If you love lemon, this cake is for you! It’s the ULTIMATE gluten free lemon ricotta cake, composed of moist, not-too-sweet lemon ricotta cake layers (inspired by Kendra’s lemon ricotta cupcakes), filled with whipped ricotta + cream, lemon glaze, and heaps of tart lemon buttercream. It’s got every form of lemon you can think of and makes for a sunny, cheerful cake for any occasion. In this case, one of my roommates, Verity, requested a non-chocolate cake for her recent 30th birthday, and after learning from her brother that one of her favorite cakes is lemon drizzle, I knew that turning Kendra’s lemon ricotta cupcakes into an actual layer cake…
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Giant Gluten Free Lemon Saffron Muffins
Give us all the citrus! I recently returned from an absolutely wonderful vacation in France and Italy, and the final week was filled with incredible foods and citrus-centered dishes. I stayed with friends in Sicily, where lemons reign supreme and seafood is the freshest you’ll ever have. A few lemony stand outs: limone e sale, a typical Sicilian drink (especially on the east coast where we were) made of sparkling water, fresh lemon juice, and sea salt! Sounds weird, but it’s surprisingly refreshing – highly recommend. Another stellar find was an absolutely glorious scoop of lemon gelato at Caffè Sicilia (which, apparently, is a now a world-famous cafe thanks to…
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Giant Costco Copycat Gluten Free Lemon Raspberry Muffins
The giant muffin saga continues!! Not to worry, friends, this is going to be a regular installment series for us. With so much going on in the world that seems shakeable or unsteady, we’ve set a strong enough foundation to continue serving you giant muffin recipes for a long time to come (we may be reaching out to you all on Instagram and other platforms to help us come up with new flavors when our idea well runs dry). These ones were a top-voted flavor from our Instagram stories a week or so back, so we knew we had to make them pronto. They’re also a new (maybe? maybe they’ve…
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Gluten Free Lemon Cake Parfaits
For these gluten free lemon cake parfaits we are giving a huge shout out to Simply Delish for this recipe inspiration! Full disclosure – we joined the Simply Delish affiliate program which essentially entails them sending us a box of their gluten/dairy-free pudding and jel boxed mixes every few months, and us coming up with recipes that involve those boxed mixes as an ingredient every month, so you’ll see a few other Simply Delish-inspired recipes on here once in a while! This one uses their classic Vanilla Instant Pudding boxed mix and if you’re into it, use our specific link here to go check out their products, and use our 10% discount code SSGPUDDING to get…
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Gluten Free Yuzu Tart with Swiss Meringue and Sweet Sauternes Wine
Here’s to friends far away – and to reconnecting with folks you meet years later to collaborate on awesome projects that blend two perfectly-balanced passions: wine and dessert! This whole post starts back in the summer of 2019 (remember those days? no masks, hugs, handshakes, and seeing people’s smiles?) when we visited one of my best friends in Vienna, where she’s living her best life. She happens to have a marvelous rooftop terrace just above her apartment where we organized a late-summer dinner paired with incredible wine, and we met her downstairs neighbors, Iker and his boyfriend Felix. And Iker happens to be not only an incredible academic (just a…
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Gluten Free Pink Lemonade Bars
Today is the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden Jr. and of Kamala Devi Harris – both titans in their own right, and people who will put the needs and hopes of a country before their own. It’s been a long four years, an even longer four years for those who do not look like me – I’m one of the lucky ones, despite Trump’s (and the entire GOP, let’s be honest) attempts to disenfranchise and demean women wholeheartedly. Today is a new day, one that will not mark immediate change, but one that will put us on a path to righting so many of the egregious wrongs that have occured,…
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Gluten Free Strawberry Lemonade Layer Cake
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is! Earlier this year, in June, we were commissioned to make a big birthday cake for a friend and we came up with the ultimate summer combo: strawberry and lemon cake layers, wrapped in more silky strawberry and lemon buttercream – the strawberry lemonade cake! We were subsequently commissioned by another friend who had tasted the cake at the June birthday, to make it again for their other friend’s birthday. And now, months later and solidly out of summer, one of my longest friends decided the cake she wanted for her November birthday was, you guessed it, the epitome of summer, the strawberry…
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Gluten Free Lemon Basil Cupcakes
I remember the day I first tried this lemon+basil combo in something sweet. I’d always been a huge lemon and a huge basil fan – topping fix with squeezes of lemon wedges and adding in ad much fresh basil as I possibly could to bolognese or tossing fresh sprigs on a platter of sliced tomatoes and burrata. But together? It was deep summer back in Ashland, Oregon, I think while I was still in high school. Maybe a weekend since we were wandering around in the plaza downtown in the early, hot afternoon. We ducked into Mix, our favorite tiny coffee+sweets shop on the edge of the line of shops,…
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Gluten Free Strawberry Lemonade Tiered Cake
Summers are for lemonade and sunblock and big, cloudless skies that seem to expose more of the world than in any other season. If you’re still stuck inside (or if you also live in San Francisco or various areas up in the PNW) then those big skies might still be a little out of reach, depending on your windows. But lemonade and sunblock are totally in-season, and anything that involves the two sounds like a plan for a great sun-soaked day. One positive adjustment that many folks seem to be making during shelter in place is a newfound love of parks. Now, it’s arguable whether your neighborhood 2×2 block green…
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Gluten Free Lemon Ricotta Cupcakes
A wise old wizard once said, “happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light,” and that classic Dumbledore quip seems especially pertinent now. These are uncertain, dark times, and it’s imperative that we all remember to turn on the light whenever we can. These gluten free lemon ricotta cupcakes were some of the most fun to make and photograph (and eat, of course) because they really are quite sunny, and in a regularly-gloomy city in a particularly gloomy time, they brought at least a bit of light into my dining room, and to the few friends who got special…