Standardby Julie61 Comments

It was 27 degrees today with sun and blue skies in Calgary. Tomorrow, the forecast is for snow and a high of 2. Back off fall, you’re coming on too strong. The (very small) consolation of going from high twenties to zero is that you can pull on your woolies, turn on the oven and bake a pie. Or a cake. And eat the whole thing yourself because fall just up and snubbed you altogether, just like spring did. It’s tough getting the shaft. With my condolences, I offer a spice cake with salted caramel. (Now that swimsuit season is about as far away as it’s going to get.) Granted, I still have no oven to turn on. This is a cake I made way back when I had an actual kitchen, not a microwave on a cart in the dining room and a barbecue in the back yard. I made it to use up overripe pears and salted caramel that did so well onContinue reading

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Standardby Julie87 Comments

Once in awhile, I come across a recipe that really blows me away – not only because it’s delicious, but because it utilizes some original technique I would never have thought of. This chocolate quinoa cake is a perfect example – it’s not made with quinoa flour, but actual cooked quinoa, whizzed into a batter with sugar and eggs and cocoa, then baked into this rich, dark cake that has a texture better than any gluten-free cake I’ve tried. Just look at it! It tastes as good as it looks. It comes from Patricia and Carolyn, authors of the superhit cookbook Quinoa 365: The Everyday Superfood, a book you may have seen practically everywhere for the past few years. It came at a time when quinoa was new and exotic, and people weren’t sure what to do with it. I made this cake years ago, and people keep asking about it – I just realized I never did post it here, and so here youContinue reading

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Standardby Julie50 Comments

As you may have seen on twitter, we’ve slumped into Tofino for some beach time, family time, book reading and kayaking and eating. I’ve mostly stayed out of the kitchen, although having one here – one that looks out over the water, even – has meant getting my baking fix before we head back to the gutted room that will hopefully be our kitchen once again before the snow flies. There are apricots and cherries in the wee one-room Beaches grocery, and I can never resist baking them into something. With browned butter, if possible. This isn’t quite a cake, but it’s not a crumble, either… it most closely resembles a slump – thick batter poured over fruit of any kind, then baked. It’s just enough to hold it together, and the cake part is more sugary-buttery than cakey. You could manage wedges, but it’s more of a spoon dessert, served warm with vanilla ice cream if you can swing it. Or for breakfast withContinue reading

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Standardby Julie38 Comments

This would be pretty for Canada Day, don’t you think? (I knew better than to attempt to arrange a maple leaf out of raspberries.) It looks pretty enough that people asked me where I bought it, but in reality if you can stand a raspberry upright, you can cover a cheesecake with them. The truth is, here they’re covering a gaping chasm of a crack in the top – something so common in cheesecakes it’s traditional to cover the plain ones with a sour cream topping to conceal any flaws. Cheesecake was my dessert of choice back in the 90s – it was Mike’s birthday cake of choice for decades – and yet I never think to make them these days. They’re pretty low-maintenance, as far as desserts go – once baked, it needs to sit in the fridge to firm up, so it may as well just hang out in there until you’re ready for it. A plain cheesecake like this – a classicContinue reading

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Standardby Julie63 Comments

It’s finally summer enough to warrant coffee on the back porch! And while these are hardly summery, I can’t imagine chocolate, cherries and whipped cream have a particular season. I’ve been promising to share the recipe since E’s 16th birthday back in April, when she told us it didn’t really matter what kind of cake she had, but she liked Black Forest. Me too. Who doesn’t? And the flavour combo makes a fine cupcake – a good thing because Black Forest cakes can be tricky to assemble and messy to cut. With a bag of frozen cherries in the freezer, all we needed was a batch of our standby chocolate cupcakes and some whipped cream. And something fancy to go on top – chocolate trees I recalled seeing somewhere, sometime – maybe on Pinterest? Here, I think? At any rate, I love melting chocolate chips in zip-lock baggies in a cup of warm water, then squeezing it out into shapes that then harden and canContinue reading

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Standardby Julie64 Comments

I totally didn’t plan this. One of the many benefits of having a teenage niece across the street are those times she decides she wants to bake – and wants your help. Here I was minding my own business, doing things that were probably productive, possibly healthy and definitely didn’t involve cupcakes, and then there she was, just-baked chocolate cupcakes in hand, wanting to make frosting together. (She made red velvet cupcakes too, but that’s another story.) Her goal: salted caramel on chocolate cupcakes. We made a brown sugar frosting, and the caramel was her idea – her plan was to run to the store to buy caramel sauce to dribble overtop, but I explained that caramel could be made easily out of the sugar we already had in probably less time than it would take to run to the store. We brought sugar to a simmer with a bit of water to help it along – and a drop of lemon juice, which helpsContinue reading

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Standardby Julie2,542 Comments

I love a good excuse to make cupcakes. If I don’t have one, I’m very good at justifying my actions when it comes to baking or buying new shoes (with size 11s you gotta buy ’em when you find ’em, right?) -but when a friend comes over within a few days of her birthday, it’s like a free pass to bake. (This is just butter + sugar, beaten for several minutes – I feel like most people fall short on this part, beating the two until they’re well combined but not really whipping it until it’s sufficiently light. Try letting it go for a couple minutes next time.) Cupcakes make it easier to serve a crowd, especially when fast-moving kids are in attendance and you’re not really sure you have enough little plates and forks to go around. Of course I generally choose cakes based on their need for adornment; I do love a well-frosted cupcake (and can even appreciate a 1:1 cake-frosting ratio) butContinue reading

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Standardby Julie2,163 Comments

I realize that 90% of the chocolate cakes you see here are bundt cakes. There are two reasons for this: 1) I like dense, damp, not-too-sweet (even squidgy) chocolate cakes best. And 2) I’m pretty lazy; I’d rather not deal with the layers, which require to be dressed with frosting, and I like the sort of cake you can eat by the wedge – it’s easier to shave off a nibble here and there. And so last Sunday, having just made a round of smoothies, I decided that while the blender was out I’d fast-track the batter for a chocolate cake I had decided to bring my mother in law, who likes a wedge of cake to nibble every night before bed. My standard chocolate cake has a very thin batter anyway; I figured it could be blitzed up like a smoothie and poured into the pan. Right? I was being so lazy about it all that I didn’t even go upstairs to get myContinue reading

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Standardby Julie54 Comments

Can you manage just one photo this time? And a chocolate cake that has beets in it? (I brought a beet cake to a friend on her birthday a few years ago, and she looked at me flatly and asked why? why would you do something like that to me on my birthday?) People adore chocolate zucchini cake and spiced carrot cake – why not grated beets? They behave much the same, lending a subtle earthy flavour as well as moisture. Beets can be roasted by wrapping them in foil and tossing right on the oven rack for about an hour; I sometimes do this while something else is in the oven (might as well do double duty with that warmth) and then keep the still-wrapped beets in a bowl in the fridge until I want them to add to a salad (with goat cheese and candied pecans!) or to grate into a cake. The skins rub right off with your fingers.

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