non-airy. Add in sifted flour and sugar and fold gently into the almost-meringue mixture. Pour into the ready pan, and put into the oven right away. Bake for about 30 minutes just until the top is nice and golden, and a tester comes out clean. Remove from oven, chill on a rack in the pan until it settles, and then cool on the rack upside down for at least an hour before removing.
2. For the Devil’s Food Cake, butter and flour the pan, and line the bottom with parchment. Sift the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Cream the butter in an electric mixer with a paddle attachment, then add in the brown sugar and beat on medium until lighter in colour. Add in egg and mix on medium for three minutes until the mixture is light and fluffy. Beat in melted chocolate. Then alternately mix in dry ingredients and milk + vanilla until it’s all incorporated. Pour into the pan and pop in the oven for about 40 minutes. Remove from pan when it’s set and just starting to pull away from the edges, and cool in pan for a few minutes before removing and cooling on the rack.
3. For the peanut butter mouse, whip the whipping cream until stiff peaks form. Put in refrigerator. Cream the cream cheese in a electric mixer with the paddle attachment until smooth. Add in icing sugar and salt and cream together until smooth. Add in peanut butter and mix until smooth (will feel slightly dry and lumpy, just keep going at a lower speed). Fold in the whipped cream by hand until well mixed, and put back on the mixer and whip at medium-low speed for another 30 seconds. Yum!

Assembly

1. Slice the cake layers in half, so that you have 4 cake layers in total. Start with a Devil’s Food Cake, top with a layer of peanut butter mousse, then a layer of Angel Food Cake, and then another peanut butter mousse layer. You should finish at the last layer of Angel Food Cake. Don’t add peanut butter mousse on top, but finish off the edges with any leftover mousse – “masking the cake”, if you will – so that the edges are even and smooth. Put in the fridge while you do the chocolate ganache.
2. Melt 8 oz. chocolate chips and 1/4 cup whipping cream, and pour over the top of the cake when it’s cooled off a bit but is still liquid.
3. Use any leftover peanut butter mousse to pipe fancy decorations on top of the cake if you have any desire to continue with the cake at this point. Voila!

If you’re blissfully unaware of the nerdiness that today inspired, I apologize for ruining this ignorance. Apparently, March 14th is a recognized “holiday” called Pi Day, and yes, people celebrate by having pie at 1:59 (am? pm? undetermined).

While I can’t say I’m a big pie person, Alex loves apple pie. So when he pointed out to me that we should have pie and discuss the relevance of pi on March 14th, I agreed to the pie part. As if I would be willing to impart my views on pi just because it’s March 14th!

Because I am not a big fan of a lot of flaky pie pastry, I made an apple-crisp-pie. It definitely struck a chord and I think it’ll be our compromise from now on…ah, I can’t wait for the strawberry-rhubarb-crumble-pie or the peach-crisp-pie in the summer!

Basic Pâte Brisée – adapted for my 6″ pie plate, yields about 1 crust
4.5 oz / 1 cup minus 1 tbsp all-purpose flour
3.0 oz. / 3 tbsp cold butter
1.5 oz / 3 tbsp ice cold water
1 pinch salt

Apple Pie Filling – just enough for my 6″ pie plate, again…
0.5 lb. Granny Smith apples (or any other baking apples), cubed
0.5 lb. Granny Smith apples (or any other baking apples), thinly sliced
3 tbsp. packed brown sugar
1 tbsp. granulated sugar
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. salt
zest and juice of 1/2 lemon

Apple Crisp Topping – again, enough for my 6″ pie plate. Or if you’re making this as strictly fruit crisp, this should cover about 4 little ramekins of fruit.
1/4 cup flour
1/4 cup oats
1/4 packed brown sugar
3 tbsp cold butter
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
pinch of salt

For the pie shell
Cut cold butter into the flour using your fingers, a pastry cutter, or a food processor until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs with pea-sized balls of butter. Work quickly and don’t over-do it! Throw in salt and cold water, and using a fork, bring the mixture together to a dough. Gather into a ball and wrap with plastic wrap. Chill in fridge for at least 15 minutes before rolling out to cover the pie plate. Once rolled out, trim off excess dough with a sharp knife, and put back into fridge while you gather together the apple filling.

For the apple filling
Toss everything together in a bowl and let sit at room temperature while you prepare the apple crisp topping.

For the crisp topping
Mix together flour, oats, brown sugar, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg in a bowl. Cut in cold butter using your fingers or a pastry cutter. The mixture should resemble coarse crumbs with pea-sized balls of butter. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and chill in fridge until ready to use.

Putting the pie together

1. Preheat over to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Put apples in the chilled pie shell. You may want to drain the apples first as the lemon and sugars will really draw out the juices from the fruit. I didn’t really mind either way so just dumped the apples into the pie shell.
3. Cover the top of the pie tightly with aluminum foil. Cut a few vents with a small knife.
4. Bake, covered, for 40 minutes – you should be able to smell the apples at around the 40 minute mark.
5. Remove from the oven, uncover, and throw on the crisp topping. Return to oven and bake for at least another 25 minutes, or until the topping is crispy and browned. The edges of the pie should also be nicely browned around this time.
6. Let cool in the pie dish, on a cooling rack, for about 15-30 minutes before serving. Serve with ice cream or just a dollop of whipped cream!

So there you have it. I did something nerdy today to celebrate Pi Day and Albert Einstein’s birthday. Also, I hear pie makes the whole losing-an-hour-of-sleep thing go down better, too!

Can you believe that I grew up in BC, loved Bake Sales at school, but had never had a Nanaimo Bar until this past Friday? It’s true, sometimes I can be unnecessarily stubborn.

I decided to make these because it looks like everyone is in Olympic spirits and making Nanaimo Bars to celebrate, so I hopped on the band wagon and made some to take into work. I followed the recipe to a T for the first batch, found on – where else – Nanaimo.ca. I loved the hint of cocoa that came through the crust, but felt it could be a bit heavier, and also thought the middle layer could be a little less sweet and a little more complex. So with that, I set out to make my own version the next day.

Ingredients

for the base

• 3.5 oz (1/2 cup minus 1 tbsp) butter
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 6 tablespoons cocoa powder
• 1 egg (lightly beaten)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups graham cracker or finely crushed cookie crumbs
• 3/4 cup shredded coconut
• 3/4 cup pecans (chopped)

for the filling

• 4 tbsp butter (room temperature)
• 2 tbsp cream cheese (room temperature)*
• 3 tablespoon Bird’s custard powder
• 1/8 cup (2 tbsp) milk or cream
• 2.5 cups icing sugar

*If you don’t have cream cheese, just replace with butter. I like the tartness the cream cheese adds to the icing.

for the topping

• 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
• 2 tbsp butter

Putting it all together

1. Line an 8″ or 9″ square pan with parchment paper and set aside
2. For the base, melt the butter in a heavy small pot, or over the double boiler in a heat-proof bowl. Once melted, using a wire whisk, whisk in the cocoa powder and sugar until smooth. Add in egg and vanilla and whisk again until smooth. Stir in coconuts, cookie crumbs, and pecans with a spatula. Press and pack the mixture into the bottom of the pan and put in fridge to cool.
3. Using an electric mixer with the paddle attachment, or a handheld mixer, beat the cream cheese and butter together for the filling. Add in the milk/cream and custard powder, beat until combined. Slowly, 1 cup at a time, beat in the icing sugar. Once it’s all mixed in together, whip on medium-high speed for 30 seconds. Spread on top of the base, and set back into the fridge to set.
4. Melt the chocolate chips and butter together in a double boiler, in the microwave, or over the stove carefully. Pour onto the filling and put back into fridge to set.
5. About 30 minutes after putting the bars in the fridge, score the bars with a sharp knife, wiping clean after each cut, to ensure that it’ll be easy to cut once everything sets.
6. Cut into bars and enjoy!

You can also add sprinkles to the bars for a festive look, say, around Valentine’s Day?

When Starbucks first came out with these, Alex would always pick one up whenever we stopped in. Slowly, from having lukewarm feelings towards them, I became a fan of the spicy and sweet flavour. I’ve always wanted to find a recipe that mimics just this cookie, and so entered Barefoot Contessa at Home.

Since Barefoot Contessa has baking mixes as well, I actually first tried this cookie via her box mix, and loved it so much that I searched for it in my Barefoot Contessa cookbooks. Surely enough, there was the recipe in Barefoot Contessa at Home, and I made it immediately.

The recipe sucks.

After having seen how runny/sticky the batter from the mix turned out, I was dismayed to find actual decent-solid-like cookie dough in my mixing bowl. From there, it was a downhill experiment where I forgot to add baking soda to the second batch, and the third batch’s consistency was even further from my expectations that I couldn’t even muster up the energy to roll the cookies in sugar before baking.

That was all last year. This year, I decided that the problem must lie within the proportion of the ingredients in the recipe – and I boiled it down to the fact that everything was in cup measures. Out of curiosity, I weighed my cup of flour and discovered that today, a cup weighed 6 oz. in my apartment! (On a dry summer’s day, it’s about 4.5 oz. using the exact same cup.) So after some fine-tuning (hello, first-batch ginger rocks in garbage can), here’s the recipe:

Ginger Molasses Cookies – adapted from Barefoot Contessa at Home by Ina Garten

Ingredients

• 8 oz. dark brown sugar
• 2.5 oz. canola oil
• 3.5 oz. molasses
• 1 large egg
• 2 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp. ground cloves
• 1 tsp. ground nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp. ground ginger
• 1/4 tsp. sea salt
• 10 oz. all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• roughly 1/2 cup chopped crystallized ginger
• granulated sugar, for rolling cookies in

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit
2. In a stand mixer, mix together on medium speed, the sugar, oil, molasses, spices, and salt for about 5 minutes. You shouldn’t have to scrape the bowl too much, but do as necessary.
3. Add in egg and mix on medium speed for another 2 minutes.
4. Add in flour and baking soda, and mix on medium speed to incorporate all the flour. Add the chopped ginger and mix until combined.
5. Roll the dough into about 1″ balls, and drop into sugar. Flatten on the cookie sheet.
6. Put into preheated oven for 10 minutes. Depending on oven temperature etc., it should be ready at about the 13 minute mark. In my convection oven I left them for only 10.5 minutes and they turned out perfectly.
7. Cool on the cookie sheet for 3 minutes before removing to rack to cool completely. Makes 32 regular-sized cookies, or 16 jumbo Starbucks-sized ones.

Notes:

• The dough dries out and “seals” itself easily, so my second batch, which was rolled and then sat on the counter for 10 minutes waiting for the first batch to bake, didn’t crack as much. Pictures here are of the first batch.
• When you remove the cookies from the oven, they should still be puffed up. That’s fine, during the three-minute cooling period, they’ll flatten and start to look like what you want them to look like.

Now go and make them! They taste just like the wonderful things from Starbucks!

I have emails in my Gmail inbox from Spends2Much from November 2007, October 2008, and again October 2009 trying to get people organized to sign up for the Visions of Sugarplums workshop at Dundurn Castle in Hamilton. After two years of not being able to get into the little workshop, this year we finally got in, with 6 people, no less! According to Wikipedia, a sugarplum is “a piece of dragée candy that is made of sugar and shaped in a small round or oval shape”. How cute does that sound? Therefore, with my own visions of sparkling fairy lights and candies in a fancy castle, I was super excited to make these legendary candies this morning.

We got to the castle, and were warned before descending to the basement (the servants’ quarters) about how dark it is down there. They weren’t kidding. However, it was totally quaint and cute and full of kitchen gadgets and a cool oven/stove thing that I think is referred to just as the “hearth”. We got to use the hearth for our baking. I could totally get used to baking in the dark with a hearth.

The hearth! And a pump! I don’t think any of us heard any explanation on the pump – it was too cool of a novelty for us to notice what the worse alternative might’ve been.

Sugar in a packaged in a cone! A cup measure was actually a tea cup!

Under gas lights and candles, we read the recipes of the day: gingerbread, shortbread, pudding, other British-sounding desserts. Finally, Lori piped up for all of us: “Where are the sugarplums?”

Oh, it’s a misnomer. Yes, they apologize, but they will change it next year. O-kay then, we were a little disappointed, but we were also immediately distracted by the Ginger Pudding – something that is tied up into a cheesecloth ball and boiled. Seriously, that goes against everything we know about having ovens on for hours during baking marathons over the holidays, so we had to try it!

Many inappropriate comments were made about these balls prior to dropping them in the boiling water on the hearth. When they came out, it was even funnier with the steam. Schwetty balls, anyone?

These tasted like semi-cooked wet dough, full of ginger and brown sugar and butter. Nothing wrong with that, especially with a buttery brown sugar and cider glaze!

We also made Scottish shortbread with one of these fancy Springerle molds, and as if that didn’t offer enough butter, we also made flaky cheesy cookies.

Afterwards, we did a tour of the castle. First of all, not a real castle – a large estate is more like it. The castle was decorated for Christmas, and it was neat to see some of the traditions being observed in Victorian times.

I thought this tree looked kind of tacky at first, but now, looking at this picture, it makes me happy.

That’s right, the original Easy Bake oven!!!!! This one probably functioned better than a lightbulb, too.

This totally reminded me of James Garfield.

Being silly with the cookies after they were done – love the sugar high!

It was a fun time, but a little part of me feels unfulfilled about not having anything in my bag about sugarplums. I have located a recipe from Saveur.com that I would like to try before Christmas. I’ll keep you posted!

A little something for a little girl’s first birthday. The theme that her parents requested was Mary Had A Little Lamb…so off I went with some modelling with the fondant!

The inside of the cake was a basic yellow cake, with strawberry buttercream that I adapted from the Sprinkles Cupcake recipes on Martha Stewart

Strawberry Buttercream

• 1/4 cup strawberry puree that’s been cooked, reduced, and thickened
• 1 cup butter at room temperature
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 3 1/2 cups icing sugar, sifted
• 1/2 vanilla bean

1. Cream butter and salt in an electric mixer with a paddle attachment until smooth and creamy, about 2 minutes on medium-low speed
2. Sift in the icing sugar in two parts, stirring just to combine each time. It’d be helpful to drape a cloth over the mixer when you do this to avoid icing sugar flying everywhere
3. Scrape in the vanilla paste from the bean pod, and add in the thickened strawberry puree. You don’t need to thicken the puree, but I think it helps to intensify the flavour
4. Mix on medium-low speed until combined. Don’t mix too much – too much air would make it very light and airy and harder to stick on cakes…not that it’s a bad thing, though, if you’re partial to lighter frosting and you’re making cupcakes

The little lamb had somewhat evil eyes, I know – food writers suck, don’t buy them. For the little girl, I opted to use a toothpick and the black food colouring paste I had, which worked out much more precise and looks way nicer!

A while ago I alluded to the baking sessions that Ali P and I used to have in university. A recipe from the back of a Chip-its packet might’ve been mentioned…and today I’m here to share.

This recipe has lasting power. It is like chocolate chip cookies dressed up in leopard print and killer heels. When Ali P showed me the little coupon-sized recipe from the grocery store, and I saw all the good things in it, we decided it was going to be our first recipe adventure together. It worked out beautifully…the cookies oozed caramelized flavours from the toffee bits and butter and sugar and everything nice. The texture, when cooked just right, should be soft and chewy and full of flavour in the middle, with a nice caramelized crispy-chewy edge from the melted toffee bits – heaven!

Ingredients

• 1 cup (227g) room temperature butter
• 1 cup (245g) packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup (110g) granulated sugar
• 2 large eggs (about 45g each)
• 2 tsp. (5g) pure vanilla extract
• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour*
• 1 1/2 cups (150g) rolled oats
• 3/4 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 1/2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 1 cup Skor toffee bits
• 1 cup chopped pecans

*For the flour, I like to use about 1 cup whole wheat flour. Since whole wheat flour weighs more, I would recommend reducing the overall flour amount to about 2 cups – 1 cup all-purpose, 1 cup whole wheat. I use whole wheat in this recipe because with all the gritty bits from chocolate chips, toffee bits, oats, and pecans, you wouldn’t even realize you have gritty whole wheat flour in there as well, plus it’s good for you!

  

Make the Dough

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit
2. In an electric mixer with a paddle attachment, or with a handheld mixer, cream butter and sugars together on medium/high speed until light in colour, about 3 minutes. Add in eggs one at a time, beating just until incorporated. Beat in vanilla
3. Slowly mix in the flour, salt, and baking soda. You want to beat it in if you can, until it is fully incorporated into the dough
4. Work in the oats slowly. If using an electric stand mixer, you should have no problems beating everything…it might seem like it’s a bit heavy, but your mixer is strong enough!
5. Add in the chocolate chips, toffee bits, and pecans until everything is distributed evenly
6. Shape into little 1.5″ balls on a cookie sheet and bake in oven for about 12-15 minutes, just until golden on top
7. Cool on cookie sheet for about 3 minutes before removing to a cooling rack to cool completely. This recipe makes A LOT of cookies…about 4 dozen!

Try it right away. You’ll love these cookies, and you’ll start hoarding Chip-its packages of Skor bits, because they’re not always stocked at every single supermarket!