Birthday Shortcake with Fresh Strawberries and Cream

Birthdays need cake. Special birthdays need special cake. This year my boyfriend’s mother celebrated what will henceforth be known as her Diamond Jubilee with an unforgettable surprise birthday party, complete with a surprise VW beetle convertible and tickets to the Kentucky Derby. The biggest surprise, however, was her daughter and granddaughter arriving home to Texas an entire month early from Oman. This strawberry shortcake, made at the request of one very surprised birthday lady, was two layers of strawberry summer decadence, a delicious and familiar end to a distinctly surprising and celebratory evening. Use this one to say Happy Birthday and Happy Summer.

Peekaboo Blueberry Pie

Exciting things happen when you move out of college and into a real human apartment. If your real human apartment happens to be in a place like Texas where there is space for all of your items, one of the exciting things that happens to you is that you are suddenly reunited with all of your long lost kitchen equipment. In others words, your parents make you take all that stuff you left in their garage when you went college four years ago in a city with no storage space. Among the goodies awaiting me in my parents’ garage was none other than a food processor. A few years back my parents got themselves a new one, and being sensible people, decide to hang on to the old one. Now it’s mine! Holy Cuisinart! This can only mean one thing – pie crust!

Red Velvet Bundt Cake

After graduating from college, moving yourself and your stuff half-way across the country, and unpacking 40-ish boxes  without tripping over your boyfriend’s cat, it is time for cake. It is most definitely time for cake. It seems that in some kind of moving and MCAT studying haze, I felt that now would be a good time to make a red velvet cake. I do not, in fact, like red velvet cake. For years the wild enthusiasm this cake appears to inspire in people both above and below the Mason Dixon line has totally baffled me. People have, while struggling not to swoon head first into the mountain of cream cheese frosting atop their red velvet cupcakes, waxed poetic to me about the subtle cocoa flavors, the rich, moist crumb. Horse hockey. Are you bananas? This stuff tastes like food coloring! What is WRONG with you people? If you, too, have spent a lifetime mystified by red velvet, I say to you I have solved the mystery. I have found the cake that people think that they are talking about when they get all excited about the subtle cocoa flavors and the rich, moist crumb, and, man, is it good.

Butterfinger Cookies

A Happy Easter to you! Or Passover! Or Sunday! Whatever the case may be, I hope you are enjoying this spring weekend with your family, with your cat, with your favorite movie. I hope you get to spend time with people who you don’t see nearly enough, who ask you to come their apartment and bake delicious things with them, who strangely suggest a cookie recipe that you’ve been eye-balling for a while. It’s always comforting when familiar people can still read your brain waves even when they don’t live next door to your anymore (or maybe you would find that terrifying).

I hope that when get done making those cookies you spend time with the people who you do live next door to, that you decorate easter eggs with them like you’re kids again, and that you make your friendship just a little bit stronger with the happiness only holidays bring. So that they always stay familiar to you – so that they can always read your brainwaves.

Ode to Joy

Everybody has heroes. Some wear capes or unitards. Some stand up for what is good and right. Some are just everything you need them to be: warm, creative, funny. Wonderful. This hero wears a blazer and a smile. She is armed with laughter and baked goods. It was a treat to meet this hero, Joy the Baker, in person. Well worth a trek to Brooklyn in the rain and a four hour wait, because after all this time her food has never steered me wrong.

Cornmeal Griddle Cakes

I dig pancakes. Even when they aren’t pumpkin flavored or shaped like Yoda’s head, they are a breakfast treat to get excited about. This is not simply because they often serve as a vehicle for two of my favorite items: butter and maple syrup, the real deal stuff, you know, from trees – it’s because pancakes are different. They don’t just make your kitchen smell like mornings or brinner. They make people smile. And if they’re sorta small, they make you feel like a kid again back when you ordered the Silver Five off the kids’ menu at IHOP. Besides, when they’re aren’t huge you can eat more of them, and more pancakes are always a good thing. Always.

Pear Upside-Down Cake

Sometimes you need a simple cake. Sometimes you need a simple cake that looks impressive (So impressive, your adoring fans gobble it up before you can take a picture of the whole thing). Enter the upside-down cake. Specifically this upside down cake. I think you ought to make this cake. It’s simple, like I said, and stylish, too. Heck, tell people that it’s healthy. There’s a whole two pears in it. But wait – there’s more: how delightfully springy it is, the wonderful texture from the polenta, and the perfect subtle sweetness of those pears. Like I said, I think you ought to make this cake. It’ll get you right side up again.

Bite-Size Bacon and Gruyere Scones

These scones go fast. I don’t just mean the making of them either. I mean the impressive consumption of them that occurred at about light speed. They were inhaled. By me. By my roommates. Not by anyone else though – there was no sharing of these glorious breakfast bites. Someone would have had to stage a pretty impressive sneak attack to get their hands on some of those scones. It’s certainly not surprising that we ate them all, or that no interloper got a hold of them. Why? Because they have bacon in them, obviously. And I would probably defend bacon foodstuffs with my very life or least a skillet. But you know what else they have? Cheese – and not just any cheese mind you. Gruyere. It’s Swiss and awesome. It keeps these scones from being anything but neutral. We should know. This isn’t our first Swiss cheese filled bacony rodeo.

Thieving Thursday: Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Pancakes

Apologies. I have been on a serious pumpkin kick. And even though there may or may not be a pumpkin shortage on, it did not stop me from grabbing up cans of pumpkin at the store greedily and then putting it in these pancakes. You are probably sitting at your computer yawning as I suggest you make yet another pumpkin item. Oh great, now I’m yawning. It’s contagious you know. These pancakes, though, are anything but a yawn. I mean they are pretty orange. They are totally worth the urge to hoard canned pumpkin and wake up early in the bright sunshine to make them for the people who dig you and your pancakes (also known as your pumpkin hungry significant other or your family). Trust me, they’ll thank you.

Quick Skillet Chocolate Snack Cake

Apparently, I have a desire to deprive you, dear reader, of delicious chocolate cake. This is a bad habit I am attempting to rectify post haste. You see, I made this cake, um, ages ago. By which I mean, of course, summer. I was home, basking in the glory of my parents’ fully stocked kitchen and abundant Texas sunshine, and I made this cake. Then I ate it. Well, my dad helped. It was good and chocolatey and – well, suffice it say that it went pretty fast. Despite its tastiness, I kept this recipe from you, swathed in mystery for months. Well, NO MORE! I reveal to you at last: