This was the cakes to end all cakes. Every year, my sister and I would enter things into the Jackson county fair. Yes, it does sound like we just stepped out of a mid-20th-century Rogers and Hammerstein musical, but honestly these were some of the most exciting parts of summers in Southern Oregon! There were loads of categories too, which meant you could enter photographs, canned goods, home-sewn dresses, paintings, drawings, and baked goods all at once and vie for county-fair fame by coming out with one of those multi-colored, frilled, glorious objects: the GRAND PRIZE ribbon. The first price ribbon wasn’t too bad either but the grand prize, or…
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Gluten Free Cranberry Apple Pie with a Flaky Crust
Gluten free pie crust has been my nemesis for 16 long years. Either it’s a soggy bottom, or too tough, or too mealy and damp, never flaky, never buttery, I mean come on, it turned into a half-ass attempt to carry the actually-good part of any pie: the filling! I would reluctantly pull out my food processor and do what I’d always done and come out with the same dry, crumbly crust that I would (if we’re being honest) throw away after scooping off spoonfuls of custard or pecan or karo. Crisps were a much better match: tons of fruit, tons of spiced, nutty, crumbly (because it was supposed to…
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Gluten Free Parsnip and Ginger Tart
Parsnips are far and beyond one of the most over-looked root veggies when it comes to sweet dishes (anything, really, or maybe we just haven’t gotten the memo), and they’re AWESOME. They look like white carrots, and taste similar, with less bitterness and more sweetness which makes us wonder… why did carrot cake overtake parsnip cake as one of the top 5 most common cake flavors in the US? It’s a mystery to us, so we’re making it our mini-mission to find great and wonderful reasons to start picking up these colorless carrot cousins more often on your grocery runs. And they’re just as good on the savory side! We…
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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 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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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 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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Cheesecake Pecan Bars
You may notice a theme here: fall treats laden with hazelnuts, walnuts, pecans, almonds…autumn seems to be the perfect season to celebrate the brilliance of the nut. Buttery and rich, a touch sweet, and with an earthy variance in flavors as subtle as the gradient in fall colors. These cheesecake pecan bars simply jump on that nutty bandwagon, with the added bonus of a creamy, vanilla-packed layer of cheesecake to balance out the sticky sweetness of corn syrup and brown sugar caramelized around the pecans. What’s extra fun about this recipe is the magical switch that seems to happen after popping them in the oven: when you pour all of…
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Yogurt Cranberry Bread
We heralded the brilliance (and tartness) of cranberries in last week’s post (cranberry clafoutis) so we’ll refrain from repeating ourselves here. Instead we’ll just rave about the moistness (sorry) of this yogurt cranberry bread, which, yes, also contains bright crimson pops of color and fall crispness, but which also is a comfort food of the season and deserves to be your next baking adventure. If you’re celebrating turkeys and pies and all the drowsy effects of tryptophan in two weeks, this is another recipe to add to the Thanksgiving dessert table. Quick breads have a sort of humble elegance to them: rustic and simple, but with often more heightened flavors…
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Cranberry Clafoutis
Cranberries are the deceivingly beautiful but unfortunately tart fruit of fall. I grew up on Costco bags of dried Ocean Spray cranberries, grabbed by the handfuls for after school snacks or tossed together with almonds or cashews for a between-class snack. I remember the revelation that took hold of my sister and I the first time we witnessed the marvel of a cranberry harvest on PBS: millions of marvelously smooth rubies floating in washes of flooded fields. It was practically the red sea, waters parted by wader-clad farmers in checkered flannels and baseball caps. As a proud Pacific Northwesterner, it was another shining example of the quiet gloriousness of the…
