The Yum Yum Factor

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...

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. 

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...

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.

Could someone please tell me why have I spent my entire life NOT making trifles? I think I had trifle once about a hundred years ago when I was 18 or 19. My own mother never made anything like it. She was more of a jello 1-2-3 kind of gal when she wasn't making pies, but I do have a fuzzy memory of eating it at a boyfriend's house. It must not have left much of an impression since I waited another hundred years to actually make one myself, although I do have very fond memories of jello 1-2-3.          I have a friend who makes all of these little desserts in jars whenever she hosts a party and there is almost always some sort of trifle along with something cheesecakey and something chocolately and this must be what sparked my interest. My Christmas  Rum and Eggnog Tres Leches Trifle  was everything I love about a dessert. It was delicious, although time consuming it was easy to make and, most important of all, it looked super impressive. I h...

I am going to be very honest with you right now. The Great Blogger Cookie Swap was happening and the deadline for shipping was only days away. I had assumed, this whole time, that I was going to make cardamom/rosewater palmiers and had planned to make them at the very last minute to ensure their freshness upon delivery. As the time approached, I started panicking. What if they got lost in the mail? What if the Canada Post truck fell down a sink hole? What if my recipients opened their package only to find stale, horrible palmier train wreck cookies that would bring shame upon all of our houses??? Instead, I made the Cardamom Quince Layer Cookies that went out to the three bloggers who were assigned to me. These are really good but very strongly flavoured and when they are warm, out of the oven, they are incredibly cardamomish and after eating one like that, I had a mild breakdown. THEY WERE NOT GOOD ENOUGH TO SEND TO OTHER FOOD BLOGGERS FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING OH HOLY NIGHT! ...

Grace Massa Langlois might have been born in Belgium but she grew up in London, Ontario where she remains with her family. I was born and raised in London, Ontario so we have a connection in that regard but when it comes to baking, our paths diverge. I am a decent, simple baker and dessert maker and I make a few things quite well but Grace is a real dessert master. I was already familiar with her food blog, Grace's Sweet Life  , and loved to peruse all of the delicious looking desserts while daydreaming that someone else would make these things for me. When I was offered a copy of her new cookbook, I jumped at the chance.  I read the entire thing, cover to cover and was incredibly impressed with the huge array of Italian sweets. Cannoli , Tiramisu and Panna Cotta are all fairly familiar but there were other things like Italian Peach Cookies , Boccanotti  and Celletti which were all new to me. I have to admit, that as a lazy baker, many of these recipes ar...

The Neighbour made the most delicious strawberry rhubarb crisp the other night but my kid was sick and didn't get to eat any of it. He really loves rhubarb and has been talking about wanting strawberry rhubarb pie all week. I love him but not quite enough to make pie crust today in this heat but I was up to making a crumble. We found some nice rhubarb at the market and the local strawberries have been insanely sweet and delicious so we were in luck. I decided it would be safe to use Smitten Kitchen's basic recipe and just add a few tweaks because I find her baking is always pretty spot on. I added some crystalized ginger to the crumble topping and replaced half of the sugar with maple syrup in the filling but otherwise, I followed her recipe and it was really delicious. The next time I make it, and there will definitely be a next time, I will add even more ginger to the crumble because the few times I got a nice little chunk in a bite it was amazing. I also think I will pick u...

This month's Food Network Canada's Cooking Club Challenge was to use at least one of five featured PC products in a dish. Because I am on a bit of a popsicle kick AND it's Canada Day weekend coming up how could I not choose to make a popsicle with a nice Canadian theme. It doesn't get more Canadian than maple syrup, local strawberries and they are a very canuck red and white stripe. The cream/yogurt layer is a bit decadent but they can't all be healthy treats, can they and although I love the thickness of no fat greek yogurt, it can feeze with a grainy texture that I didn't want in this popsicle. I really had no choice but to mix it with some heavy cream - I might even try going the whole hog with whipping cream the next time to see how that turns out. Thankfully, the tartness of the pureed berries give a really nice break from that richness mid way through the pop and I am glad that I used the maple syrup instead of my standard honey as the sweetening agent...

I woke up this morning determined to make popsicles. I dreamed of popsicles all night. Adult popsicles with boozey layers and exotic fruits. Yummy kid friendly popsicles using my new favourite PC Greek Yogurt and fruits. Maybe even trying some spicy popsicles at some point. It probably helped that we spent yesterday lolling about in the third ring of hell here in Toronto and I could barely stomach anything heartier than a chunk of watermelon all day.

It's christmas and that means baking your fool head off, no? And everybody expects something a little different from those of us who talk of nothing but food day in and day out. They want chocolate chip cookies from their grandmother but they want matcha shortbread made with North western Tibetan goat butter and a dusting of freeze dried truffle pig snouts from their foodie friends. I have been wracking my brain to come up with one last sweet thing to put in my christmas goodie boxes. I have a cakey, ginger molasses cookie, meringues, chocolate pecan toffee and lime meltaways. I felt like I needed something really chocolately and really chewy. Brownies were a consideration for a while but that wasn't quite what I was looking for so I kept searching through cooking blogs, knowing that when I saw the perfect recipe, I would know it just like a bride at Kleinfeld's just knows that they just slipped into THE dress. You know what? That is exactly what happened.  This is my Say...