I could not wait for someone to request this pairing as a commissioned cake, and it finally happened! A friend recalled the chocolate hazelnut cupcakes I had made earlier this year (because sharing cupcakes during tough times is always a good thing) and asked it I could make it as a giant birthday cake. Answer: of course. So here it is in all its glory: four layers of the most heavenly, moist, cloud-like hazelnut cake (made with heaps of finely ground, freshly-roasted hazelnuts because that’s truly the only way to eat these perfumed little beauties), enrobed in the silkiest chocolate hazelnut buttercream, topped with dark chocolate ganache, and then decorated…
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Gluten Free Chocolate Peanut Butter Tart
I’ve already waxed poetic about my love of chocolate and peanut butter and peanut butter and chocolate and any elaborate combination of the two, so I’ll spare you the same spiel here (if you’re into it, you can read ALL of it here on our chocolate peanut butter mud cookies or on these chocolate peanut butter cupcakes). Instead, I’ll just give you the ooey gooey fudgey details of this gluten free chocolate peanut butter tart, my new pride and joy of the weekend (it can be yours too if you follow the recipe below). I’ve seen so many elegantly-simple chocolate tarts on Instagram (our number one app for consuming egregious…
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Gluten Free Pumpkin Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Buttercream
Pumpkin desserts are one of those American things that seem to boggle people in other countries who haven’t grown up eating them every October, November, and December. I’ve probably told this story before on here but when my dad was in his early 20s and traveling through Europe, staying with Servas (an awesome international network of hosts + travelers!) families and picking up odd jobs to fund his next step, he stayed with a family in Sweden who had (not surprisingly) never tried an American pumpkin pie. So, being the guest that loves cultural exchange (as both of my parents are), my dad went searching through markets and grocery stores…
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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 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 Irish Cream Cupcakes
I’m a tea drinker – any coffee and my heart thinks it’s part of a horse race and my brain bounces off ALL of the mental walls faster than tonight’s debate dissolved into absolute carnivalistic absurdity. So the coffee in the photo shoot for these cupcakes was, I’m sure, absolutely terrible, made from instant coffee granules (GREAT for baking) and promptly tossed out after the winning shots were captured. But! I do love a good coffee-infuse/flavored/enrobed baked good. Or coffee ice cream – I’ll take that any day before 6pm. These gorgeously indulgent cupcakes have not only a luxurious chocolate cupcake (with Irish Cream Liqueur), but they’re filled with –…
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Gluten Free Vanilla Lavender Trans Pride Layer Cake
The great thing about baking, and any food really, is that it can carry messages. We’ve gotten the chance to bake for movements and missions that are so much bigger than ourselves this year, and that chance is worth so much. This cake is another one of those chances: Trans rights are human rights, end of story. Aside from the fact that some of our longest, most wonderful friends are trans women, men, and people, every human being deserves the right to express themselves and be who they are meant to be in the most honest, real way they can, and it’s not any of our place to “correct” them…
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Gluten Free Chocolate Raspberry Birthday Cake
In Harry Potter, Professor Lupin gives Harry, Hermione, and Ron chocolate after the first bizarre and harrowing encounter with dementors, and you’ve got to hand it to him, he knows how to cure a case of the willies. For any anti-chocolaters out there, apologies in advance for this post, but you’re probably not reading it anyway after seeing the gargantuan photo of an ALL CHOCOLATE cake, so, oh well. My sister and I have always loved chocolate. When we were little, we’d frequently have chocolate ice cream rings around our mouths, or would choose the flourless chocolate cake (often times the only gluten free dessert option but we’re not complaining),…
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Gluten Free Mexican Hot Chocolate Cupcakes
It’s officially winter in San Francisco again – or, as we call it, “summer.” We seem to exist in a perpetual state of fog, sudden breezes that make a wool coat sound like a great idea in July, and brief, spotty, but glorious moments of sun and blue sky. In the midst of everything else going on this year, it’s key to take a moment to appreciate those sun-soaked moments, and then to plan for your next cozy night in in August with heaps of blankets and a good Netflix show (Dark, and Dear White People are fantastic). For those cooler days, these gluten free Mexican Hot Chocolate cupcakes give…
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Gluten Free Fig and Rosemary Honey Cupcakes
Late summer droops like the slopes of so many purple, green, and yellow figs. I remember reading a book in 6th grade (11 years old) about a young boy in ancient Egypt who embarked on a terrifying adventure through a Pharaoh-dictated city, trying to find and then hide (I think?) a golden vase. Besides the very heat that radiated off the pages that described day after day in the desert, the one thing that stuck bizarrely in my mind from that book was a phrase about figs and how they were the fruit of the divine – something so sweet and sumptuous they were only good enough for the gods.…
