Posts Tagged: Desserts

Eat

Cherry-Almond Chocolate Clusters

I’ve been making homemade chocolates – by which I mean melted chips sprinkled with various things that sound like they will probably taste good together and then poured onto wax paper to harden – for a couple of years now. They’re one of my go-tos mostly because they’re so easy to make, but also – let’s be honest, now – because they’re virtually guaranteed to elicit impressed oohs and aahs from anyone who has not themselves made homemade chocolates (and is thus unaware that the process involves a microwave and approximately three minutes).

It’s completely unjustified showing-off, and I am okay with that.

The chocolates that I made last weekend and brought over to my friend Amy’s place pulled the double-duty of being very delicious (basically a DIY version of one of my all-time favorite chocolate bars, Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut) and providing a nice little boost to the skin. They contain ingredients that taste great and are specifically targeted at protecting your skin from damaging UV rays and inflammation: antioxidant-packed cherries and almonds filled with Vitamin E.

SWEETS

Lemon Angel Food Layer Cake

I am about to blow your mind, because I BAKED SOMETHING and it was GORGEOUS and DIDN'T FALL APART IN THE OVEN and did not taste bad AT ALL.

That's a whole lot of caps and a whole lot of self-congratulation, but really: given my baking history, I'm allowed a little back-patting, I think.

OK, so maybe this recipe was adapted from a "semi-homemade" one courtesy of Sandra Lee (via People), which vastly limited my opportunities to screw up. And maybe I actually did end up screwing it up anyway, just a little bit. I mean, obviously. See, I realized too late that a cake topped with whipped cream might not enjoy hanging out in my kitchen on a hundred-degree day with thousand-percent humidity and no air conditioning (our house is ancient and has small windows and low-voltage sockets and I haven't yet found an air conditioner that works downstairs, and I don't want to talk about it because it is so hot). And there were still about twelve hours to go before I could serve the cake to our guests, and that very pretty plate that you see in these photos does not fit anywhere in our refrigerator. So I tried to sort of slide it onto a smaller plate, and discovered that angel food cakes do not slide; they collapse. Sigh.

Anyway, I fixed the patchy spots with more frosting, propped up the slightly collapsed side with a few lemon slices, and solved the melting-in-my-kitchen problem by magically rearranging our freezer in a way that enabled me to slide in the cake, plate and all. It was actually even better cold (angel food cake also, apparently, does not freeze - perhaps because it's plastic? possible, but let's hope not - so it ended up being just chilled cake with an ice-cream like frosting and frozen lemon slices, yum). Let's look at some photos, because I'm proud.

SWEETS

Hearts On A Pie

This pie was born of necessity.

I completely forgot that I wanted to make it until just a couple of hours before we were due to leave for our friends' house, and so instead of rolling out crusts I used two deep-dish frozen ones, flipping one upside-down to use as the top crust. The problem with this technique is that if the crust isn't perfectly defrosted, it can stick to the aluminum while you're flipping it, and sort of...break. Which is what happened to my crust. I would ordinarily fix this by rolling out the crust and starting over, but: no time.

Teeny-tiny (and crack-concealing) hearts to the rescue!

Eat

Homemade Lemon Curd

When I discovered that the lemon curd that I had been planning to fill Mom's Lemon-Chocolate Birthday Cake was a relic from my trip to London (that would be a trip that I took a year and a half ago), I thought I'd just go ahead and wash out the jar and fill it with some homemade stuff.


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