This chocolate vanilla bean cake was epic to make: four layers of one of my favorite chocolate cake recipes, layered with silky, gorgeously-easy and indulgent vanilla bean pastry cream (with a touch of bourbon because why the heck not), rich chocolate buttercream (also with a touch of bourbon), and a ganache drip. And tons of flowers! Sometimes the classic combos like vanilla and chocolate are the absolute winners, and that certainly is the case with this cake. For those of you who haven’t tried making pastry cream yet, let me be the first to welcome you to the world of SUCH easy and mind-blowing-amazingness. Pastry cream comes together in under…
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Gluten Free Passion Fruit Tart
Passion fruit was one of those mysterious, enticing fruits that I never saw in the grocery store in tiny, semi-rural Eagle Point, Oregon as a kid. The first time I got up close and personal, and proceeded to eat an abundance of the strange, wrinkly, impossibly satisfying tangy fruit was when I got to travel to Australia at age 13. I’d applied for and gotten into a People to People Student Ambassador Program in 7th grade, and spent the year raising money for the program cost and studying the various peculiarities and fascinations of the great southern island. When we finally got there, all 20-something of us 13 year olds…
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Best Gluten Free Canelés
The first time I ever saw a canelé was on the menu of Dominique Crenn’s new upscale wine bar in Cow Hollow. San Francisco has a number of fantastic wine bars, but this one was particularly special because Dominique Crenn is a local, and now global, celebrity. After wowing restaurant-goers at her original Atelier Crenn, she graced the screen in an episode of Chef’s Table with her ethereal and utterly perfect dishes of ginger foam and lobster tartar, caviar with cream sauce and the tiniest slivers of pickled pearl onions, seared abalone under a crackling shell of seaweed and so many others, she opened a second stunning locale, and a…
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Gluten Free Vanilla Bean & Chocolate Layer Cake
Sometimes you save a very-ambitious baking project for the day-of and sometimes it takes a biiiiiit longer to pull it all together than anticipated and sometimes that means you end up taking photos of it after the sun has DEFINITELY set (thanks Winter) so they turn out a bit grainier and darker than you planned. And that sometime was THIS time, but I’m still excited because it was the first time working with edible gold powder and doing this gold drip layer cake! Don’t let the outside deceive you, this cake is dark as night inside with velvety chocolate cake layered with bourbon cherry preserves (just add bourbon to anything…
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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…
