Twitter is a great invention as far as I am concerned. I love chatting with y’all there and especially late in the evening the banter can get going pretty strong. One night last week it was going back and forth and Kelly from Evil Shenanigans said something about me making whiskey sours and inviting her over…I don’t drink very often…counted in terms of maybe once or twice a year if that and so I thought that was funny. I said I needed to make a whiskey sour bundt cake and all of a sudden half a dozen people were inviting …read more

Mmm…pumpkin recipes…are you looking for moist? How about earthy-spicy? How about something to make your house smell like the Yankee Candle Company? How about if I throw in easy as well?
Yeah. You want this cake.

Now that you know how easy it is to roast your own pumpkin you can create magic in the kitchen with this recipe.  And…did you know…Pumpkin and vanilla are supposed to be very…VERY attractive scents to men…you must keep that in mind and use this recipe responsibly.

This is the cake that I had decided on for the luncheon I catered last Saturday. I wanted a recipe that would go together quickly and easily but be a delicious ending to the rest of the meal, and sort of pull all of the other flavors into it. When I need inspiration I have a couple of cookbooks I invariably turn to – Dorie Greenspan’s Baking From My Home to Yours is one of them. I knew I would find exactly what I was looking for and I did.

I used her Double Apple Cake as the basis for my …read more

Browned butter is a wonderful ingredient. It was used a lot in vintage recipes because it gives a lot of flavor easily. In these cupcakes the butter adds a rich, nutty, caramel flavor that pairs nicely with the very sweet penuche frosting.  Although the frosting has coconut and pecans it is more like pralines than the traditional frosting for German Chocolate cake.

The frosting is very thick and has a creamy fudge-like consistency. It is best just to spoon a dollop on the top rather than trying to spread it. You wouldn’t believe how amazing the house smells while these are …read more

Due to the magic of preposting as you are reading this I am having surgery. At the moment I am not sure how I feel about that but I am sure everything will be fine.
Root Beer Floats are one of my guilty addictions. I have loved them since I was small. I like classic root beer floats but also love them with coffee or chocolate.  The trick to it is to get good root beer, hard to find nowadays. If you can get the real stuff from the health food store, or better yet make your own, you are on …read more

Pound cakes are awesome. They are simple, almost everyone likes them and they are really versatile. You can flavor them with almost anything.  I was thinking of pound cake and mentioned on twitter that I was planning a white tea, apricot, cream cheese one OR a Cappuccino one and the votes started coming in for cappuccino.

It was a landslide. Then I just needed to figure out how I wanted to do it. I wanted a delicate coffee flavor that revealed itself in layers, chocolate but just a hint..and a little cinnamon. I would have loved to put orange peel in …read more

http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_excerpt

No, it isn’t raining. I am trying to get ready for Erin’s ( my daughter) baby shower. Decided to create a tea menu so I could blog it..You have to feel sorry for the families and friends fo food bloggers, they are constant guinea pigs! I swear to you my kids will grow up, leave home, and be sitting at a table with a full plate of food in front of them not eating it…They will be waiting for someone to take pictures before they eat!
Making the food for the shower was a family thing, for the most part. Matt, …read more

Did you see the front of the April family Circle?  Homemade junk food!  I decided that I am going to try the recipes one by one and let you know.  I started with the filled chocolate cupcakes.

I did make a few changes.  I did not like the flavor of the filling as written at all so I added a little cream cheese to give it richness and creaminess.  I used a bittersweet chocolate ganache without corn syrup.  And..I used Hershey’s Dark Cocoa for the cocoa in the recipe…And I added coffee for part of the buttermilk because I find that …read more

This is more of a frosting recipe than a cake recipe. To be perfectly honest I was in a hurry and used a yellow cake mix from the store. I realize that this is grounds for having my foodie insignia torn from my white chef’s coat but there you have it. I am guilty as charged.
Before you send me to the tar and feathering room, though, take a look at this recipe for the frosting. You can do it two ways, one is sweet and the other is less sweet but more creamy like traditional …read more