April 2010

Rhubarb Berry Steamed Pudding – the Daring Baker’s Challenge, April 2010

April 28, 2010

In a fit of anxiety that I wouldn’t have anything to blog about (apparently that’s not an issue as I seem to have a backlog of posts that I’m trying to catch up on) I joined the Daring Kitchen group Daring Baker’s Challenge. For those not in the know, they challenge everyone in the group to bake the same thing and then post simultaneously the results of the baking on the 27th of the month. The April 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Esther of The Lilac Kitchen. She challenged everyone to make a traditional British pudding using, if possible, a very traditional British ingredient: suet.

Read the whole post →

Duck Confit Spring Rolls and more for Nina’s Birthday Party!

April 25, 2010

My friends Aric and Nina had moved here a couple of years ago from New York but unfortunately Aric works crazy insane hours and we never really have a chance to hang out with him. His job requires him to be working both east coast AND west coast hours. I believe it has something to do with finances (hedgefunds maybe?). He’s explained it to us about twenty-six times, and I still don’t quite understand it. Basically it’s one of those “grown-up” jobs that I always imagine adults did when I was child – vague and kinda important and long hours, but probably makes lots of money, as the people who had these grown-up jobs when I was a kid always drove shiny new cars and lived in big houses.

Read the whole post →

A Ten Year Celebration: with Chocolate Caramel Cheesecake

April 22, 2010

Ten years ago this past Monday, I kissed AJ (or AJ kissed me, I guess it depends on who you ask!) on a street corner on a gray rainy day in San Francisco, only to have him leave the following day for a four-day cycling trip that he had previously scheduled. It’s the sort of memory that is both crystal clear and nostalgically hazy at the same time. If it were being filmed for a romantic comedy (the sort of film that AJ and I specifically avoid watching) there would be this sort of grainy feel, with the background blurred while the camera zooms in on us, under an umbrella kissing, traffic lights and car lights multicolored specks in the background, an atmosphere of uncertainty, of what was going on, where things were going, what it all meant. There would be melodramatic symphonic music swelling (probably scored by John Williams because AJ love Star Wars) at the kiss moment. Then we would part, walking to our separate apartments alone.

Read the whole post →

National Blogger Bake Sale! Gluten Free Cookie Bars!

April 18, 2010

Dude. I am totally late to the game.

It’s been a crazy week, with traveling to Ohio and back, and so I decided this weekend was going to be a mellow weekend. I slept in this morning and leisurely lounged about in bed until about 10:30am where I grabbed my iPhone (because I was too lazy to actually get up and move to my computer) and stared at it’s tiny screen to see what was going on in the world.

Read the whole post →

Emergency Strawberry Shortcake Birthday Cake

April 16, 2010

I’ll be honest…strawberry shortcake isn’t necessarily the first thing you think of when you think of a birthday cake. And though it’s true that I’ve made a pretty fancy strawberry shortcake like desert before for my dessert party (an adaptation of Sherry Yard’s Desserts by the Yard – it’s a white chocolate buttermilk cake with layers of whipped marscarpone cream and fresh strawberries – one of these days I’ll blog about the fancy version on the left there as it really is one of my favorite cakes), I just didn’t have the time nor the cookware available for me to make something that fancy.

Read the whole post →

Minneapolis HO! Vegan Apple Spice Muffins

April 12, 2010

How many hours (including sleep) does it take to eat six Vegan Apple Spice Muffins? 24. Well, 24 hours if you are my friend Hadley. Let’s back up a little bit. I was told a couple of weeks ago that I needed to go on a business trip to Minneapolis for work. Thing is, the trip was going to go as follow: I wake up and go to the office, work half a day, fly out at 3pm, land in Minneapolis at 9 pm, go to the hotel, check in, go to bed. Wake up the next morning at 8am and go into a day of meetings and running around and then head home on a flight arriving back in San Francisco at 11pm.

Read the whole post →

Olive You! A Mediterranean Citrus Olive Oil Cake

April 7, 2010

One of the first times my friend Megan came to our dessert party she told me she loved everything I made but raved specifically about the Mediterranean Citrus Olive Oil Cake I had made. So when we recently had our friends Megan and Erik and their adorable child Brady over to our place a week or so ago, she requested it for dinner again. She wasn’t the only one, as it’s probably the one dessert that we don’t have leftovers of in our vast sea of desserts – which is all the more impressive as I usually make it gluten free for a few of my gluten/wheat sensitive friends (ok, I really only have one good friend who is wheat allergic, but it just gives me an excuse to play with flours that I normally wouldn’t play with – thereby expanding my baking palette).

Read the whole post →

Susie’s Pseudo Seder – A Really Good Passover Cake

April 3, 2010

Growing up in my part of town, I was surrounded by The Jews. That’s what my mom referred to them as. The Jews. It’s not that my parents were Anti-Semitic. It was more that my mom, being immigrants and having English as a second language, didn’t quite get the difference between the article “a” and the article “the”…thus it was The Jews, The Catholics, The Blacks. Even The Orientals (that would be us). It probably would have been The Latinos too, if we knew any Latinos, but St. Louis didn’t really have a large Latino population, what with, it being smack dab in the middle of the country.

Strangely though, it was never The Whites. I guess, white people were the norm in the Midwest and everyone else had to be described.

Read the whole post →