The Yum Yum Factor

Nothing is sexier than creme brulee. It's rich. It's thick. It's just sweet enough. It has a crust that only shatters when you tap it with a spoon to reveal the treasure that lays beneath it. Unfortunately, it is also a bit of an ordeal to make at home but not if you have a pressure cooker. Creme brulee in my Instant Pot is a revelation. Long gone are the days of tempering the custard, trying my best not to curdle it but straining it before adding it to the ramekins just in case there were little bits of scrambled egg in there. Bye bye water bath that I always slosh all over the damned place when I am trying to get the cumbersome pan in and out of a hot oven. No more heating up the house for an hour which ensured that this was NOT a dessert I often made in the summertime.  The most exciting thing about making our favourite dessert in the Instant Pot is that I if I don't want to have six pots of fatty goodness teasing me from the fridge, I can whip up a si...

A while back I was given a few bars of Green and Black's Maya Gold organic dark chocolate  to use in my Mexican Compost Bars   and I was left with just a little bit of chocolate at the end of it all. It sat in my cupboard, sad and lonely with the knowledge that it was destined for bigger things than being shoved down my throat at 1am in the throes of a late night sugar attack. That is what Trader Joe's Spekulas Cookie Butter and a tea spoon is for. Maya Gold is a really fragrant, spiced dark chocolate, full of orange, nutmeg, cinnamon with a bit of vanilla and I had just enough to make a tiny batch of ganache and that is how this recipe for Creme Brulee with Ganache came about. It is a much more honourable fate for this majestic chocolate, right? You can cook this without the pressure cooker in a water bath in a 300F oven for 40-45 minutes if you like but using a pressure cooker is quicker and more efficient Creme Brulee with Ganache makes 6 ramekins 3...

who wouldn't want a cookie with some Bugels on top?? One of my favourite cookies is my Compost Cookie Bar   - I used to make  Compost Cookie Bars for the kiddies  when The Kid was at his Magical Unicorn School, using fun junk like Cap'n Crunch, caramel corn, Bugels, candy canes. I was very popular at his school. I needed a dessert to serve with Chili Verde, Vegan Jackfruit Pozole and a Beet and Roasted Fennel Salad with Pepita Crema for a drop in dinner at The Depanneur . I guess I could have gone the more traditional Mexican cookie route but where's the fun in that? Green & Black had sent me a few bars of their Organic Maya Gold   to play around with and , after tasting it, I knew it would make the perfect base for Mexican Compost Cookie Bars. The 60% dark chocolate bar's flavours are taken from a traditional Mayan drink from Belize so it's full of nutmeg, cinnamon and orange - a love match with salty, porky, chicharron. Whe...

I have been using my Yonanas machine constantly since it got here and I have to tell you, I love it. My only regret is that I didn't have this thing when the kid was little because, if I did, I would have made him this stuff every day of his little life. I used to try to make "ice cream" from frozen bananas with a blender and a food processor but it would get over whipped and gummy and I just gave up and kept buying the Haagen Daz. I do have a soft serve ice cream machine as well as the attachment for my kitchen aid but the main drawback to those machines, apart from all the cream and sugar, is the fact that I have to make room for the big drum in my freezer and I have to know I want to make ice cream 24 hours in advance to make sure the drum spends that time chilling in the freezer, where I have had to remove a turkey to make room for it so every time we make ice cream, we eat turkey dinner. With this thing, you just plug it in. That's it. You make sure to al...

I have participated in the Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap since it's inception so, seeing that this is the fourth annual swap, this is my fourth time baking for three fellow food bloggers. This is always a bit stressful because cooking for other people who blog about cooking is a bit of pressure. What if my cookies are terrible? What if they got lost in the mail and sit on a shelf at some post office in Kapuskasing  for a month and get all stale and hard? What if the recipient thinks they taste like dust and cobwebs, dipped in chalk?

I wanted to make a cake to raffle off at our Magical Unicorn School's halloween party and the only thing I knew that I wanted to do was use black food colouring in ganache and drip that down the sides. I found some rubber black mice and and really liked the idea of black on black. Red Velvet cake was the original plan when I came across the most delicious sounding recipe for a pumpkin spice cake and I changed my mind, which is, of course, my prerogative. I would make a Pumpkin Spice Layer Cake with Spekulas Cookie Buttercream and Spooky Ink Black Ganache.

Did you know that Kyoto is a sister city to Boston? They became sister cities back in 1959 and, in fact, their gift of the Japan House to the Boston Children's Museum is thought to be the most expensive gift ever given to an American community from a foreign sister city. The two cities collaborate on various events throughout the year and are very tight.

As we all know, we are knee deep into holiday baking season and I wanted to make all new cookies this year and I get sick of making lime meltaways and gingersnaps year after year, even if that disappoints some of my people. I had great success with   Chai Tea Cookies , Cardamom Quince Layer Cookies  and Chocolate Dipped Gingery Pecan Shortbread and wanted one last cookie to round things out. I guess it's because my kid is no longer little that I am gravitating towards more grown up flavours and away from just sweet and easy. After a wine fueled pinning frenzy, I found these cookies on Rock Recipes and couldn't get them out of my mind. The basic cookie dough looked great but I detest chocolate mint chips with a white hot passion. Actually, I only like fresh mint and have never found any sort of food item that contains any sort of mint extract that I would want to eat. I also really prefer chocolate to anything else so I used his basic cookie recipe and then changed it to s...

I know what you are thinking. Nothing says the harvest, fall and Canadian Thanksgiving like a berry pavlova! Whatever. You eat your pumpkin pie and leave me to my meringue for the love of god. Okay, I actually LOVE pumpkin pie, pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin creme brulee and every other, more traditional, thanksgiving type dessert. I did make an apple pecan upside down cake   too but I just really love pavlova and although I flirted with the idea of incorporating some pumpkin into it, I couldn't get the skor bar thing out of my mind and I wanted to keep it tasty but simple. There is enough work going on when you are making a big turkey dinner and two desserts and I love that you can make the meringue a day or two in advance and just throw it all together right before dinner.  As it happens, the MVP (most valuable Peruvians) family came for dinner and they devoured the pavlova in record time while the more white bread branch of the family (Shack and MIL specifically) s...

We are just all ice cream, all the time around here right now, aren't we? This week alone I have posted recipes for  Mango Coconut Frozen Yogurt , Raspberry and Strawberry egg free ice cream and I haven't even gotten around to talking about the peach ice cream that is currently languishing in my freezer. Thank god I have a 14 year old boy to eat it all. "Vietnamese iced coffee with milk" , also known as  ca phe sua da  or  cà phê sữa đá  It is also called  ca phe nau da    in northern Vietnam but the restaurants that I frequent call it cafe sua da so that is what I am going with. Call it whatever you like but I call it insanely delicious. If you have never had one, go find a Vietnamese restaurant today and get one and come back and finish reading this. It's okay, I'll wait. Calling it iced coffee with milk is incredibly misleading. What it really is is insanely strong, thick coffee with sweetened condensed milk that you mix to...

I recently wrote about a cookbook, Grace's Sweet Life  , a book full of amazing Italian desserts, pastry and other sweets. I knew that this would be the first recipe I tried as soon as I took my first look at the book but I needed to wait until an occasion was upon us because I just don't make desserts like this for just the three of us. Last night, The Neighbour's had a big, holiday dinner party and I volunteered to make the desserts so, of course, I made Grace's Truffle Cake with Chocolate Glaze. It came together surprisingly easily although I skipped a couple of the steps that would have rendered a more refined end product because I didn't really need it to be perfect, just delicious.  Oh boy, was this thing delicious. It really did taste like a slice of chocolate truffle in a yummy chocolate cookie crust. I usually do a flourless chocolate cake when it's a cake night but this might become my new, go to show stopper.

Christmas season is upon us and, as always, I have a couple of cookie exchanges coming up and  have been combing the internet for inspiration so I can make something shiny and new. I also wanted to enter the cookie contest over at  Manitoba Canola Growers  but the deadline is today at 4pm so that put me on a bit of a deadline. I tend to procrastinate until it's almost too late and then I fly into action - I enjoy working under pressure. I have been told that all that stress will burn away the pounds but I have yet to find this to be true. It probably doesn't help that my stressful energy is spent baking things that must be tasted I suppose.

I bought two pounds of cherries this week, planning to make a double batch of boozy cherries but then I changed my mind. I am allowed to change my mind. I am an adult. I do it all the time. Instead, it felt like it was time to make some ice cream. Last August, I made a  key lime pie ice cream  using the whipping cream and condensed milk thing that was all over the blogs. Since I don't have an ice cream maker, this method was very appealing to me. It's certainly not a light treat - consisting of nothing but heavy cream and sweetened condensed milk and add ins, but it was ridiculously easy and really, really delicious. If you can whip cream and you own a freezer, you can make this stuff. When I think cherry, I immediately think dark chocolate and so I used some tiny dark chocolate chips and then threw in a few tbls of toasted, slivered almonds for good measure. When I tasted it before it froze, I was afraid I couldn't taste any cherry and was worried that it wasn't ...

I like to bake at christmas time and up until recently it was pretty much the only time I baked all year and unless they are all lying to me, my friends and family seem to really enjoy the treats I make for them. I get special requests for specific things and I always like to throw one or two new things into the mix. This year I had decided I would do chocolate pecan toffee, chambord dark chocolate truffles, lime melt aways (my mother in law would probably stop talking to me if I didn't make these for her), the cardamom ginger cookies I made for the Great Blogger Cookie Exchange and a delicious Lemon Almond Meringue that I found on Joy the Baker. There was one small snag this year though. We decided on Wednesday night to book a week in Tulum, Mexico, leaving Saturday, which is fabulous, no? Except that when I woke up Thursday morning, I realized that if I was going to put together baking gift boxes for Little Shack's teachers, I was going to have to make all of those thin...

I was one of six lucky Canadian food bloggers chosen to be featured in the holiday issue of Eat In Eat Out, Canada's first online magazine for foodies who love to eat - whether you like to cook and eat in or whether you are a restaurant junkie and love to eat out. You might be like me and fall somewhere in between and love to do both equally. We were asked to come up with two simple, original recipes for the holiday season. I always like to make a box of treats to give to friends and I try to have a good variety of sweets in there. This year there will be the same  ginger snaps  I make every year, meringues, these chocolate truffles and probably some toffee. I attended a crazy, multi day Hindu wedding this summer and I cannot get the sweets we ate out of my head. I don't know what they all were but they all seemed to taste like cardamom, sugar and pistachios and everything was covered in this delicate silver foil. I LOVE shiny things and couldn't' wait fo...

photo by Chris Couper I have a dear friend named Kate. One of my first blog posts was about me making cookies for Kate's mom to take to a cookie exchange party at Christmas because Kate's mom, like Kate herself, doesn't cook. Imagine my shock the year that Kate brought this chocolate cake, covered in whipped cream to our annual Christmas Eve party? My son ate half of it and proclaimed it to be THE best cake he had ever eaten. He even asked if Kate could make it for him as his birthday cake. That would be like Kate's daughter asking me to organize her room. I decided that I wanted to make this magical chocolate cake myself and asked Kate for the recipe. She looked at me like I had three heads and said "there isn't a recipe. Are you making fun of me?" It seems like I am the only person of our generation who did not grow up eating this Nabisco chocolate wafer refrigerator cake. My mom was the queen of easy desserts and I certainly ate my sha...