Cocktails or Cake – Why Not Both? Limoncello Birthday Cake with Campari Frosting

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Remember when I made that adorable ha-cake for my friend's half birthday?  Well, luckily for me, despite generally preferring savory to sweet, K does love a good celebration cake, so when her full birthday rolled around this year she requested a cake that incorporated one of her favorite things: booze.  Specifically, Campari, which she fell in love with during a trip to Italy a couple years ago and which has been so well-loved as to have spawned its own hashtag.

Even better than suggesting (I won't go so far as to say demanding) a specific cake for her birthday, K suggested we bake it together, at my parents' house in the Napa Valley.  K is a food blogger too, although she focuses more on savory dishes and wine pairings, and while we've cooked together (we lived together for a while and we made some delicious dinners) we've never baked.  Plus, since she moved to Napa last year we get far too little bonding time, and this sounded like an excellent way to get some 'us' time (plus our assistant, but he's good at respecting our girl time).

So without further ado, to the cake-baking!  Of course, we started with booze: Negronis (a classic Campari drink), natch, mixed by our handsome assistant (to whom also goes credit for all the photos herein and on Flickr).

Another Win for Laziness: Chocolate Chip (Etc) Cookie Bars

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The first time, I made them because I needed something easy and transportable for a graduation party and I knew I wouldn't have time to wait for the butter in my freezer to soften, or to make multiple batches of drop cookies.  I googled 'melted butter cookie bars' and voila!  Bloggers to the rescue, as usual.

The recipe was super simple and I had all the ingredients, plus some pecans I thought would enhance the flavor of half the bars (we have a friend with a nut allergy so I wanted to leave half plain), and nobody was expecting cookies so the pressure was off.  I gave it a go and an hour later my companion and I were burning our fingers trying to 'test' the batch.

#chocolatechipcookiebars with pecans only on half (out of deference to our allergic brethren). #noms #baking #stuffourfaces #prettythings

A photo posted by Anne H. Putnam (@ahputnam) on May 23, 2015 at 3:38pm PDT

Once we were able to try a bite, we agreed: these things are good.  So good that I ate three that night, which is unusual for me – often when I bake something, no matter how tasty it is, I tire of it quickly and am obliged to convince someone else to eat the rest.  It's no coincidence that I favor tall boyfriends with hollow legs ;)

In this case, though, not only did I eat a bunch of the baked good in question but I also started thinking about making them again almost immediately upon leaving the party (I nearly brought home a couple bars but I stopped just short of embarrassing myself that much).  So when I was gifted two glass jars of Nutella from Italy and was antsy to use one as a wine glass, I knew exactly how to put the Nutella inside to good use.

The point is this: these bars are infinitely adaptable.  They were delicious with pecans, indulgent with Nutella, and likely would be even more toothsomely tasty with oats – that's my plan for next time!  In other words, make these.  As soon as humanly possible.

You're welcome.


Chocolate Chip (Etc) Cookie Bars
    Adapted for pecans/Nutella from Em's Bytes  
    (I doubled the recipe the first time and used an 8x13 pan – ain't nothin' wrong with twice the amount of this goodness)

Preheat oven to 350F/175C and grease an 8" pan, square or cake, whatever you have.
 
Mix together in a large bowl:
     1/2c (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted
     1/4c sugar
     1/2c brown sugar

Beat in: 
     1 egg
     1 tsp vanilla
 
Add and stir until combined:
     1 c flour
     1 tsp baking powder
     1/4 tsp salt

Stir in:
     1c semi-sweet chocolate chips
     1c chopped pecans (optional – you can also place them on top of the dough once it's in the pan, if you fancy the look or want to limit their reach) 

Spread into prepared pan, pausing to top with blobs of Nutella if desired, and bake 20-25 minutes, or until golden brown. (Side note: mine never got as golden as I'd like, but I'm glad I pulled the first batch out when I did anyway, as they were getting close to dry.  I suggest using the cake tester method if in doubt, and remembering that gooey cookies are always better than dry.)

Monkeying Around with Birthday Cakes

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When my sister told me that her daughter, who turned three last week, had requested three cakes for her birthday party, I immediately volunteered to bake one of them.  I adore my niece and nephew and have had a blast getting to know them better since moving back from London, but I still see them rarely enough that any opportunity to impress them is worth jumping on.  It only got better when my sister told me the only other request my niece had made: that the party be 'a monkey party'.

I remembered a cake I'd seen on Smitten Kitchen, years back, a monkey face that looked surprisingly easy to put together.  A quick google confirmed my suspicions that this was something I could definitely handle, and I spent the rest of the day at work printing recipes, doubling and tripling ingredient lists, and blocking off the day before the party in my phone calendar.  I was going to go all out this time.

Ruminations on Perfectionism and Lemon Cream Pie

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One of my favorite things anyone has ever said to me about writing was a Voltaire quote one of my wonderful teachers passed on to us in the early months of my MA: "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good".  After years of angsting about writing rather than doing it, my bookshelf littered with beautiful, empty journals too pretty to write mediocre things in, that sentiment resonated hard in my heart.  I determined to give myself credit simply for doing, even just for trying, or simply for remembering an idea – anything to encourage myself to build up momentum instead of stopping in despair.  And it worked, most of the time.  Okay, the beautiful journals still sit empty on the shelf, but now I buy myself unimpressive, blandly designed journals and write in them without concern for perfection.  And when I was in Italy, my amazing friend and writing coach Magda held me to a deadline of 5,000 words a week, and I gave myself the space to write about anything I felt inspired to write – of course, what this means is that I now have somewhere around 40,000 words to sift through and fill holes in, and the majority of what I have is off-plot-line or too heavily biased toward subject matter that was less excruciating to write about, but it's a start.  And that was good enough, at least for the moment.  

My attitude toward baking is similar: as long as people can eat it and enjoy it, I'm happy.  My baked goods rarely come out looking beautiful or professional, and they're almost never consistent in size/texture/bake, which is the main reason I never even considered doing GBBO.  Still, my laid back attitude sometimes leads to legitimate failure in the kitchen (two weeks ago I made some very dense 'muffins', 70% of which I threw out).  And it doesn't always hold up in the face of potential let-downs.  I have definitely had my baking meltdowns, as well as plenty of cases of simple 'that wasn't good enough' melancholy.  For example, the lemon cream pie I made last weekend hit a few too many snags and had me feeling pretty crappy for a while, and now that I want to post about it and I'm looking at these photos in the light of day, after spending all evening editing them with f.lux on, then turning it off and trying to undo the damage, all I can say is 'I'm sorry'.  I'd like to re-do all of it – the pies, the photo editing, even my hair in the photos – but I'd rather get this post up and keep the small amount of momentum I'm beginning to rebuild here in this, my little bakery corner of the internet.

So in the spirit of doing rather than perfecting, let's get cracking on this post about lemon cream pie!  (Sorry I'm not sorry about that pun.)

A Long Time Coming: Apple Slab Pie Worth Making Thrice

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I made SK's apple slab pie last fall to great acclaim – in fact, the reception was so positive that I wound up making it three times in the space of a week, and there was nary a slice left over that wasn't immediately gobbled up by my parents' neighbors and their nine year old twins.  So why haven't I written it up until now, you ask?  Or, more accurately, you demand, with a stamp of the foot and the missed opportunity of apple slab pie on your palate?

I have no excuse.  There is no amount of busy-ness or family drama or house-/job hunting that can explain why I didn't stay up all night editing photos and writing up the recipe.  I just...didn't.  And I'm truly sorry, because you've all been missing out.  But I plan to make amends now; better late than never!

But not for you, when it comes to making this pie.  Get on it.  Seriously, you guys, this thing is TASTY.  Not too sweet, with a flaky, buttery handmade double crust just bursting with appley goodness.  And yes, you read that right: I made the crust from scratch.  I almost never do that, especially here in the US, where frozen pie crust is so easy to come by and decently tasty, but this time I figured I might as well make use of my mom's Cuisinart and spare myself the math of trying to make a long rectangle out of two pre-made circles.

Blogged in the Nick of Time: Easter Baking Experiments

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Last weekend, my brother's girlfriend (and my friend) Rachel and I did an Easter crafting day, where we made ridiculously cute magnets to gift to family members in their Easter baskets – we also decided that this weekend we would do even more crafting, this time in the form of baking.  She set her heart on making these super cute fluffy chick cookies, with a further lamb variation of her own invention, while I chose the much easier-looking (if frequently warned-against) bunny bread rolls that have been all over Pinterest of late.  I bought frozen parkerhouse rolls and she showed up in Napa with all her many ingredients in hand, and right after a boozy brunch and a wee wander we came back to the house and got to work.

And by 'got to work', I mean that I pulled some rolls out to defrost and she got started on the first of six or seven relatively involved steps.  This post is going to be mostly photos, with a bit of description alongside, but since (spoiler alert) Rachel's recipe turned out to be a bust and mine is little more than a set of vague instructions, there will be more links and tips than actual directions here, in case you want to recreate anything.

Any Excuse for a Celebration: Half Birthdays and Ha-Cakes

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It’s holiday time in the blogosphere – everywhere I look I see recipes for Christmas cookies or Hanukkah cakes or generalized ‘winter holidays’-themed party food.  But I think you’re all forgetting the most important holiday of the year: my friend K’s half-birthday.

Yes, I said half-birthday.  I can’t tell you how many people have balked when I tell them I’m planning to make a half-cake for K.  “Half-birthday?” they ask, incredulous, “isn’t that just for kids?”  Well, yes.  It is.  But one of the things I love about K is that she is pretty much the definition of unabashed.  She wants to celebrate her half-birthday with a few friends, some tasty food, and a ha-cake (as in hapenny, jeez), and honestly I don’t see any problem with that.  It is a bit strange for a grown woman to count her age in halves, to be sure, but on the other hand, couldn’t we all use a little more whimsy and celebration in our lives?  I know I could.

How to Tart up a Dinner Party: Easy Apple Tart

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I have a fantastic friend here in London who used to be my tutor and is now the source of most of my shocked belly laughs – he's crude and shameless and hilarious and I love being around him.  So when he invited the BF and me to dinner at his house, of course we rearranged our schedules to make it work.  I offered to make dessert, and my request for preferences was met with the line 'A tart sounds appropriate.'

Well, what could that be besides a challenge?  (Okay, yes, it could be an insult, but it was written in a cheeky tone, not a mean one.)  I immediately started going through my recipe bookmarks in search of the perfect tart – I wanted to make this super-easy showstopper, but of course we couldn't find raspberries anywhere in London in the dead of winter, so it had to be apple or pear.  The tricky bit: as I had plans that day to go to the Taste of Christmas event, it had to be something I could make either very quickly or in advance.  As it turned out, the recipe I used was a little bit of both.

Beauty Comes from Within: Sexy-Ugly Hedgehog Cookies

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One of the BF's favorite kind of cookies is oatmeal chocolate chip, for which he'll hardly get a raised eyebrow from me: the toothsomeness of an oatmeal cookies with the sweetness of chocolate?  Obviously.  I myself am a fan of the good old oatmeal raisin as well, but the more people I poll, the more I feel like this cookie has unfairly fallen out of favor.  Alas, poor oatmeal raisin... well, more for me!

Anyway, when I went to visit the BF in Boston a few weekends ago, I planned on bringing him some oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, but for some reason (I guess because, really, I wanted to eat them), I went with my gram's chocolate chip shortbread cookies instead.  He was never any the wiser, and those cookies are the bomb, so I didn't feel too guilty.  I did, however, find myself craving them the following week (I suppose the idea had planted and refused to let go!), and as I was going to have some girlfriends over for dinner – and needed to make some cookies to mail to a friend for his birthday – I had an excuse to make them.

A Tart and Tasty Birthday Treat: Lemon Cream Cupcakes

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It was my mom's birthday a couple of weeks ago, and since I was in town for it for once (had you guessed that the past 6 weeks of radio silence had something to do with me reveling in the delights of the Great Bay Area?), I wanted to make her a little treat.  Of course, my mom being the healthy lady that she is, I knew nothing rich or heavy would be up her alley, which made for a slightly tricky situation when, without thinking, I suggested that my nephew and I should make and decorate cupcakes together...  My mom is so not into buttercream, or cake, really – she prefers fruit tarts and crisps and maybe the odd cookie (just one).

Still, I figured there was one way I could still have bonding time with my nephew (who's nearly 7, and a boy, and not so into grown-up baking like tarts) and serve my mom a dessert for her birthday that she'd actually enjoy: when in doubt, make it citrus.  My mom, like me, loves anything lemon.  And when I found a recipe, it came with an accompanying recipe for a whipped-cream-based frosting, which I figured would be much lighter than a buttercream, not to mention easier.

Travel, Family, and Meyer Lemons – Does It Get Any Better?

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Look at that.  Just...look at that.

Now do you understand why I checked out for so long while I was gone?  I know, I know, there are bloggers far better than I, who schedule posts to go up while they're away – there are even some bloggers, like the Energizer Bunny Pioneer Woman, who write and post while on vacation!  Alas, I am not one of these bloggers.  I am weak, and as much as I may know I should write a post while I'm home in SF, I cannot resist the temptation of an offer to walk along Crissy Field instead.

However, I am not entirely useless – I also cannot resist an opportunity to bake, and the overflowing bowls and bags of Meyer lemons in my mother's house were just that.  Her trees in Napa were heavy with fruit, and she was running out of ideas for what to do with it.  So I bring home for you: Meyer Lemon Quickbread (and some bad phone pics, sorry).

Signs of Growing Up: My First Meringues

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I had a bunch of girlfriends over for dinner a couple weeks ago, and one of them (whom I nonetheless love very much) is a serial dieter.  Not in a fad-diet kind of way, more in a oh-no-I-shouldn't kind of way.  It makes me sad, since I show my love through sugar and butter, but I was determined not to either a) do without dessert at my dinner party or b) make her watch everyone else eat pound cake while she tried not to salivate.  I did a bit of research, skipped a lot of recipes that involved Splenda or other unnatural ingredients (no offense to people who use that stuff, but I always find I can taste the difference, and anyway my dieter-friend is a bit of a purist), and wound up back at Joy the Baker, where I reacquainted myself with a recipe I'd bookmarked weeks before, for vanilla bean and cocoa nib meringues.

Failure and Fallbacks: Let-Down Lemon Tart and Brilliant Backup Brownies

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Can I tell you the truth?  I don't always turn out amazing baked goods, despite what people say.  The reason my friends think I'm such a good cook/baker is because I usually only serve things I've already tested myself, ideally multiple times.  And there are plenty of failures along the path to deliciousness.

For example, back when I made that amazing lasagne, I also made a failure of a lemon tart (well, semi-fail, and not a fail at all according to my ever-polite guests) – trust me, it looks better than it was.  I spent all that time zesting and juicing and whisking, only to find the end product lumpy and terrifying.  I think the eggs had been cooked a bit by the acid in the lemon juice, maybe... whatever the reason, it looked foul.

Ain't Nothin' Wrong with a Classic: Chocolate Chip Cookies

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 Can it be?  Can it really be possible that I haven't ever posted a recipe on this blog for that most classic of classics, the chocolate chip cookie?  How can that be so?

Well, I guess it doesn't matter how the omission came to pass – the important thing is to rectify it.

An Easy, Healthy Dessert: Baked Apples

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I'm not one for New Year's Resolutions.  If I had to guess, I'd say my hesitation is born of cynicism, which is in turn born of too many resolutions made and broken.  I try to make year-round changes, because for me the pressure of 'this is your one shot this year to make a change' is just asking for a massive (and early) failure.

That said, I'm fully aware that the clean slate of a new year is a helpful motivator for a lot of people.  And what's the most common resolution, in my experience?  Lose weight!  Or just eat better and be fitter (sort of my constant resolution).  And in support of that, and of all y'all who tire of my constant butter and sugar assaults, I give you baked apples!

Buon Natale di Roma!

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Ciao, tutti!  I'm on a much-needed vacation in Rome right now, but I couldn't neglect the blog during the bakingest season of the year, so I'm leaving you with this recipe for fabulously easy, majorly impressive homemade biscotti.

I made these guys for a dinner party back in early November (more on that to come, as it was my first time doing a full-on dinner for a vegetarian-inclusive crowd), and everyone was so surprised to hear that I'd baked them from scratch.  I just brushed off the oohs and aahs with a shrug: no biggie.

Fall Baking, Without the Pumpkin: Dairy Free Spice Cookies

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The air is biting, the leaves are turning, and the adolescent swans down on the canal are finally starting to turn white, which means two things: 1. the swans are currently a mottled grey-white, which is adorably hilarious, and 2. it's time to bust out the fall recipes!

Now, I'm not the most creative cook, so fall recipes, for me, usually just involve pumpkin.  I love pumpkin.  Pie, bread (or bread, or bread), muffins, oatmeal – you name it and put pumpkin in it, I'll eat it.   

Healthifying a Craving: Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

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My cravings aren't always butter-related.  Often I crave sushi, or heirloom tomatoes, or noodles.

But if we're going to be really honest here (and I think we should be – this is a safe space for honesty and cravings), I have to admit that the majority of my sudden desires involve copious amounts of sugar, egg, flour, and yes, butter.

Another weird veggie I'd never cooked: Chard with White Wine and Garlic

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Contrary to what you might think from reading this blog, I do in fact eat healthy foods.  Real foods, like meats and veggies and fresh, non-baked-in-sugar-and-butter fruits.  It's true, I swear!  The problem is, anything interesting enough to share is usually cooked for dinner... at night... (so please excuse the bad pics in this post) but I promise I do eat, and enjoy, healthy foodstuffs. 

Take, for example, this beautiful chard that came in our organics box last week.  Isn't it pretty?  And, amazingly, my tastebuds finally grew up about a year ago and decided they liked chard!  Especially when it's cooked in lots of butter and cheese, but that's neither here nor there. 

Fall Nostalgia Favorites: Gooey Butter Cake

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Well, it's starting to get fall-y again out there – the wind is picking up, leaves are already beginning to litter the sidewalks, and the humid midday gloom is replaced with cool, breezy evenings.  This time of year always makes me feel massively nostalgic, both for San Francisco, my heart's forever home, and for St Louis, where I went to college and experienced many wonderful autumn seasons.  The minute that fall bite hits the air I start craving long, leaf-crunching walks through residential streets, hot apple cider, and gooey butter cake, best consumed sitting in the window at Kaldi's, watching the dusk fall on the seminary park outside.

Gooey butter cake is a St Louis institution.  It tastes as good as it sounds (does what it says in the tin, as the Brits say): gooey, sweet, buttery, with a crisp top and a soft cakey bottom.  It's divine.  So when I saw the recipe in the New York Times a while back, and then again on Smitten Kitchen, I bookmarked it immediately.  But it's pretty involved, and I'm generally pretty lazy, so it wasn't until this past week that I got around to making it.