desserts

Meyer Lemon Vanilla Bean Creme Caramel

July 19, 2011

What, another lemon dessert?

Shhhh…yes, another one, and don’t give me any flack about it. I love my little ancient lemon tree and it loves me back. It’s my own personal “Giving Tree” providing me with luscious, sweet, Meyer lemons almost year round. Of the 22 desserts in my “Dessert” category, 6 are made with Meyer lemons, but only 9 of the 150+ recipes on the blog are tagged with “lemon.” And what’s not to love about lemons? The flavor is bright, fresh and clean so how can you go wrong incorporating it where ever possible? In summer we drink lemonade, so why not make a light lemon dessert?

This is the perfect do-ahead dinner party dessert. You can make them up to the day before and then just invert them onto plates (or eat them right out of the ramekins!) right before serving.

Lemon Creme Caramel Recipe
Printable Recipe in PDF

For the …

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Chocolate Banana Bread with Flax and Whole Wheat

March 29, 2011

Do you associate banana bread with the 1970′s? I know I do. In that era of hippies and free love, there was a push toward eating healthy and that’s when natural food stores, macrobiotics and crimes against nature like carob came into vogue. But banana bread actually became popular in the 1930′s during the depression as a way to salvage over ripe bananas, along with a rise in the use of baking powder in recipes to create such things as “quick breads.” Regardless of association, banana bread is often thought of as healthy, though it can be loaded with fat and cholesterol and in general is not exactly good for you despite the addition of fruit.

Banana bread is not always my favorite because it’s usually loaded with walnuts (which I loathe). However, remove the walnuts and add chocolate and I’m a happy girl. I wanted to see if I could make a healthy banana bread without wanting to use …

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Meyer Lemon Pudding Cakes

February 7, 2011

Sometimes recipes come from the strangest, most unexpected places. They can come from a flash of creativity connected to absolutely nothing, they can be inspired by eating something amazing or even by a location, they can be passed down from generation to generation or given like a secret gift from friend to friend. The recipe for this lemon pudding cake came to me from of all places, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Only in our digital age would it have found its way to me as it did.

In the Fall of 2009 I sent out a tweet, asking for lemon dessert recipes. Robyn Eckhardt, a professional travel/food writer who also writes one of my favorite blogs Eating Asia replied, asking if I’d ever made Lemon Pudding Cake. I said no and she emailed me a scanned page from an cookbook called Classic Home Desserts, one I can only presume made its way …

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Molasses Spice Cookies (Gluten Free)

December 14, 2010

I haven’t always had the best luck with gluten free baking. I bought all the right flours and starches, but my experience when trying to bake gluten free bread was less than positive; it was edible but not something I’d eat by choice. While I don’t need to eat gluten free I have friends and family who do and when it came time to bake some holiday cookies, I realized that everything I wanted to give had gluten in it. That didn’t really seem fair to me. Who wants to get a box of something beautiful they can’t eat?

I set out to find a decent gluten free cookie recipe, and was hoping to find something not just “good enough for gluten free” but simply “good enough to eat.” I’m happy to say I think I’ve found it and no surprise, it was on the well known Gluten Free Girl blog. The cooled cookie should …

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Apple and Cranberry Crisp

November 24, 2010

This post will be short and sweet because I know we all (at least here in the US) are getting ready for the biggest foodie holiday of the year, Thanksgiving. I simply wanted to illustrate that substitution can be the backbone of any good cook’s repertoire. When you find a good basic recipe, you can switch out ingredients and easily create something new to fit the season.

Case in point; this Apple and Cranberry Crisp. All you need is to do is take my Strawberry and Nectarine Crisp recipe and replace the nectarines with 4 pounds of apples (I used Granny Smiths and Fujis), peeled and sliced. Then replace the strawberries with 3/4 of a cup of dried cranberries and follow the rest of the recipe. That’s it! You could use fresh cranberries if you want, but you may want to add a bit more sugar if you do so.

This crisp is an simple seasonal dessert, and was perfect at our last “…

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Strawberry and Nectarine Crisp

September 15, 2010

Here in Southern California we are in that “sweet spot” of perfect weather between the scorching summer and our typically mild Fall; it’s a beautiful and sunny 78 degrees and should be for most of the week here. Even though people not originally from Southern California lament the “lack of seasons” here, as one raised here, I can tell you we have our seasons and Summer is coming to an end. I can tell the seasons are changing because the traffic gets worse when kids go back to school. Seriously though, my garden is gasping its last breath and I’m already looking forward to Fall soups and stews and more baking.

Last week my husband, an avid golfer, made a pilgrimage of sorts to play a nice course up in Ventura, CA. On the way home, he stopped at one of the many farm stands which dot the highway and bought …

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