Think I’m talking about pancakes? Think again. I’m talking about one of the best and easiest sweet treats I’ve come across in a long time: the flapjack. It’s a tantalizing triangle o’ tasty.

I received an issue of Bon Appetit in the mail the other day. I have no idea why since I don’t subscribe to it or any other food magazines because if I did, then what would I read at my Mom’s house? I thank the magazine gods because in this particular issue Molly from Orangette wrote a story about British flapjacks and included a recipe. I give it four thumbs up: 2 for the story and 2 for the recipe.

To quote the article: “…about two chews in, the flavor came: deep and hearty, the way good oatmeal can be . . . You take a bite, and it tastes good, if a little wholesome. But you keep chewing, and in a second or two, the flavor opens up threefold, big and toasty and rich, and your salivary glands start going, and you think, This is delicious. I don’t know what this thing is, but I’m going to need another.” Amen, sister. That is so not hyperbole, either. It’s a great description of the experience.

Next time I’m going to adulterate them with dried cherries or chopped dates or coconut or nuts or all of the above.

Here’s the recipe.

My aunt Sherrie and I made these together. I think it’s kind of weird that red velvet everything is in vogue right now. It must be some irony-induced backlash to the organic/natural movement that makes us want to pump our bodies full of whole bottles of evil red food coloring. Or maybe it’s just because they are so pretty!

They weren’t quite as dark red as we wanted but they sure were velvety! They were kind of dense and pound cake-y. Yum! The recipe is adapted from a Paula Deen recipe- I mean, how can you NOT trust a woman who puts Velveeta in chocolate fudge?

Red Velvet Cupcakes
Makes about 16 cupcakes.

Ingredients:

• 1 stick butter at room temp
• 1/4 cup crisco
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 4 eggs
• 1/2 ounce of liquid red food coloring
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1 1/2 cups pastry/cake flour
• pinch salt
• 1/2 cup milk

Method:

• Preheat oven to 325 and prepare cupcake pan with papers.
• Cream butter, crisco, and sugar in a mixer until fluffy.
• Add eggs one at a time, beating after each time.
• Add food coloring and vanilla and mix.
• Add half the flour and half the milk and mix well. Add the rest of the flour and milk, and the salt, and mix until blended together.
• Pour or ladle into cupcake papers. Bake about 40 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool before frosting.

Frosting:

Ingredients:

• 3 oz. cream cheese
• 1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter at room temp
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/2 pound powdered sugar plus a little more if needed

Method:

• Mix butter, cream cheese, and vanilla in a mixer til smooth.
• Add the sugar about a cup at a time, beating until creamy. Add more sugar if too thin or add a little bit of milk if too thick.

My last couple posts have been kind of weird and gross! As individual posts, they are OK, as a gestalt, notsomuch. I’m pleased to say that things are looking up for everyone, as I have something that is decidedly NOT gross and in fact  SUPER delicious- a recipe for Pancake Ice Cream with Bacon Candy.

I put this beloved recipe up as a guest post on Thursday Night Smackdown, which is known for its witty proprietress Michelle, who swears like a stevedore. Ergo, don’t be surprised if I seem a little grittier over there. Or funnier. I think I tried harder to be funny because she’s really funny and I wanted to impress her, and you. Hopefully it worked. If not, just think about the bacon candy some more. Bacon. Plus candy. Bacon candy!

My nephew turned 5 recently and swore he wanted a circuit board cake. At the 11th hour he decided he wanted a car cake instead. Online searches for car cakes yielded a lot of lameness and ugly-ass cakes, so I winged it. Wung it? Whatever. I figured something out, and was pretty pleased when it actually, totally looked like a car.

I know the icing isn’t perfect here- that’s the beauty of making something for a person who is only 5. Perfection is not what they’re after. They are after copious amounts of frosting and candy on a cake that’s shaped like something other than a cake, which makes them pretty easy to please. I think the biggest compliment came when, after admiring the cake for several minutes, my nephew turned to my Dad and with saucer eyes and his jaw hanging open, and said- “GRAMPA- do you realize this CAR is EATABLE?!?!?”

Eatable indeed! I made this somewhat nasty hot pink strawberry cake in a 9×13 pan and then cut a third of it off, lengthwise. Then I cut the long skinny piece I had in half perpendicular. Like this:

I flipped the 2 pieces 90 degrees and set them next to each other on top of the remaining large cake and stuck them on with frosting. They were kind of slope-y which actually made it look more like a car. I wanted really sturdy, fluffy frosting for this, so I used a fluffy meringue frosting (my mom made it so I’m not sure how- something about like this) and tinted it blue to attach the cake pieces and cover the whole thing in gobs and gobs of icing. I made a little bit of white royal icing for the windows, doors, and writing. Tic-tacs for lights and blinkers, oreos for wheels, sour belts for racing stripes and windshield wipers, some weird white tootsie rolls for the bumpers, and voila! A car that any 5-year-old would love.

And now for something completely different: the GINGERBREAD CASBAH.

The gingerbread casbah came into being because every year, we throw a themed Christmas party for around 100 of our closest friends. Since we just took a honeymoon to the Middle East, we thought we could try out some new tricks at a Middle East-themed Christmas party. After all, that is where the whole Christmas thing started, right? An evite full of bad puns later (”we are Beiruting for you to come”, and so forth) we had our “Christmas at the Casbah” party ready to go, and all we needed was an impressive centerpiece.

This is not really a casbah, but a typical courtyard house. (Casbah sounds cooler though, so that’s more of a marketing-focused name for it.) On our honeymoon, we stayed in a beautiful hotel in Old City of Damascus called Beit Al Mamlouka, and I very loosely modeled the casbah on my recollections of how it looked. I say “very loosely” because their floors weren’t made of sour belts and jujubes, and their walls weren’t edible.

For the gingerbread, I used a recipe that C&H tweeted me- and it was great. Alas, I haven’t actually tasted it, but from a construction point of view it was tops – simple to make, very easy to roll out, not too sticky, sturdy, and kept its shape during baking. Also, it smells delicious, which adds a nice extra sensory dimension to the house. The royal icing that glues the whole thing together is just a stiff mixture of egg whites and powdered sugar with a pinch of cream of tartar, mixed with the paddle attachment of a Kitchen-Aid.

I did most of the shape-cutting freehand, but used a star cutters for the front windows. To make the windows, we rolled out the dough and put it on a silpat. Then we cut shapes out and arranged crushed jolly ranchers inside. When they baked, they became clear and solid. You have to let them cool while carefully loosening them from the silpat, as the candy stays soft and molten for about 30 minutes after coming out of the oven. Once they harden fully, they are structurally quite sound.

I thought that doing this alone would be both boring and incredibly frustrating and also not come out as well, so I assembled a crack team to help out. Rodney the pastry chef is always an excellent addition to this type of team, and did lots of the rolling, fine icing work, and construction assistance. Heather took care of cobblestones and windows, while MJ formed small furnishings including the excellent hookah.

I am a firm believer that everything on a true gingerbread house should be edible, and should be candy. Also, I can make like anything out of marzipan or fondant- ergo, marzipan and fondant are cheating. Sculpting something out of a tootsie roll is so much more impressive. So I refused to allow any non-edible, non-candy/gingerbread/icing objects adorn the house.

I bought electric flicker tea lights to illuminate it during the party, to make the windows shine. Merry Christmas everyone!

Here’s the breakdown of what’s what:

• Windows: crushed jolly ranchers baked into the gingerbread
• Tile floor: rainbow sour belts, jujubes, licorice wheels, and silver dragees
• Balcony floors: red hots, tic tacs, and silver dragees
• Balcony railings: sesame candies, licorice wheels (unrolled), jujubes
• Cobblestones: formed tootsie roll slices with yellow sprinkles
• Hanging lamps: licorice wheels and Haribo raspberry gummies
• Hookah: deconstructed tootsie rolls, sour belts, and licorice wheels
• Table: gingerbread star with dragees and jujubes
• Chair: sesame candies and tootsie rolls
• Tree: iced cookie with Haribo raspberry gummy and tootsie roll
• Camels: iced cookies with sprinkles

I wasn’t able to find any other instances of Middle Eastern gingerbread architecture on the web, but I did come across some gingerbread structures of note. Here are a few of my favorites from around teh interwebz.

• Max’s cave from Where The Wild Things Are, from A Table for Two <<<btw, AMAZING!!!>>>
• Gingerbread Houseboat from Houseboat Eats
• Gingerbread Woodcutters Cabin from Sweetopia
• Not gingerbread, bacon and licorice house from Almost Bourdain
• Cool 2 story house by Brown Sugar Bee

I saw this lovely recipe for chocolate thumbprints filled with a delectable ganache over on Macheesmo. But I am kind of lazy and couldn’t deal with making ganache and fill the cookies, so I was overjoyed to find some dark chocolate mint UFOs at Trader Joe’s to stick in the middle instead. The cookies were fabulously chewy and tasty, and the light sugar crust added some nice texture.

The UFOs are basically like an oversized, flat-ish dark chocolate chip with a strong mint flavor. If you don’t like mint and/or don’t have access to Trader Joe’s, you could stick something else in the middle. Off the top of my head, some things that might be tasty are the small Reese’s peanut butter cups, a handful of white chocolate chips or a white chocolate pistole, or caramel-filled Hershey’s kisses. Of course, if you’re not averse to a few extra steps, you could just make the original Macheesmo recipe with the ganache and what have you and have even fancier cookies. Regardless- the cookie recipe is a keeper for sure.

Here’s the link to the Macheesmo recipe. A big hit- thanks, Macheesmo!

I was looking at Halloween ideas with my 8 year old niece last night, and we thought this stuff was sooooo cool. We also recognized that we are probably never going to motivate to make anything this complex but we love the idea that somebody might.

Martha Stewart doesn’t usually do it for me, but my GOODNESS these are lovely ghost and witch hat petit-fours. They don’t look as hard or time-consuming as I expected for a MS recipe but they are still kind of a lot of work. But how cool are they? Basically the recipe tells you take a cake and cut it into circles, then pipe a big pointy hunk of frosting on it, then pour a glaze over it. So if you bought like a pound cake or a banana bread or something instead of making a cake yourself, it would be a lot easier.

Also on Martha Stewart, these cute creepy cupcakes! I especially like the mummy ones and they have the added bonus of seeming the easiest to make. Find instructions here – if you dare. That’s, if you dare to spend an entire day making cupcakes because this would take forever.

Of course, if you’re more into the gruesome stuff, you could always follow this Instructables project which shows you how to hollow out a creepy doll and serve guacamole in it.

My friends got married on a mountaintop in Israel, and had a little local shindig to celebrate the nuptials stateside. I offered to make a wedding cake for the party, and they gave me absolutely NO guidance. These folks are avid kayakers, backpackers, skiers, and mountaineers- but of all those, kayaking is definitely their #1 love. Furthermore, they met on a kayaking trip. So this was a no-brainer: I had to surprise them with a kayak wedding cake!

Of course, I had to make the cake delicious as well as beautiful, because it’s totally stupid to make a cool-looking cake that tastes only so-so. I made a double recipe of hazelnut brown butter cake from Smitten Kitchen and a brown sugar buttercream from Epicurious. I divided the batter between a 5 inch pan and a 10 inch pan. The hazelnut brown butter cake was great to use for this project, because not only was it delicious, it was also dense and heavy, so it really helped everything stay in place. I chose the brown sugar buttercream because I wanted dirt-colored frosting but didn’t fancy chocolate.

As to the decorations, my goal was to make the cake as naturally tasty as possible- meaning no gum paste or real flowers or other such nonsensse. Hence, I used marzipan for the kayaks, leaves, and flowers. (You might be wondering why I opted to make the kayaks in such ugly colors, but I felt it important to faithfully represent the neon hues of each of their real-life kayaks.) I used whole hazelnuts for the boulders, and ground pistachios for the gravel. The blue icing was just the brown sugar buttercream dyed and marbled with 2 shades of blue.

TIP: if you’re marzipan-challenged or even just really lazy, the calla lily is by far the easiest flower to pull off. Roll out a thin snake. Flatten a colored piece into a circle. Wrap circle around snake and pinch off at the bottom.

Now I KNOW I could have made those flowers thinner and more perfect, but to be honest, I’m a little attention-challenged. And impatient. But I swear no one noticed the extra thick petals. I’m all about the gestalt anyway, know what I’m sayin’? Plus when you’re getting a surprise kayak wedding cake for free, you really can’t expect me to give myself carpal tunnel over the frickin’ calla lilies. Thought that counts and all that.

In conclusion, this was a super-fun project, and if I could go crazy like this with other wedding cakes and also make them somewhat imprefectly with no negative consequencs, I would most definitely be more amenable to making them! So keep that in mind if you’re planning to ask for one…

When I was but a youthful lass of 22, I worked at the fabulous Extraordinary Desserts in San Diego for about a year. If you’re ever in San Diego, I highly recommend stopping there for one of their scones (the best I’ve ever tasted, to be sure) or to dazzle your friends with one of their heart-stoppingly gorgeous cakes. I learned a lot there, but probably the most important thing I learned was that the way to a good bread pudding is simple: make creme brulee mixture and don’t use regular bread. This opens up a realm of delicious and easily adaptable flavor possibilities and combinations that are blissfully simple to make, as well as very forgiving.

For this occasion, I bought a soft loaf of Semifreddi’s cinnamon twist bread and made an orange zest-infused vanilla brulee mix, then dotted it all with dark chocolate chunks. It took about 5 minutes to put together and tasted like a million bucks. With a scoop of Bi-Rite Creamery’s salted caramel ice cream, it was almost transcendent.

Orange-Cinnamon Bread Pudding with Chocolate Chunks

serves 4-6

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups heavy cream
• zest from 1/2 orange
• 3 egg yolks
• 3 T sugar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 loaf cinnamon bread (1-2 days stale is better than fresh but it will work either way)
• large handful semi-sweet or dark chocolate chunks (can use chocolate chips)

Method:

• Preheat oven to 250.
• Heat cream in saucepan until hot but not bubbling. Turn off heat and add zest. Set aside.
• If bread is a few days old and a bit stale and hard, just use it as is. If it’s fresh soft bread, toast in a 350 degree oven or toaster to dry out a bit before using. Cut bread into 1 inch cubes.
• Whisk yolks, sugar, and vanilla into cream until fully incorporated.
• In a loaf pan or half-size casserole pan, arrange half the bread in the bottom and pour half the cream mixture over. Sprinkle with half the chocolate. Repeat with remaining bread, cream, and chocolate. Press mixture down with the back of a large spoon or your hands, so it’s tightly packed in and all bread is moistened.
• Bake at 250 for about 20-30 minutes, until custard is set but wobbly. Serve warm with ice cream.

This morning, I received the following email in my inbox from reader Chris:

Dear Karen,

I put your foodgawker entry for lemon raspberry white chocolate cake balls on my “favorites” list.  That is such an ingenious recipe.  I clicked on it tonight because I wanted to make them, and-screeeeeee!!!!!  It was gone! I tried to find out the date that you posted the recipe so that I could look it up in your archives, but was unable to get the date.  May I please have a copy of that recipe, pretty please?

This happens sometimes, because when I switched my site’s web host earlier this year, I didn’t move over all the recipes from my archive site. If you have a recipe you can’t find please let me know via email or Twitter, and I’ll be happy to post it for you too!

Chris: ENJOY  this recipe from the archives, and please let us know how your cake balls turn out!

******************

After making my little lemon cakes last weekend, I had essentially the equivalent of an 8-inch square cake all in pieces in a bowl. After googling the term “cake scraps recipe” I came across Bakerella’s Red Velvet Cake Balls and thought, hmmmm… intriguing. The concept: smoosh together cake and frosting, form it into a ball, and coat it in chocolate. I decided to dig in and take the risk, and came up with this concoction by using equal parts of inspiration, ingenuity and overconfidence. Often that combination equals a failed dessert, some tears, and a huge mess, but luckily this time it all came together.

The only even remotely tricky part of this recipe is coating the balls with the white chocolate. Ideally the chocolate will be tempered so it will create a hard shell. There is a trick to doing that which I will explain in the recipe and which doesn’t require a thermometer or any gadget or device other than a spatula and some patience. Oh, and if you’re making something experimental, it never hurts to bust out the fancy garnishes- in this case, a dusty bottle of crystallized violets I brought back from Paris maybe 6 years ago, and had never used, and my trusty box o’ gold leaf. (I swear it’s a mystery, because as much as I use that stuff, it’s always a full box.)

I’ll admit that I was skeptical about whether these cake nuts cojones nads testicles balls would be worth the effort, but they were pretty fabulous! I’m not a huge white chocolate lover, but I knew it would work really well with the lemon as long as I balanced the sweetness of the white chocolate with a super lemony center marbled with some slightly tart raspberries. One guest predicted that “cake balls will be the new cupcakes.” You heard it here first.

Lemon Raspberry White Chocolate Cake Balls
This will make 20-30 balls depending on how big you make them. I got about 24 golf ball-sized balls out of my cake.

Ingredients:

• 1 8-inch lemon cake or equivalent (you can use this yummy recipe, but just make half of it and bake it in an 8- or 9-inch square or round pan)
• 8 oz. cream cheese
• 1/4 cup powdered sugar
• zest of 2 lemons
• a couple handfuls of raspberries
• 12 oz. to 1 lb. good quality white chocolate (I used El Rey 34% pistoles from Whole Foods)

Method:

• In a mixer, combine cream cheese, sugar, and lemon zest until blended and frosting-like.
• Crumble cake into a bowl and mix with frosting. You will need to use your fingers to get them well-combined because it’s really almost impossible to get this mixed with a spoon.
• Add a couple handfuls of raspberries and smoosh them in with your hand, but don’t mix them all the way in because it looks cooler if it’s marbled.
• Roll into balls and put on a tray or cookie sheet. Put the tray into the freezer for about an hour.
• Now you have to temper the white chocolate. Put white chocolate pieces into top of a double boiler*. (if you are using chunk chocolate, chop it into smaller pieces first.)
• Heat water in bottom part of double boiler by itself, without the top part on it. When the water boils, turn it off. Then with the heat off, place the chocolate on top of the hot water.
• Stir chocolate with a spatula, scraping the sides, to melt it. Keep it over the water until the chocolate is about halfway melted. Then take the chocolate out of the water and put it on the counter (on top of a towel to stabilize it.)
• Keep stirring and the pieces will keep melting. Keep stirring and the pieces will keep melting. Keep stirring… you get the idea. It will take awhile and you will think it won’t all melt but it will.
• The chocolate is ready for dipping when it’s melted but around 90 degrees. How do you check this? One part of your body that’s sensitive to temperature is the piece of skin just below the middle of your lower lip. So if you dip your finger into the chocolate and press it to the part under your lower lip, it should feel cold. If the chocolate is melty but feels cold when you do that, you are ready to dip. If it feels warm, keep stirring and testing.
• Once it’s to this point you have maybe 5 minutes to dip. For me this meant the chocolate in the bowl started getting hard after I had dipped about half of the balls, so I had to melt it in the water again and then remix and recool it for the second half of the balls. As I said, this is the only tricky part of the recipe.
• Put a ball into the chocolate and use a fork to prod it around then to lift it out. Shake off excess chocolate and put on a drying rack over a piece of parchment or another pan to harden. If you are garnishing do it before the chocolate sets.
• If you’ve tempered correctly, you can keep these out at room temperature for a good long while and they won’t fade, sweat, or melt. Don’t put them in the fridge or they’ll get watery condensation on them.

* If you don’t have a double boiler (I don’t!) you can use a pot and put the chocolate in a metal bowl to melt.