Posts Tagged ‘indulge’

Ohhhh, white chocolate. You are one of my few culinary enemies I have yet to defeat. I will admit, you’re delicious in peppermint dark chocolate bark, and occasionally drizzled on chocolate cake. Otherwise, your flavor is sickly sweet and takes over anything it touches. Yet I try to make my relationship with you work. Tirelessly.

These cookies were an attempt to try and use up some white chocolate morsels I had lying around and I figured whole wheat flour, some pecans, and an equal ratio of semi-sweet morsels to white would balance out. It pretty much didn’t. If you like white chocolate, you’ll adore these cookies. They’re super moist and chewy, have fantastic texture, and the white chocolate flavor is right there in your face. For me, these are cookies to be handed out to others. If I ever make them again I’ll change the ratio of semi-sweet chocolate to white to at least 2 to 1 (maybe 3 to 1) but hey,  my loss can be your gain.

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Bakers, start your ovens!

That’s right, y’all. It’s cookie season! Thanksgiving is over. Christmas time is here. And for many bakers that means it’s time to bake dozens upon dozens (upon dozens) of cookies.

I decided to kick off cookie season with something I’ve wanted to try for ages: an oatmeal raisin pecan cookie. I had a few different recipes bookmarked and torn out of magazines, but in the end I of course relied on Ina because, well, she’s never let me down before. And this is definitely no exception since these are, hands down, the best oatmeal raisin cookies I have ever eaten.

If you like a chewy cookie (which frankly when it’s oatmeal raisin of any kind why would you want anything else?), be sure to let them cool completely on the baking sheet. They’re so plump and moist from the raisins with fantastic texture from the oats and pecans… whoooo-whee, it’s a good way to kick off the season.

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Hee hee, Happy Halloween!

This is quite the departure from the frou-frou cupcakes I made last year, but that’s precisely why I did it. My coworker Haley threw an awesome Halloween party last night and her chef/husband Sean is covered the savory end of party food quite well (CAROLINA PULLED PORK) so I volunteered to bring a sweet. And decided to go the silly, fun, cavity-inducing route of cereal-based treats.

Reeses Puffs cereal, honey roasted peanut butter, and candy accoutrement – all my favorite things rolled together and slathered in orange food coloring: can it get more festive? Well, maybe this:

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Happy Birthday, jonesing for… !

One year ago today I started my blog and it’s been nothing but fun since.  This whole thing began after encouragement from friends since I enjoyed taking pictures of whatever I was cooking, and liked typing up a few words about it as well. I’ve had so much fun sharing my love of cooking and recipes, and nothing makes me happier than hearing my friends and total strangers have been inspired to cook from recipes I post.

And I have something even bigger to celebrate than my blog’s anniversary. I’m so excited to announce I’ve just accepted a position as the new Test Kitchen Assistant for a national food magazine! I’ll be testing recipes, assisting food styling, grocery shopping, and working in the test kitchen for a living – a.k.a. my dream job! Words cannot express how excited and blessed I feel to be able to do what I love for a living as young as I am. Getting out from behind a desk and back into the kitchen means the world to me, so now it’s really time to celebrate!

So to celebrate, I wanted to bake a cake – a very special cake. In a way, this entire post, blog, and really my career, is dedicated to my oldest sister, DeAnna. She honestly is the biggest reason I pursued cooking – admiring her life as a pastry chef when she was younger and always being enchanted with whatever she was baking or making. This bundt cake is one of the earliest food memories I have of being impressed with food, thinking the black and white drizzle was so fancy, the cake shape so odd, the entire thing just being special. So I wanted to go back to my roots with this one.

Unfortunately neither D nor my mom could find the recipe. They both tore their kitchens apart looking for it to no avail, which seemed almost poetic in a way. I got to just create my own version, which is exactly what I like to do here. So I took a simple chocolate bundt cake recipe and oomphed it up, adding coffee and buttermilk, using a chocolate ganache drizzle instead of melted semi-sweet chips, and I had to stay true to the white chocolate drizzle – even though I’m not a huge fan, you can’t get that stunning white color with anything else, and since the cake isn’t overly sweet, it balances out.

So thank you to my readers, family, and friends for a wonderful year! I can’t wait to see what this next year has in store!

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Oh, Easter. In a way you’re my favorite holiday in the culinary world more than any other because your day is devoted to breakfast and brunch, in which all my favorite foods reside. I was going nuts trying to choose what exactly to make for my Easter entry since there is no breakfast/brunch food I don’t love (no – really), and in the end, I had to go with one sweet and one savory dish (to be posted later).

Although we did a lot of the traditional Polish/Catholic customs for Easter growing up (dyeing eggs, strict lent, attending all Easter masses), our usual Easter fare wasn’t Polish at all. We’d have a big breakfast of sweet and savory things like scrambled eggs, potatoes o’brian, and Pillsbury cinnamon rolls before heading to church where I would secretly eat the Eggums I had snuck in my pockets and get disapproving looks from my mother. Then for dinner it would be bone-in ham, au gratin potatoes, and cornbread. There just wasn’t much Polish influence in our meals, so as much as I love my heritage and the food it offers, I decided to go with something we always enjoyed at our modern American Easter brunches.

The Doughboy certainly produces a delicious and fast cinnamon roll, but these just put him to shame. Although mine don’t make that glorious thoomp! sound when you make them, they are still ooey-gooey and rich cinnamon rolls with that cream cheese icing I could just eat by the bowlful. They require very little work (just time to rise) and once you’ve tried a homemade cinnamon roll, you’ll never touched the canned ones again.

Eggs, butter, buttermilk.

Dough + melted butter.

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