We made this cake for Elsie’s birthday, and it turned out very well, with a rich, fudgy frosting. Elsie and her sister helped make the frosting, which was a memorable and time-consuming process, but great fun for the girls! This recipe is adapted from Williams-Sonoma’s Essentials of Baking. It is a rich cake (note the Read More …
We made this traditional Southern cake for Amanda’s birthday, and it was a hit. The unusual part of the cake is that it contains some crushed pineapple and bananas in the batter, as well as pecans. The frosting was good, but relatively soft due to the high butter content, so we stored the cake Read More …
Maybe because I visited Thunder Bay, Ontario a couple of months ago on a Boy Scout trip to the Northern Tier, I have seen a number of references recently to a Canadian cousin of Pecan Pie, the Butter Tart. I made a batch for last night’s Boy Scout Court of Honor, and they were a Read More …
This is an adaptation of the recipe for Tarta de Santiago (Galician Almond Cake) for backpacking or canoeing. The key adaptation is using powdered eggs (I used Hoosier Hill Farm – available on Amazon) rather than fresh eggs. Otherwise, all the ingredients are dry in the base case, so this cake is very suitable for Read More …
This simplified version of a classic cake from Brittany originated in Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s book Home Baking: The Artful Mix of Flour and Tradition Around the World, as further refined by Food and Wine magazine, and then as I further adapted it. I made it the first time per the recipe with Read More …
Yesterday, I found myself with a request for dessert and more milk in the refrigerator than was needed. I decided to make a batch of rice pudding based on a recipe which Mark Bittman wrote when he had “The Minimalist” column in the New York Times. The basic idea is to slowly bake the pudding Read More …
This pie was adapted from a recipe in King Arthur Flour’s The All-Purpose Baking Cookbook and was a hit at a family party last night. Flaky Pie Crust – full recipe for a double-crusted pie 30 oz. fresh blueberries (~6 cups) 1 tsp. lemon zest 2 Tbs. lemon juice 1 cup sugar ¼ cup Read More …
This posting shows the current way I have been making pie crusts, most recently for blueberry and pecan pies. It is an adaptation of the Easy Pie Dough recipe from Serious Eats, and includes some useful tricks to get a flaky crust. This is the first pie dough I made where I felt that the Read More …
We had a zillion blueberries around the house after some blueberry picking, so Carol suggested I make blueberry ice cream. Here is the result, which was adapted from a recipe for cherry ice cream in The Ultimate Ice Cream Book. The key step to this is to properly make the custard base. ¾ cup Read More …
I have three times made baklava on camping trips, mainly to show that it is possible to make something while camping that most people would think is impossible. The second and third times were at summer camp as part of the Scoutmmaster cook-offs. A year ago, I made baklava at Camp Powhatan as my entry Read More …