These cookies are for Hope. You know those friends who, even after years of losing track of each other, you fall back into friendship with so easily it’s like coming home? Hope is one of those friends. We hadn’t even seen each other since high school, back when we were both feeling a bit stuck in a rut in tiny Oregon towns, finding our outlet in community theater productions (I think we met on the set of West Side Story, so many years ago) and figuring out who we were. Fast forward nearly ten years and after watching her lay a foundation in actually writing, singing, and producing her own…
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Gluten Free Guava Cheesecake Cupcakes
These gorgeously-pink fairy tale cupcakes are 100% in existence because of a dear friend who, when asked what new cupcake flavors she’d like to see us make, gave us this winning combo: guava cheesecake. What’s not to love? Guava? fantastic. Cheesecake? also fantastic. Cupcakes? awesome. Guava has a light flavor that seems to wrap itself around the cheesecake swirl in a dreamy summer flourish, making us wish we weren’t stuck in smoky San Francisco and instead out somewhere more-frequently sunny and preferably with a swimmable body of water. Thanks Clarissa for championing these incredible cupcakes that are a new favorite. And if you’re lamenting not being able to make these…
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Gluten Free Raspberry Vanilla Bean Layer Cake
Over thirty fires have cropped up across California in the past five days, due to late summer heat waves, high winds, and unexpected lightning and thunder storms. Situated in down-town San Francisco, we’re usually safely far from the path of any wildfires, and only have to worry about smoke-tinged air cloaking the peninsula, blown across the state. But this time they’re even closer to home. There’s a strange cognitive dissonance when fire season starts – while admiring the nectarine-orange sunrises and movie-filter sunsets we’re worried about friends and family around the state and wary of the flash-fire devastation that tore so many from their homes in years past. If our…
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Gluten Free Caramel Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cookies
The macadamia nut is such a divine little bauble. What a nut! Buttery, with a slight tang and a delicate crunch that most nuts just dream of. And, unbeknownst to me (until about 10 minutes ago), they’re indigenous to Australia! Typically, when I think of these expensive, tiny, orbs, I think of neatly-packed Hawaiian Host boxes with sleeves of caramel and chocolate-enrobed salted, roasted macadamia nuts – the classic gift that numerous friends in college would bring back from Maui after winter breaks at home on the islands. But no! Like so many foods, the origin and original champion of these nuts was not the region that eventually made them…
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Gluten Free Strawberry Cupcakes
Strawberries are a fruit loved the world round. You see strawberry images on clothing and accessories; and you see strawberry flavored everything in the grocery store. But just switching from strawberry flavoring to a real, fresh strawberry? Absolutely to die for. One of my first memories of my parent’s produce garden was picking the sun-warmed strawberries and biting into them, just for them to be gone in just one quick bite. These gluten free strawberry cupcakes really bring me back to those simpler summers. For the simplest and easiest of desserts, we have to look at strawberries and cream. Now these gluten free strawberry cupcakes are filled with fresh strawberries,…
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Gluten Free Almond and White Chocolate Sprinkles Cookies
These are the happiest cookies I’ve ever made. It’s amazing how gleeful you can get tossing cookie dough into heaps of rainbow sprinkles. Sprinkles! They’re such a great invention! These cookies are an homage to the incredible Liz of Cup of Ambition – another stellar baking blog that you should absolutely check out right now. It’s not all gluten free but it’s super inspirational and has some great gluten free options! She has an awesome Sprinkles Cookies recipe over there and after staring at her photos and wishing I had one of those pockets-of-sunshine on my brief lunch break (here’s to working from home and having a “home office” right…
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Gluten Free Caramel Latte Cupcakes
Caramel is always seen as a difficult thing to make; only trained chefs or your grandmother know how to make it. However, that’s simply not the case. Caramel is finicky and delicious as any other sauce or reduction, but as you know, well worth the effort. Coffee on the other hand, is as easy to make as putting a pod into a machine these days. I may not have experience as a barista, but I know exactly how to make coffee that I love. I started drinking coffee at the young age of ten, when I would steal quick sips of my mother’s coffee drinks from Costco. The rumor that…
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Gluten Free Pomegranate Cupcakes
A pomegranate is a challenge. Certainly if you’ve grown up cracking them open perfectly in Iran or Turkey or Israel, you’ll scoff at the absolute mess most of us in California make when we try to hack into the intricately-marbled honeycomb of garnet beads. The thin, gorgeously-cardinal skin poses both a hefty protection for the fruit inside and an impossibly-flimsy match for any kitchen knife. After years of trying, and looking up tips for getting into the tricky bulb without turning the kitchen into a bloodbath, I think I’ve got some sort of system down. Slicing a neat little square into the top and carefully peeling back the casing until…
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Gluten Free Banana Chocolate Chip Cupcakes
Anyone else remember the old Bananas in Pajamas routine? I have a vague memory of the “Bananas, in pyjamas, are coming down the stairs…” theme song and the animated intro, but after looking it up just now to refresh my memory, it seems I completely missed the actual show. Human-sized teddy bears and bananas have every-day adventures in brightly-lit homes and sunny backyards. The episode I happened upon was “Pink Spots,” a rather timely short about one of the teddy bears coming down with a case of, you guessed it, pink spots. Alarmingly, neither teddy bear was wearing a mask, and even after proclaiming “you must be sick, Morgan!” the…
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Gluten Free Chocolate Hazelnut (Nutella) Cupcakes
I have many more thoughts on hazelnuts now than I did three years ago. Despite growing up in Oregon, a region that proudly proclaimed this fragrant tree product its official state nut in 1989, I had little dealings with hazelnuts until I was about 17 and tried one of my all-time favorite ice creams at Zoey’s in downtown Ashland – the “Oregon Trail” (dark chocolate swirled with roasted hazelnuts and marionberry jam). My relationship to hazelnuts grew when, in college, I’d often scoop whole spoonfuls out of Costco-sized Nutella jars sitting temptingly in the dorm dining hall. But as many food relationships do when you become an “adult,” mine with…
