The Yum Yum Factor

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...

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...

Thanks to my prize winnings from Canadian Lentils , this family is now completely immersed in ice cream making. My first batch of Strawberry Rhubarb Pie Ice Cream  was a traditional egg custard based recipe and it was great. Needless, to say, it didn't last very long and it was time to make another batch but me being me, I was procrastinating over flavours for days. Shack decided he had waited long enough and was going to make ice cream the other night and started puttering around in the kitchen. I was trying not to interfere but when he asked me to go to the basement and get the frozen ice cream bowl from the freezer, I knew there was an information breakdown going on in there. I reminded him that you have to temper the eggs and make the custard, put the bowl over ice to cool it down and then refrigerate it for at least 2 hours before you can even think about actually churning it. It was pretty clear that he wasn't planning on using an actual recipe and was just goin...

You know, we don't usually do much for Valentine's Day anymore. My son is too old to bring home lovely macaroni and glitter crafts and to be honest, every day is Valentine's Day with Shack. Shut up, I mean it. Anyway, this year, our school's bake sale to raise money for Free the Children is today. Since it's Valentine's Day it was a nice opportunity to make something themey again. They get plenty of delicious muffins, cupcakes, brownies and cookies so I try to do something a bit different every year. The marshmallows I made a few years back sold out instantly so the time to make them again was here. To make them more valentiney, I thought they should be pink so I added strawberry pulp to the actual marshmallow and used some freeze dried strawberries for dusting. Using a heart shaped cookie cutter did enter my mind but there is too much waste and the fact that they are pink and I am packaging them up in heart covered little bags is enough.

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 used to spend a lot of time in Mexico and one of my favourite things to drink was something they just called Jamaica, pronounced ha-my-ka. I knew it was just a steeped agua fresca type drink made from these Jamaica flowers and water. I was told it was a natural diuretic and so it was great for me because I might have consumed a little bit of alcohol back in those days and so it was the perfect thing to sip on all morning. I just assumed it was some exotic thing that I could only get in Mexico so imagine my embarrassment when I wandered into a Mexican dry goods store in Kensington Market only to discover that Jamaica is spelled like Jamaica and is simply the name given to Hibiscus flowers there. As soon as I realized what it was, I made sure to always have some on hand and I would often throw a handful in my pitcher of steeped cold berry tea that I like to keep in the fridge. I had some beautiful, local strawberries which were really ripe and threatening to go bad on me and I ...

Tomorrow is Little Shack's turn for snack day again so that almost always means muffins. I had a ton of strawberries in the fridge and they were so ripe that they weren't going to last much longer so it was obvious that I would be making strawberry muffins. I found tons of great sounding recipes but they all called for stuff I didn't have on hand like buttermilk or yogurt and I wanted to make them using what was in the house. I came across this recipe on Thyme For Food  for a really basic strawberry muffin. With a little tweaking, I whipped up a batch and they are pretty good. Not very sweet at all and with the addition of some whole wheat flour, I could send them to school with a clear conscience. If I were making these for home, I would probably serve them with a bit of butter or some apple butter or something because they really are not sweet at all. Maybe next time I would also add a mashed banana. I thought that the vanilla soy milk would give enough sweetness to...