Halloween was always one of my favorite holidays. My sister and I were VERY into dress up (especially Renaissance and other time-period costumes) growing up – we even had a dress up closet that consisted of giant bins of fanciful dresses and capes and scarves and wigs and suspenders with which to enrobe ourselves for various make believe games and mock-plays. Stepping into the outerwear of some other character not only allowed us to feed our wild imaginations, but also to inspect various aspects of ourselves. We would heighten our silliness or breathe life into our anger or ambition and create characters flooded with those magnified bits of our own…
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Gluten Free Spiced Mandarin Orange Pound Cake with Spiced Blood Orange Tea
I’m not a fan of orange-flavored desserts. But here’s an orange (more specifically, mandarin) pound cake! Contradiction: absolutely. Successful baking venture: also absolutely. Chocolate orange is, in my book, one of the highest offenders, which I know is a wildly unpopular opinion. I used to love those chocolate oranges that we got as gifts on Christmas morning or Christmas eve and smash on the table until they splintered into a dozen perfectly-molded chocolate orange segments, melting on our tongues. Years and years of these, and probably some unfavorable experience with an overly-sweet orange cake over did it for the orange stuff and I retreated to safer spaces of lemon, lime,…
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Gluten Free Cranberry Bundt Cake with Cranberry Glaze
I remember being shocked and awed when I learned how cranberries were harvested. The mental image of a bunch of people in waders sloshing around in an artificial bog with millions of cranberries floating around was delightful – undoubtedly a lot more time consuming and tricky than I’m making it out to be but what a way to gather bucket loads (boatloads, if you will) of these deep crimson gems. Cranberries are strange, if you think about it. An entire bag of them weighs less than anything else you can pick up in the produce section, and they hard and dry until you toss them in with sugar and water…
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Mini Gluten Free Banana Nut Loaves
When I was little, I remember trailing our shopping cart through Costco, delighted every time we passed (and stopped at) a sample table – getting to savor a bite of sausage or a cracker or a tiny cup of smoothie made with an on-sale blender. But the best part of those shopping trips were the muffins. If you’ve ever had a Costco muffin, you most likely have a similar nostalgia around these larger-than-life bakery flats. Because they were huge! At the time of first eating them, they may even have been bigger than my face – a muffin that, when cut into quarters, would more resemble a normal, homemade-sized muffin.…
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Gluten Free Spiced Pear Cupcakes with Vanilla Pear Tea
Tis the season for spices in EVERYTHING, and we’re not mad about it. There’s something so cozy and comforting about the ethereal mix of nutmeg+cinnamon+ginger+allspice+cloves, and any combination of any two of them really, in baked goods, warm fall drinks, and in roasts or stuffing. In this case, we’ve dumped heaping teaspoons of them into these gluten free spiced pear cupcakes with a mapley/spiced buttercream. Pear is one of those delicate, nearly-not-there flavors that are usually best highlighted in slender slices on their own, especially when they’re perfectly just ripe and cut like butter. But we really wanted to figure out a way of putting them in cake form, or…
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Gluten Free Chocolate Mousse Cake
Chocolate mousse. That lighter-than-air, seemingly miraculous dessert that’s the stuff of high-end restaurants and single-serve custard cups of sublime chocolatey goodness. I’d always balked at the idea of making it at home – intimidated by the technique or what I thought I needed to do to make it. But there are many ways to make a mousse! (feels like that should be a saying…) and this one is gosh darn easy as pie (or cake). In times of isolation and social distancing, tracking those “safe” friends/folks in your bubble and making plans to get gussied up and cook a fancy meal add a bit more excitement to the COVID life.…
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Gluten Free Pumpkin Swiss Roll with Pumpkin Spice Gold Milk
This year has been a YEAR already and we’re still a few months away from the dawn of a new one. But this year has also had it’s positive notes – one of which is meeting kindred spirits through baking, both in the activism sphere that allows us to connect and pursue justice and change, and others that focus on bettering our craft and collaborating in new ways that challenge us. We’ve been lucky enough to forge friendships with many new folks, including Erin Creeks of Basil and Beauty who embarked on a food photography journey around the beginning of the shut down and created marvelous dishes, desserts, drinks, smudge…
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Gluten Free Caramel Apple Brandy Bundt Cake
This may be the best bundt I’ve ever made. Bold statement, I know, but so far I’ve eaten four slices of this cake since finishing the photoshoot and honestly, if it wasn’t 10pm and if I wasn’t already way too tired thinking about work tomorrow, I’d walk the 20 feet to the kitchen and sneak a 5th. It has apples (loads of them – both in chunked and grated form for maximum moistness), it has Calvados, a gorgeously-apply French apple brandy, it has fall spices, and it is absolutely soaked in a caramel apple brandy glaze. You heard that all correctly. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for but it…
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Chewy Gluten Free Pistachio Chocolate Chunk Cookies
Green has almost always been my favorite color. Pink was the star of the show when I was in about 1st grade and, upon moving into a new house in Eagle Point, Oregon, I was given the massive responsibility of choosing a color for carpet in my room (out of some of the cheaper options) that my dad installed along with all of the other work my parents did on that house by hand. A deep pink was the winner, though I questioned my choice years later when I was stuck with it and had shifted back into blues and greens (my sister apparently had the foresight to choose a…
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Gluten Free Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bundt Cake with Chocolate Ganache
October (at least here in the States) is all about pumpkins. A bit of a strange. American obsession, much like peanut butter or butting into Latin American governments or personal reusable water bottles or systemic racism. At least pumpkin, and pumpkin spice everything, is a bit more pleasant than some of those others. And with the christening of PSL (pumpkin spice latte) season upon us, we’re now getting to work developing all-new pumpkin recipes that are fun twists on classics or just straight up experiments that push the envelope of what pumpkin can be (the answer? everything). That humble, bulbous, vegetable is now the celebrity of an entire season, gracing…
