For me, a cheesecake needs to have one, maybe two, distinct flavour components. For example, lemon or chocolate-hazelnut. Too many flavours are hard to balance, and plain is too boring to enjoy forkful after forkful. This pear and maple cheesecake was a wonderful combination. ...
As I was selecting the second deep-fried item on our menu for our Hanukkah party, I was very excited to make this east-west fusion dessert. The recipe calls for infusing cream with sliced, seeded kumquats, and pouring the hot mixture over chopped chocolate. It wasn’t clear whe...
Our annual Hanukkah party was a bit low-key this year: due to sickness, many families weren’t able to come, including our co-hosts. Nonetheless, I forged ahead with my deep-frying plan. Tim Horton’s sells a cruller, one of my favourite donuts (the others being sour-cream glaze...
Ingredient surplus is a common theme in our kitchen. I like getting a good deal, but limited space and appetite prevent me from consuming as quickly as I purchase. Case in point: while buying some unrelated product at Costco.ca, I spotted the Food & Gift Baskets section, a...
Regan Daley authored one of my favourite cookbooks, In The Sweet Kitchen, and back when Loblaw’s produced President’s Choice Magazine to promote their line of products, I bought a single issue to flip through. There were a few dishes I tried (e.g. an egg curry) but an article ...
These cookies aren’t anything like a walnut version of Chinese almond cookies. For starters, it doesn’t use ground nuts in the batter, and the refrigeration step makes the sugars dissolve into the butter, giving the final cookie a butterscotch flavour. Do make the cookies smal...
One of my favourite cereals growing up was Quaker’s Harvest Crunch, the kind in the big orange box. I stopped eating it some time ago, around the time I went off to university, and around the time I discovered the mixture of coconut, sugar, nuts and oats was actually pretty hi...
We’re finally working our way through the last bit of pumpkin and kabocha purees. This recipe makes two loaves: I made one with pecan and raisins, and another with cranberry and pumpkin seeds. Instead of canned puree, I used my homemade, roasted squash. It’s nothing special: n...
For a recent Friday night dinner, I decided to take some of the roasted kabocha and pumpkin we had, and turn it into a cheesecake, as it’s been a long time since I’ve made a cheesecake or anything with pumpkin. This CI recipe looked good: a pecan-enhanced crust, and the promis...
After last week’s apple picking trip to Watson Farms, we had a sizeable quantity of McIntosh, Cortland and Golden Delicious apples. Since Gabe was born, I don’t think I’ve done any canning, so I dusted off the canning pot, bought some new snap lids, sterilized some half-pint j...
This is the third time I’ve made this cake in the past few weeks. It’s that good. There’s just enough batter to bind a bunch of apple slices together, and no spices or nuts to mask the pure fruit flavour. It’s reminiscent of the Bolzano Apple Cake but a little more substantial...
By popular request, I made two challahs with honey and apples, following a recipe I hadn’t tried before. The braiding into a round shape was new to me, as I’ve previously just made round challahs in a cake tin. These loaves didn’t turn out that well for me: I let them bake too...
While in Montreal for the high holidays, I had the opportunity to make delicious things using the bountiful fruits and vegetables in the Quebec markets at this time of year. This CI recipe is a cinch to make and is adaptable to other fruit including peaches, apples and pears. ...
I first heard about Fany Gerson from this video about Dough, her donut shop in Brooklyn. When her first cookbook about Mexican sweets came out, I flipped through it at Indigo and, while it was full of her meticulous research and beautifully designed, there wasn’t anything in i...
To make a dessert like this requires some advance planning. There’s a pate brisee (pie crust) dough to make, chill, roll and pre-bake. The pastry cream needs to be cooked and chilled. And there’s also three dozen little plums to core, halve, roast and cool.I started with the p...
I think this bread was the first one I tried from this book, back when I first bought it, around the time it was first published. The details are hazy, but I vaguely remember thinking that I bit off more than I could chew. These days, I’m pretty comfortable with tackling most ...
For a BBQ dinner we hosted recently, I was already making dessert, and bread for cheese, but I wanted a tasty bun for burgers. Having made Variation 3 of this White Bread previously, I wanted to try a different one. The first variation uses powdered milk solids (a.k.a skim mil...
My eyes keep landing on this recipe every time I flip through this book, whose pages are now falling out of the softcover edition I have. But rye flour is not something I usually stock, but a recent trip to (the now closed) Sun Valley on the Danforth somehow prompted me to pic...
We were on vacation in Quebec and Massachusetts for two weeks at the end of July. Since we got back, I’ve been doing “repeat” baking, whipping up old favourites like chocolate-chip cookies and oatmeal scones. I tried a few new recipes too: chocolate-zucchini cake and peach-blu...
In a mad dash before going on vacation, I took the contents of my fridge, and prepped the following items for the freezer:the juice of half a dozen lemonsa pile of chard and spinach, blanched and choppeda soup of carrot, sweet potato and misothis loafLemon and blueberries are ...
We happened to have a jumbo box of Raisin Bran (it always seems like I’m trying to use up one ingredient or another) at home. Dr. S doesn’t like raisins, and I do, but I wasn’t going to eat that much cereal. So I hunted around for a recipe and found this muffin one. Ugh, these...
In an(other) effort to use up an ingredient, I searched for a carrot cake recipe that I hadn’t made before. There were plenty of reviews for this Good Eats recipe, and I whipped up this cake with the help of a food processor. It’s a little unusual in that it uses yogurt. I dra...
I made this loaf twice recently: once before a work trip to San Francisco, and a second time afterwards, so I could get a photo. On this second trial, I put the baked loaves outside to cool to avoid heating up the kitchen. As dusk fell, I went outside and noticed only one loaf...
Our neighbours decided to have a street party over the holiday weekend. We got two quarts of strawberry at a farmers’ market, and I realized I had never made these bars before, and that it would be a great contribution to the potluck. In case there were kids with allergies, I ...
I organized a potluck at work recently, and offered prizes for the best dish in several categories. For my dessert entry, having an impressive appearance was one of my goals. This cookie has always been in the back of my mind ever since I bought the book. On the first day, I m...
It’s been too long between making these cupcakes and blogging about it (almost two months), so I don’t remember the details anymore, like which recipe I used for the cupcakes, it could have been this one. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, it’s hard to mess it up. What was important f...
I came across the Eat Your Books service this weekend. The problem they are trying to solve is that you don’t have an easy way to search through dozens of (dead tree) cookbooks, whether it’s to find a particular recipe you know you’ve made before, or to try something new with ...
For my birthday, one of the gifts Dr. S got us was a cast-iron pan. I’ve never had one before, but I’ve always heard great things about these indestructible, heat-retaining hulks of cookware. I knew the first thing I wanted to try was a cornbread. It turned out pretty well usi...
I’ve made this loaf two weeks in a row now for Friday dinner, as Flick and I have hosted a record-setting four Shabbats in a row with friends. It is a far superior challah to another pareve recipe I made recently. This recipe uses a sponge starter with lots of eggs, and oil an...
I’ve made walnut bread once before, using a recipe from maybe The Bread Bible. It turned out quite dense and dry, so I haven’t tried to make it again. But with a Costco-sized Costco-purchased bag of walnuts on hand, I decided to try again. Many of the breads in Bread Alone cal...
I don’t remember why I wanted to make a nut tart, but I recall wanting a dessert made with maple syrup for Friday dinner with friends. I also got to use an oblong tin that I don’t often work with. The filling is very, very runny, and it’s not set with eggs so make sure any cra...
We still have a lot of Kahlúa in our liquor cabinet, and we also have a lot of espresso beans in the freezer. For Shabbat dinner, I made a coffee ice cream with chocolate shavings. While it turned out very tasty, it melted quite quickly, and I didn’t like the little bits of ch...
Frozen cranberries and a bunch of tiny not-so-sweet mandarins were the key ingredients for this loaf. I squeezed many of the little citrus fruits to get the required amount of juice, but used a regular orange for the zest. The only other substitution was yogurt and milk for th...
Frozen cranberries (courtesy of Costco) are available year-round, and I hadn’t had any muffins in a while, so I tried this newish recipe from Cook’s. It featured ground pecans and was a cinch to make since three of the steps involved the food processor. I didn’t actually proce...
For Valentine’s Day, Flick wanted some cupcakes and was excited about chocolate peanut butter. Unfortunately, this recipe was a letdown. The cupcake batter featured lots of chocolate and the filling is a separate icing-like mixture. The 40-minute bake time was way too long (an...
My wife doesn’t like raisins, and most oatmeal cookies you can buy include them. To satisfy a mid-week cookie craving, I whipped up a batch of these Cook’s Illustrated cookies. I made sure not to overbake the cookies lest they become dry, but mine were a little smaller than th...
We hosted a dinner at our house to celebrate Lunar New Year. I wasn’t planning on a dessert but a friend of ours who was spending a few days at our place was also celebrating her birthday. What’s more festive than a cheesecake made with Baileys? I knew I wanted a recipe that h...
This is a great issue of the LCBO magazine that I’ve hung on to for over a decade. It features three very different fruitcakes, all made without candied, glace fruit. As a thank you gift for friends who house- and cat-sit for us, I offered to make them the dried apple, ginger ...
I made challah using this Fine Cooking recipe twice while I was in Florida. The first time, I made a double batch: a plain six-strand loaf, and the second, a simple braid with fresh pears. To make the latter, I diced a fresh pear and then blotted the cubes dry with paper towel...