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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 “…

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 …

In keeping with the theme of Mother’s Day this week, I offer up the dessert I would be making my own mother to go along with this salad if she were in town this week. Rice pudding is one of her favorite desserts, but instead of having this with me on Sunday, she’s off gallivanting around the Italian countryside. Without me, I might add.

Most rice puddings are typically made with long grain rice. I made this one with arborio, a short grain rice with more starch in it, which is most often used to give the creamy texture to risotto. It also retains the character of the rice better and thus does not completely dissolve into mush when cooked.

The recipe for the pudding is really simple can be adapted to fit your needs and tastes. If you don’t want to take the time to make the caramelized apples (though I really suggest you do) you can easily add dried …

A couple of weeks ago my mother was cleaning out a box of stuff in her office and came across a bunch of old recipes. In the middle of it was a 5×8 note card with a recipe for “Old Fashioned Lemon Bread,” handwritten by yours truly.

 The letter started, “Dear Mom, I just made this and liked it so much I had to send you the recipe.” It ended with, “You are required to make this as soon as possible.” I was college student living in an apartment and starting to cook more on my own. On the front side of the card I had decoupaged a selection of phrases cut from magazines including “Hot Stuff” and Highway Mileage May be lower” and the Surgeon General’s warning about smoking. God knows what I was thinking. No matter, the cake was fantastic and once I saw the recipe again, I …

I’ve come to the realization that prolific citrus trees are like summer zucchini; you find yourself using them in every dish possible and then leaving sacks of them on your neighbor’s doorsteps in the middle of the night. I’m not saying I did this, but I know someone who has….

We have an gnarled old Meyer lemon tree in our back yard which is about as wide as it is tall, and considering that it’s shorter than I am, could almost qualify as a “Meyer bush” if such things existed.
For the first few years we lived here we got sporadic lemons and thought that the tree might have been so old it was dying. Then, a couple of years ago I gave it some citrus food and extra water and suddenly the lemon angels were singing “hallelujah!” and we had a tree which while still stubby, was now heavily laden with the kind of sweet-tart lemons for which Meyer …