Simple Yellow Cake
Simple Yellow Cake is a recent addition to my collection of one-bowl cake recipes. The recipe comes from Laurie Colwin’s beloved More Home Cooking, specifically, the essay “Four Easy Pieces.” Unrelated peach picture. For years I read this recipe, which Colwin describes as a “classic, basic sponge cake English women…
Cherry Ice Cream
I know: cherry season is fifteen seconds long, and for many people, that fifteen seconds has passed. Where I call for cherries, substitute your favorite fresh fruit: peaches, apricots, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, or plums. Or use frozen fruits. Further, none of these recipes require an ice cream maker. A rather…
Alice Medrich’s Almond Cake
Over the holiday weekend a friend kindly gave me a copy of Alice Medrich’s Pure Dessert. If you, like me, have never read Alice Medrich’s cookbooks, much less baked from them, please head for your nearest indie bookstore or library and acquaint yourself with Ms. Medrich’s oeuvre. Barring these options,…
Blood Orange Ice Cream
Americans of a certain age might recall 1970’s Samsonsite luggage commercials. These advertisements featured a gorilla in an otherwise empty airport, trying and failing to destroy a Samsonite suitcase. This ad came to mind Monday, when my husband returned after a brief trip. He’d flown on the “good” airline, the…
Nantucket Cranberry Pie
Nantucket Cranberry Pie is not a pie. It is a cake. How it came to be called Nantucket Cranberry Pie is something of a mystery: the recipe comes from Laurie Colwin’s More Home Cooking. There she describes the cake as coming from her friend Ann Gold, who inherited the recipe…
No Churn Chocolate Ice Cream
For years I viewed no-churn ice creams as the poor relations of the frozen dessert world. My reasoning went like this: if I was going to eat ice cream, then I wanted to eat the real thing. By “the real thing,” think custard-based ice creams calling for six egg yolks…
Easy Blueberry Cake
I know what you’re thinking. It’s broiling outside, and I’m asking you to bake? Hear me out. Easy Blueberry Cake may be baked from a standing start, so to speak. The batter is mixed in a single bowl. The butter is melted, meaning it doesn’t need to be at room…
Tiramisu
I first tasted tiramisu at Filippo’s, a popular restaurant in Oakland, California. Until its closure in 2022, Filippos served family style meals to a devoted clientele. For two years we lived within walking distance of the restaurant, and dined there weekly. Filippo’s served other desserts, but our meals invariably concluded…
Cranberry Galette
Thanksgiving feels like a century ago. Back then–what was it, two weeks? I has leftover cranberry sauce, so, in an effort to use it up, I baked a cranberry galette. This cranberry galette was a huge hit with Mr. IK, so I decided to bake more. Above, the galette that…
Chocolate Ice Cream
The writer Anne Fadiman has this to say of ice cream: I go through the motions of scooping a modest hemisphere of ice cream into a small bowl, but we (she and her husband) both know that during the course of the evening I will simply shuttle to and from…