No-Bake Desserts for Lazy Days – NYT Cooking.
When the weather gets warm you may not feel much like doing any baking for desserts at home or to bring to parties. The NYT Cooking site has put together some great options for desserts that involve no baking at all so you can put some great things together even on the days when you might be feeling too hot, too tired or too lazy to bake. Check it out!
it has been a very hectic week around here, which is why I haven’t had a chance to really post anything since a few days ago. I have been busy at work and with meetings at Sean’s school, Michelle was away on business and then came home, Sean has been busy at school and then sick and spring break is upon us with Easter right around the corner. It feels like we haven’t even had a chance to breather lately and the weather has been helping, with snow falling here on and off all day. Anyway,enough complaining about all of that stuff and let’s try to get down to some cooking! I had made this dessert last week as a nice Irish dessert that seemed perfect for right around St. Patrick’s Day and I got the recipe from The Complete Irish Pub Cookbook. It is for an apple cake that makes use of just a few ingredients and it does not take any time at all to put it together. In about an hour you can have a nice dessert so it is a good one to keep in mind anytime you have a few apples around and you want a dessert in a hurry.
Irish Apple Cake
2 large cooking apples, such as Granny Smith
1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, plus extra for greasing
1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon superfine sugar
2 eggs
1-2 tablespoons milk
confectioner’s sugar, for dusting
For the Streusel Topping:
1 cup all-purpose flour
6 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup superfine sugar
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9-inch round springform cake pan. To make the streusel topping, sift the flour into a medium bowl and rub in the butter with your fingers until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs or bread crumbs. Stir in the superfine sugar and set the topping aside.
Peel, core and thinly slice the apples. To make the cake, sift the flour into a medium bowl with the baking powder, ground cinnamon and the salt. Place the butter and the superfine sugar in a separate large bowl and beat them together with an electric mixer until the mixture is light and fluffy, about 2 to 3 minutes. Gradually beat in the eggs, adding a little bit of the flour mixture with the last addition of egg. Gently fold in half of the remaining flour mixture, then fold the rest of the flour mixture in with the milk.
Spoon the batter into the prepared springform pan and smooth the top of the batter. Cover the top with the sliced apples and then sprinkle the streusel topping evenly over the top of the apples. Bake the cake in the preheated oven for 1 hour or until the top is browned and firm to the touch. Let the cake cool in the pan before removing the sides of the springform pan. Dust the cake with confectioners’ sugar before serving.
This cake tastes great when it is a little bit warm and you can serve it with some ice cream or fresh whipped cream on the side. It rose more than I thought it would at first as I was a little concerned as I put the batter in the pan that it seemed to dry, but it all came out nicely in the end and the cake was moist and flavorful. If you do not have superfine sugar you can make your own simply by processing granulated sugar in the food processor for about 1 minute. This is a nice dessert to make since it uses things you typically have around the house so you can throw it together if you need something last-minute for home or to bring to someone else’s home.
That’s all I have for today. Check back next time for another recipe. Hopefully this week will be better than the last and I will have more time to get on here and share some recipes. Until then, enjoy the rest of your day and enjoy your meal!
Our Best Irish Recipes – Bon Appétit.
St. Patrick’s Day is under 2 weeks away so now is a good time to start planning out some of those great Irish recipes in advance of the day that is everything Irish. Bon Appetit has put together 18 recipes that are Irish-inspired recipes to help you celebrate the day with great drinks, corned beef and fun desserts. Check it out!
50 of Our Favorite Cake Recipes (Yep… 50!) Slideshow – Bon Appétit.
It’s the weekend and perhaps you have some free time to do a little baking this week to make a nice dessert for Sunday dinner. You can never have too many great cake recipes to fall back. You need different cakes for different occasions, so here Bon Appetit has put together 50 of their favorite cake recipes for you to cover everything from special occasions to a simple coffee cake or pound cake and everything in between. Check it out!
there are always going to be times where you wish you had some dessert around and you just don’t have anything available. Maybe it is some last-minute visitors stopping by for coffee and you just wish you had something you could put out. Or maybe you are like me and you have a teenager complaining that there are no desserts in the house and they would like something to have as a snack or dessert. At times like this you need to have an arsenal of desserts that you can put together easily, typically in under an hour and without creating a lot of fuss or mess. Sure, cookies are always an option, but for me it means dragging out a lot of ingredients, the mixer, cookie sheets and more and it means a lot of clean-up. Brownies are always a good option too, but maybe you don’t have the chocolate on hand to do them fast. it is at times like this that I often find myself turning to a trusty pound cake recipe I got from America’s Test Kitchen. it is a classic recipe, easy to put together, requires only a few ingredients and minimal clean up and produces a great and versatile dessert.
Easy Lemon Pound Cake
1 1/2 cups cake flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups sugar
4 eggs, room temperature
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 tablespoons grated lemon zest
2 teaspoons lemon juice
16 tablespoons (2 sticks) butter, melted and hot
Adjust an oven rack to the middle position and heat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour and 8 1/2 by 4 1/2-inch loaf pan. Whisk the flour, baking powder and salt together in a bowl.
Process the sugar, eggs, vanilla, lemon zest and lemon juice together in a food processor until the ingredients are combined, about 10 seconds. With the food processor running, add in the hot melted butter in a steady stream until it is incorporated. Pour the mixture from the food processor into a large bowl.
Sift the flour mixture over the egg mixture in 3 additions, whisking to combine the ingredients after each addition until only a few streaks of flour remain. Continue to whisk the batter gently until almost no lumps remain. Try not to overmix the batter. Scrape the batter into the prepared loaf pan and smooth out the top. Wipe any drops of batter off the sides of the pan and gently tap the pan on the counter to release any air bubbles from the batter. Bake the cake in the oven until a toothpick in the center comes out with a few moist crumbs attached, about 50 to 60 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through the baking process.
Let the cake cool in the loaf pan on a wire rack for 10 minutes. Run a small knife around the edge of the cake to loosen it from the pan, then flip the cake out onto a wire rack.Turn the cake right side up and allow it to cool completely, up to 2 hours, before serving.
What you end up with in just about an hour is a moist pound cake that is not thick and dense like many can be. The process of adding the hot butter in the food processor allows the ingredients to emulsify quickly before there is a chance of anything curdling that can make the cake dense. if you prefer not to have the lemon you can simply leave the zest and juice out and get a nice, plain pound cake or you can substitute something like orange juice and zest for an orange flavor or use some almond extract and slivered almonds for an almond pound cake. you can then serve this nicely by itself or with some ice cream, serve with berries or other fruit, or even serve it in chunks with some chocolate fondue.
That’s all I have for today. Check back next time for another recipe. Until then, enjoy the rest of your day, have a Happy Valentine’s Day and enjoy your meal!
Trying to find snacks to eat to appeal to kids and that provide something of a healthier alternative is not always an easy thing to do. Kids get turned off just by the name of something if it sounds healthier a lot the time and aren’t always willing to even give it a chance of tasting good, so it can be a challenge to find something that is better than the usual snack cakes, candy, chips, brownies, ice cream and the like. I saw this recipe recently in Bon Appetit for a banana-oat snack cake that provides a good alternative to a typical snack using some healthier choices like oats and bananas. This recipe only uses a few ingredients and can be done in under an hour to give you something quick and easy to offer as a dessert or snack after school.
Banana-Oat Snack Cake
6 tablespoons butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces, melted, plus more for the baking dish
1 1/2 cups old-fashioned oats
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 1/4 cups (packed) light brown sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 bananas, chopped
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly coat an 8 x 8 inch baking dish with butter and line the baking dish with parchment paper. Whisk the oats, all-purpose flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt in a large bowl and set it aside. Whisk the brown sugar, eggs and vanilla in another large bowl until the mixture is smooth.
Slowly stream the butter into the brown sugar mixture, whisking constantly until the mixture is well blended. Add the bananas to the dry ingredients and toss the bananas to coat them well. Stir the banana mixture into the brown sugar mixture. The resulting batter will be quite thick. Spread the batter evenly into the prepared baking dish. Place the dish in the oven and bake until the cake is golden brown and the edges start to pull away from the sides of the dish, about 35 to 40 minutes. Transfer the cake to a wire rack and let it cool completely in the dish. Cut the cake into 12 servings and serve.
The resulting cake has great flavor from that oats and bananas with a nice hint of cinnamon throughout the cake. I think it is a great snack cake and it stayed quite moist for the few days we had it around the house, making it the perfect after school snack. it also goes really well with your coffee in the morning if you are looking for something a little different for your breakfast and it certainly is a great dish that you could add to any breakfast buffet or lunch or something you can throw together easily if you have some last-minute guests drop by and want something tasty to serve over coffee.
That’s all I have for today. Check back next time for another recipe. Until then, enjoy the rest of your day (we have a snow day here in our area of New York today) and enjoy your meal!
I took most of last week off from blogging and doing any work so that we could spend some time together as a family and do some things around the house, including taking down all of the Christmas decorations and ornaments that were around the house. So now that Christmas and New Year’s are complete, it is time to get back to regular blogging. I did get a number of things for Christmas this year that are related to cooking, including a couple of great cookbooks that I hope to go into detail about in a future blog post. I also got a great new bread maker that I had wanted for a while and I will do a blog post about that as well as I have already used it a couple of times and I have been very happy with the results. But for now, I have lots of recipes to share as I tried out a number of things and did a bunch of cooking between Christmas and New Year’s, including stuff I made for Christmas dinner. One of the items we made for dinner that day was a special dessert based on a recipe that I found at the blog Life, Love and Sugar. It is for a very easy peppermint brownie ice cream cake that makes use of some quick ingredients so that you can easily put together a fantastic looking dessert in no time at all. The original recipe does call for use of cream cheese to help create a type of ice cream for the filling of the cake. We decided it seemed better to actually use ice cream in the cake itself so we substituted some mint chocolate chip ice cream as an alternative. The recipe that I am posting here is the one that we altered a little bit to make use of the ice cream.
Peppermint Brownie Ice Cream Cake
1 box brownie mix, plus the ingredients required for the recipe on the brownie box
1 pint mint chocolate chip ice cream
2 teaspoons peppermint extract
1 10-ounce bag Andes peppermint crunch candy
1/2 cup chocolate syrup (plus a little more for drizzling)
2 cups whipped cream (homemade whipped cream or store-bought)
For the brownies, make the brownie dough according to the instructions on the back of the box. Grease two 8-inch cake pans and line the bottoms of each pan with parchment paper to allow for easy removal of the brownies. Bake the brownies at the temperature listed on the box, reducing the baking time to about 20 minutes. When the brownies are done baking, allow them to completely cool.
For the assembly of the cake, removal of one of the brownies from the 8 inch pan and place it on a large platter, springform cake pan or cake holder. Spread half of the mint chocolate chip ice cream mixture on top of the brownie. Add the 2nd brownie layer on top of the ice cream. Cover the brownie with 1/2 a cup of chocolate syrup. Top the 2nd brownie layer with any remaining peppermint ice cream. Place the brownies with the ice cream in the freezer. Allow the ice cream cake to freeze completely, about 1 to 2 hours. When the cake is frozen remove the cake from springform pan, if using. Mix the 2 teaspoons of peppermint extract in with the 2 cups of whipped cream. Frost the ice cream cake with the whipped cream and.the top of the cake with the peppermint crunch candy. Drizzle on more chocolate syrup if desired and served.
This is one of the easiest cakes you can put together because you are really using everything pre-made other than if you decide to use homemade whipped cream or perhaps you want to use homemade ice cream instead of store-bought. We could not find a particular peppermint ice cream to use for the cake so he went with mint chocolate chip, but if you can make peppermint ice cream at home or find some of your local store it would fit perfectly. The picture I took of the cake is before we added any of the chocolate syrup, but it is really up to you if you want to add it or not. You really need to make sure that you let the cake set up in the freezer for an hour or 2 before you put the frosting on to make sure that the ice cream is nice and firm in the center. Everyone seemed to really like the cake and it was gone right away so it is certainly one worth trying again since it is so easy to do.
That is all I have for today. Check back next time for another recipe. I want to thank everybody for a great 2014 as this blog hit all-time highs in the number of visits and followers for the year and I cannot thank you enough for following along and checking things out. I hope 2015 it is just as good and I will continue to work at the blog and make improvements to make things even better than before. Enjoy the rest of your day, and enjoy your meal!
Fun, unusual and forgotten designations on our calendar.
Happily Ever After Lives Here
a little bit naughty a little bit nice
Letting Life Lead
Simple and delicious dinner inspiration
onedadskitchen 