Chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream is one of my favorite flavors, but I realized the other day that it's always the same - vanilla ice cream with chocolate chip cookie dough.  A little boring, huh.


I, along with a handful of bloggers, was recently asked to create a recipe using the egg-free cookie dough recipe from The Cookie Dough Lover's Cookbook (and was also sent a free copy of the book), and I immediately thought of revamping this classic ice cream flavor using some of my favorite flavors.

I’ve never been a fan of blondies. They’re usually just overly sweet little blobs packed with white chocolate chunks (which I do not at all care for) and maybe some nuts. There’s no real flavor there, at least not in any of the blondies I’ve ever eaten to date, and, as a result, I’ve never been compelled to make my own.


That is, up until last week, when I somehow stumbled upon a recipe for butternut squash blondies. The recipe looked weird, though – strange proportions and the inclusion of those dreaded white chocolate chips – so I took the basic idea and set about crafting my own recipe.

A few weeks ago, a wonderful French-inspired patisserie/boulangerie opened just a few blocks from me.  Their croissants are perfect - in fact better than those at Bouchon Bakery - their breads are excellent, and they have a wide array of little pastries.  Among them are seasonal fruit tarts with combinations such as blueberry, lemon, and lemongrass and cherries with rosewater.  I've been there a few times and have loved their breads and croissants, but have not yet been bowled over by the tarts, which, at $6.50 a pop, are not cheap.  So I decided to make my own.

My dad's birthday was a few weeks ago, and, as I do for everyone in my family, I make them a birthday cake.  In the case of my dad, I always make his favorite cake - my signature pistachio-cardamom cake with rosewater frosting - but even though I love it, too, I was starting to get a little tired of it.  I considered making a mango kulfi cake, but that's my mom's birthday cake, and I was also just not in the mood to make a cake this year (I blame it on the interminable stretch of damp grey days).


A few weeks ago, I had spent some time conjuring up a short menu of simple spring desserts (for a now-defunct project), one of which was a meyer lemon pudding with brown sugar-sesame seed tuiles.  For whatever reason, that one had really stuck in my head, so I ran with the idea of pudding and decided to make it mango.

Who knew that turning a classic cocktail comprised of just a few simple ingredients into a little doughnut would be such a hit?  Apparently it was - my Italian Old Fashioned Doughnuts won 1st place from the judges as well as the Theo Prize for embodying the spirit of the competition (no pun intended) at Sunday's Brooklyn Booze Experiment.

Beer and pretzels: a classic combination and for good reason.  There's nothing quite like the pairing of a refreshing, smooth, and slightly pint and the salty, satisfying crunch of pretzels.  Recently, I've been seeing this pair pop up outside of the bar, and these cupcakes aren't the first instance of it.

My first experience with beer and pretzels in a sweet was NYC's own Liddabit Sweets' beer and pretzel caramels.  Made with a blend of Brooklyn Brewery's Brown Ale and East India Pale Ale, this treat is the perfect amalgamation of pretzels suspended in a sweet, salty, and beer-y base.  (Unbeknownst to me until just yesterday, Liddabit also makes something called the Slurtle, which are the same caramels topped with chocolate.)  And just the other day I saw a recipe for beer, pretzel, and chocolate marshmallows.  Clearly the combination is a good one otherwise it wouldn't be popping up in so many places.

This one's been in the works for a while.  I've gotten a number of requests over the years for an egg-free cupcake but I never bothered with it because the demand wasn't all that great.  But last month, I had a reason to finally give it a shot.


Let me back up a bit.  Egg-free cake?  Why not fully vegan?  A lot of people I know who are vegetarian don't eat eggs, but they're ok with milk and other dairy.  And those were the folks requesting egg-free cakes.   But I figured that if I were going to make an egg-free cake, I may as well just go fully vegan as I had also gotten a few requests for vegan cake recipes.

Photo from Metromix NY

Ah, the classic combination of strawberry and rhubarb. As you may know, I got a whole lot of rhubarb and 2 quarts of strawberries and I didn’t want them to sit around until the next week, when I would likely be getting more of them, so I had to use them up.


I wasn’t feeling too original nor was I in the mood to think, so I whipped up my standard galette/crostata dough and mixed up the rhubarb and strawberries with sugar and cornstarch. But, of course, not one to be content with simplicity, I added some floral notes, courtesy of dried lavender buds in the crust and rosewater in the filling. I’ve seen rhubarb-lavender desserts, and strawberries and rosewater is fairly common, so I figured I’d incorporate both flavors to play off the sweet-tart strawberry-rhubarb action. Nothing earth-shattering, but a little unexpected twist to the classic combination.

Early March is generally pretty dreary here in NYC - as evidenced by the past few days of horribly grey and wet weather - but there is something that comes around every year at this time to (temporarily) lift the doldrums: citrus. Sure, you can get navel oranges and pink grapefruits year-round, but it's only for this brief period in the late winter that we New Yorkers can readily get our hands on Meyer lemons, blood oranges, Cara Cara oranges, and Key limes.


There's something about these ephemeral citrus species that just works wonders in lifting my mood. Maybe it's their exotic flavors or their fleeting nature, but it always is such a treat to be able to indulge in the sweet, bright, and not-too-tart flavor of the aforementioned fruit. Of them, I'm particularly fond of blood oranges - aside from their wonderful flavor, their ruby red flesh is so dramatic and there's something amazing about a fruit that can stain your hands and your cutting boards.

Well, all my hard work paid off - I won 1st prize from both the judges and the audience at the Brooklyn Chocolate Experiment!  My winning entry was a Thai Chili-Lime Dark Chocolate Ice Cream Cone: 70% dark chocolate coconut milk ice cream infused with Kaffir lime leaves and Thai bird chilies served in a hand-rolled cocoa-ginger-Thai basil tuile cone and topped with crushed coconut milk peanuts.

At long last, here’s the recipe for my entry for the Brooklyn Beer Experiment.


When I decided to enter, I came up with a shortlist of things to make. My first thought was Beeramisu using a coffee porter (specifically, Sixpoint’s Gorilla Warfare, which is SO GOOD) instead of Marsala + espresso, but, unfortunately, I was too late, as the organizers of the event informed me that someone else had already entered it. (And Johnny Iuzzini, who is one of my favorite pastry chefs, deemed it the best dessert. Note to self: stop procrastinating.) I am, however, undeterred, and plan on making this at some point in the future using the original tiramisu recipe, which, as I mentioned last fall, was created in Baltimore.

Shame on me for having been gone for so long. Life has been pretty busy, what with planning the upcoming wedding (which is exactly 100 days away - I better get cracking on the rest of my DIY projects), searching for a house, giving up on that and deciding to modify the search for an apartment to rent, embarking upon said search, and finally moving a few weekends ago (I'm back in Carroll Gardens, my favorite neighborhood in Brooklyn). Of course these are all just excuses, as my friend Meghan had a baby a month ago and is already back to blogging.

So it’s January and I’m still posting my Thanksgiving recipes…..


Anyhow, this one was actually a last minute addition to the Thanksgiving menu. There was a total of 15 of us and I realized that one apple pie and one pumpkin cheesecake would be just enough for everyone, and, of course, just you don’t want just barely enough of anything you’re serving – you want to make sure there’s plenty to go around. I wasn’t quite sure what to make that would be Thanksgiving-y, and it occurred to me that I should use cranberries seeing as how they weren’t on the main menu.