The Yum Yum Factor

Spring is in the air and a young girl's thoughts turn to....... Wine Poached Pears with Vanilla Whipped Yogurt. Okay, pears are not in season here until late summer, I know, but they are still easy to find in the grocery store. As the weather gets warmer, I want lighter treats. My winter pies and molten chocolate things start to feel too heavy and I just want fruity, lighter desserts. Poaching pears in wine (you can totally do this with white wine too but you won't get the fabulous colour) I also really love the tang you get with whipped yogurt - there's enough cream in there to ensure that it's still rich and decadent, don't worry. I also love that this dessert looks incredibly fancy but is so easy to make. You can make the pears a day in advance and store them in the fridge with the poaching liquid and then just bring them to room temperature while you reduce the poaching liquid until it's syrupy. Wine Poached Pears with Vanilla Whipped Yogur...

It's no secret that I am a lover of all things custard and caramel. Creme brulee? I'm there Creme caramel? Can't stop me. Dulce de Leche? Hold my earrings

I have a confession to make: I really like the texture of canned fruit, especially peaches.

Say that ten times fast. A rich, creamy matcha no bake cheesecake with a crust made out of Matcha Pocky granola is the dessert you need. Like, right now. Last week, I hosted a pop up night at The Kingston Social House , the place where I have been cheffing since last fall and hosting supperclubs and cooking classes for the last couple of years. It's like my home kitchen away from home but better, because my actual home kitchen is about 2 square feet. I decided on a Korean inspired comfort food menu consisting of a Kimchi Meatloaf Melt, Spicy Miso Soup with Korean rice cakes for the vegetarians and a variety of banchan style sides. Korean's aren't really known for their desserts so it took me longer than usual to come up with something until I bought a few packs of Matcha Pocky. If you aren't familiar with Pocky, you need to do something about that. Pocky are a biscuit stick with a coating of "cream" that is usually chocolate flavoured but th...

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...

Last week I hosted my monthly Supper Club at The Kingston Social, here in Toronto and the dinner was a Middle Eastern Feast with a touch of Jamaican thrown in for good measure. Each time I host, I like to try one new dish that isn't always mine but that I am dying to try out and this time, I really wanted to make this Moroccan Orange Cake  on the blog, Kitchen Confidante. I found the recipe so intriguing - using fresh bread crumbs in place of flour, the idea of soaking it in an orange syrup afterwards so it would almost like a cakey baklava was screaming YAAAAASSSSSSS. So, on the day, I realized that I only had an 8" spring form pan but the recipe called for normal cake pan so I borrowed one of those. I buttered and floured the pan and I made the cake only to discover that it WOULD NOT COME OUT! I had to, basically, dig the cake out of the pan as it stuck to the bottom and I found myself with three chunks of cake and a whack of crumbs on a day where I was going to have to...

It's summer. It's a bazillion degrees out there, you are invited to a BBQ and BAM! You are asked if you could bring dessert. If it were just your own family, you would throw a fiver at them and tell them to run to the store and bring back a bag of Mr Freezies but that isn't going to cut it. There is no way you are turning on the oven, so baking anything is immediately out. You could do an ice cream thing but you would have had to start planning that yesterday and you have to transport it without it melting all over the place. You could stop at the store and pick something up on the way to the party, which is actually a perfectly acceptable option but I have a job to do here, so, for today, that is out too. That leaves a trifle. Sure, you can make all of the elements yourself if you want, but why would you want to do that in this heat? Trifle requires no special skills, no craftiness and it is almost impossible to mess up but it looks like you took tons of time...

I have partnered up with the wonderful women of The Kingston Social , in the east end of Toronto, to host a monthly supper club to bring a little of that west end fun to our neck of the woods and I am happy to report that the response has been wonderful. For our May dinner, I knew that I was going to put both of my Anova sous vide machines to work on some sirloin cap, my favourite cut of steak and serve it with chimichurri but after that, I wasn't sure. This has been a weird spring and I couldn't be sure about what would even been in the market by the end of May. I assumed that I would find lots of seasonal produce like fiddleheads, ramps, colourful radishes and everyone's favourite weed, rhubarb. 

If you live in Toronto, you have probably had shortbread from Mary Macleod's at some point. Unlike most other self named companies, there really is a Mary Macleod and she started baking her famous chocolate crunch shortbread in 1981. Even after 30 years in the business, Mary, herself, still spends time in the kitchen coming up with new treats like the Butterscotch Shortbread Crumbs I used to make the crust for this cheesecake. I was more than happy to accept a free bag of cookie crumbs to experiment with because I would happily buy them anyway. I used to live right across the street from Mary's shop on Queen St East for a few years and so I was very familiar with the product. It's not like I had ever run over there in my pjs and grabbed a few cookies to go with my morning coffee or anything.....

Sometimes I don't want to make six servings of creme brulee because, frankly, I don't want to find myself eating the three leftover ramekins the next day when I am home alone and they are in the fridge, singing their siren song. I have often dreamt of being able to make just one or two perfect little creme brulees so that the kid could could have one after dinner and then another for breakfast because all children benefit from a breakfast of leftover pie, cake or custard from time to time. There is no way I was going to preheat the oven, get a water bath together and go through all those hoops just to make one little ramekin but that was before my Instant Pot. With a pressure cooker, making one serving suddenly became not only possible but necessary! The Kid and I did a day of taste testing until we decided that this version is the one we liked the best. Two eggs made it too rich and dense, if that is at all possible and we both agreed that this version r...

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...

You know how you can sign up for coffee delivery services where you get a couple of pounds of coffee dropped off at your door every month? Well, who knew you could get a granola delivery? OatBox is a company out of Montreal that is making really great quality, all natural granola and shipping out two different bags cereal (about 8 servings per bag) to their monthly subscribers. The flavours change constantly, inspired by the seasons and the whims of the chefs creating them. This isn't just open to Canadians either because Oatbox ships via UPS to American customers, which means that Americans are getting an even better deal these days, since the Canadian dollar is worth about 3 cents. Okay, you know if I am pushing this service there must be a bit more to it and there is. Oatbox has partnered up with Breakfast Club of Canada and for every shipment of cereal that goes out, a child will get a full breakfast at school. Food security, especially when it is concerning ...

Okay, this is a quick and dirty recipe.  Dulce de leche is made throughout South America by boiling a can of condensed milk in a pot, fully immersed in water and hoping that it doesn't explode. You can also submerge the can in your pressure cooker too but why? It takes an extra 60 seconds to open the can, scrape the condensed milk out into a nice, glass canning jar and do it without worrying about that nasty tin lining and without the fear of a sugar explosion. This is not a recipe as much as it is a method. Feel free to leave out the cardamom or  add something else like ginger Pressure Cooker Cardamom Dulce De Leche Easy, peasy. Ready: 1. Put a trivet in the bottom of your pressure cooker. 2. Open the jar of condensed milk. 3. Pour the contents of the can in to a glass, canning jar (I use a small jar since 1 can is only 300ml) 4. Add 2 to 4 cardamom pods, lightly crushed 5. Put the flat lid and the ring on the jar and finger tighten 6....

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...