Every Easter I see these pretty speckled robin’s egg cakes pop up all over the food internet, and I’ve been wanting to make one myself for a while. I’ve also been wanting to make a coconut layer cake, so I combined the two and here we are!
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Any Fruit Biscuit Cobbler
Back in August, this was the first baking recipe I managed to make from scratch, start to finish, since Max was born, and this belated post is a testament to how hard it is to get almost anything else done when you are caring for a baby! I first discovered this cherry biscuit cobbler last year and couldn’t wait to make it again with different fruit fillings. The biscuits themselves are like perfect tea time scones, light and perfectly tender, and when combined with jammy fruit and optional but highly recommended ice cream or whipped cream, the whole thing tastes like a cross between a pie and a shortcake.
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Mendiants {How to Temper Chocolate}
Mendiants are a French confection of chocolate topped with dried fruit and nuts, the name being derived from the Latin word for “begging” in reference to begging for alms by monks or friars of religious orders who have taken vows of poverty. The fruit and nut toppings are supposed to represent the four Roman Catholic monastic orders who partook in this activity. But beyond the history lesson, mendiants are a delicious and easy way to make chocolate candies – the only challenge is that you have to temper chocolate, which, if you’ve ever watched an episode of Bon Appetit’s Gourmet Makes when Claire has to temper chocolate, you might assume is an impossible task. Every time she hauls out the vacuum sealer and sous vide immersion circulator thing I cringe, because tempering chocolate is NOT THAT HARD, I swear!
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Blackberry Hazelnut Layer Cake
The end of summer is my favourite, still sunny and warm with long golden afternoons but also a sniff of cooler air and the promise of sweater weather (which apparently is here now – we actually lit a fire in the fireplace last night!) and apple pie around the corner. The best part is all the glorious late season fruit – raspberries and peaches and plums (late summer is plum cake season, after all) and my very favourite: blackberries. Weekends in late August and early September, you will inevitably find me crouched on the side of the road or in the ditch foraging for blackberries, coming home with scratched forearms and purple-stained fingers and a bucket of shiny black fruit tasting of summer nostalgia.
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Double Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake
I made this cheesecake several months ago (yes, I’m terribly behind on posting) to mark the retirement of a colleague. When I asked her what her favourite kind of cake was, she promptly answered either chocolate cake or cheesecake. I love it when people have a ready answer to that question, and also, how can you go wrong with either option?
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The Goldilocks Cake {Lemon Pistachio Layer Cake}
If you are a long time reader, you may be aware that I have been on a multi-year quest to make a lemon layer cake that is juuuuust right. I’ve made many, many attempts – the first one, with dense layers and teeth-achingly sweet cream cheese frosting; this meringue-topped beaut that introduced me to Tartine’s fantastic lemon cream; this lemon, blackberry and white chocolate behemoth; a cake with wonderfully soft and light layers but disasterously drippy frosting; another lemon and blackberry behemoth with more drippy frosting; and most recently, one that featured a brilliant lemon curd formula and was so pretty – but all were too dense or too sweet or too drippy, and still not juuuuust right.
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Salty Honey Pie
The Beatles said it best:
“Honey pie,
Honey pie,
Honey pie,
Honey pie,
I love you.”
I first made this salted honey pie from Four and Twenty Blackbirds back in the summer and we loved it so much I made it again for Canadian Thanksgiving in October. Initially our dinner guests were a bit disappointed there was no pumpkin pie (not my favourite, and one of the perks hosting is you get to choose the menu 😉 ) but after the first bite of this salty-sweet confection, all complaints were erased.
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Blackberry Basil White Chocolate Tart
Blackberry season almost completely passed me by this year. Normally I’m out scouring the neighbourhood ditches and roadsides for blackberries the minute I notice they are ripe, but somehow I missed the signs and nearly forgot. Luckily, once I remembered, the blackberry item I had in mind only required a small handful of berries, which is how I ended up foraging for blackberries in the rain at the very tail end of the season and came up with just enough for this pretty little tart.
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Cinnamon Apricot Pie with Crème Anglaise
This is another pie from The Four and Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book, and boy, do they really know their stuff. In fact, this may be the tastiest pie that I’ve ever made. I’ve never done much baking with apricots and holy smokes are they ever delicious here! I loved their tart floral flavour next to the warmth of the cinnamon. I finally found Angostura bitters in the grocery store (I guess I didn’t look hard enough last time!) and I like what they added to this pie – the flavour I got from them was almost like allspice, and it was really good with the apricots.
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Strawberry Balsamic Pie
Recently, the Food52 Baking Club had The Four and Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book as our cookbook of the month, which means that I now have three gorgeous pies to share with you. I don’t own this cookbook and couldn’t justify adding to my collection (but that might change… #cookbookhoarder), but I managed to find several recipes online, and after making two of their pies I was convinced to finally join our local regional library so I could get my hands on the actual book!
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