White Chocolate Raspberry Truffles
After years of loathing white chocolate, I realized the trouble lay not with the ingredient itself, but with the disconnect between expectation and reality. Once I stopped expected white chocolate to taste like the stuff that with geographical pedigrees and percentage points, I stopped loathing it. A parable for hard-won…
Candied Citrus Peel
Some people excel at marketing themselves. They read self-help manuals filled with buzzwords; they engage in tactical online behaviors; they practice affirmations before mirrors. Me, I’m terrible at all that. This is a long-winded way of saying I keep forgetting to tell you my photography is now available at Shutterstock.com. You…
Chocolate Gingerbread
This being the holiday season, my non-Jewish spouse asked if I might bake him some Christmas cookies. Jews don’t inherit boxes of Christmassy cookie cutters from elderly relatives. This meant I had to shop for some. (The cutters, not the elderly relatives.) My tribe, we’re good at shopping. In short…
David Lebovitz’s Cocoa-Marzipan Pound Cake
Long before David Lebovitz became David Lebovitz, he wrote a little book–literally, it’s not even 8 x11–entitled The Great Book Of Chocolate. Within The Great Book Of Chocolate resides a recipe for Cocoa Marzipan Pound Cake. Cocoa-Marzipan Pound Cake is full of ingredients that make it a resoundly unphotogenic brown:…
Kitchen Note: Rage, Despair, and Baking
Recent events have left me careering between rage and despair. Occasionally there’s a comparatively calm moment of depression, a lull in the mental action, before some tidbit of horrible news sends me bouncing off the walls again. Writing is nearly impossible. How do you sit down and write: “Today I…
Mandelhornchen (chocolate-dipped almond crecscents)
Apologies for the silence around here. The IK hasn’t been idle. If anything, she’s been cooking far too much food as NPR blares in the background. Just a few days ago, she bought far too much fruit. Before it could rot, she baked it into a cake adapted from a…
Summer Fruit Tarts
Much as the IK would love to blame her recent internet silence on European travel or a fancy sea voyage, she’s been here all along, living her workaday if extremely annoying life. A life which has conspired, at every moment, to prevent her from posting. Rather than detail these piddling…
Cardamom Hazelnut Cakes
The quest to make breakfast appealing for John, no kind of morning person, continues. Expecting non-breakfasters to become lovers of the full English is unrealistic at best. Kind of like expecting people to voluntarily surrender their health care. The trick to an appealing John breakfast is simple, portable food: a muffin,…
Eugenia’s Olive Oil Pound Cake
What interesting times we live in. When not attending marches, mopping up after barfing kitties, tending husbands with neuromuscular disease who caught cold (a volatile and potentially fatal combination), your hostess took it into her head to mess with a pound cake recipe. (Kitty and husband are fine. You were…
Sour Cream Muffins with Lemon and Candied Ginger
FYI: Cuisinart is recalling millions of faulty blades for their food processors. If your machine has a riveted blade, please check the link below, as it can break into your food while processing. I don’t need to tell you how dangerous this is. Cuisinart will replace your blade. Please check here. …