I turned thirty this past Sunday. Thirty. I know that age is just a number and I’m still plenty young, but it sounds a lot older than twenty-nine, somehow. It was a milestone, anyway, so there had to be an appropriate cake. As with every birthday cake I make, there was some agonizing over what kind it should be – but only a little. I already had it narrowed down between a crêpe cake or a caramel cake, and the caramel cake won. (But the crêpe cake is still on the list, because WOW.)
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While perusing the delicious brownie and blondie offerings from May’s Sourdough Surprises, I realized that I’d never made a blondie, let alone eaten one, and it became clear, based on the delicious recipes I was seeing, that this needed to change as soon as possible. A blondie is essentially a brownie made without chocolate, instead employing brown sugar for a caramel-toffee flavour. Imagine a square with the texture of a fudgey, chewy brownie and the taste of chocolate chip cookie dough (minus the chocolate chips) and you’ve got a blondie. And if you’re like me, you will feel compelled to make a batch as soon as you come to this realization.
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Several months ago, Jamie Oliver posted a photo on Facebook showing the most beautiful pasta I had ever seen, which immediately prompted me to start a frantic search to find out what it was called and how it was made.
The picture came from a British food TV show called Simply Italian, which of course I couldn’t watch in Canada, but I did manage to find the recipe for “wedding tortelli“. Unfortunately it didn’t give very clear instructions for how to shape the tortelli, so I turned to the Google machine and found a related pasta shape called culurgiones:
Culurgiones are also known as Sardinian ravioli and usually have a potato filling, sort of like a cross between a ravioli and a pierogi. They are formed in a manner similar to the tortelli in question, however they are more round and plump like dumplings versus the tapered, almost leaf-like shape of tortelli, which is what I was after.
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It is finally strawberry season here, and by that I mean that there are local strawberries in the stores. They are a bit more expensive than the ones trucked up from California (which seems so totally backwards!) but they taste amazing because they are so perfectly ripe and fresh.
I knew I wanted to make something special with these berries but I couldn’t decide what until I remembered the strawberry banana bread I’d seen on Joy the Baker a while ago. I wanted to jazz it up even more so I added a cream cheese swirl. The result is an incredibly moist, decadent, not-to-sweet bread with a pleasant strawberry flavour and cheesecake-y tang. The banana is not overpowering at all and mostly just contributes sweetness, and the hint of cinnamon in the batter goes really well with the strawberries….