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...

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.