| We celebrated my friend Ginny’s birthday this last week. 🙂 When I asked her what sort of food she wanted for it, she thought for a minute, then said she wanted a cake that combined her three favorite flavors — dark chocolate, coffee, and cherries. What was more, she wanted to make a marble cake. |  |
Sorry this is late–we had a housewarming party this weekend and it ate a ton of time! However, before she left for home earlier this week, Jennifer and I finally did our “combine the 
cinnamon rolls” project we’ve been talking about for so long. It was actually kinda funny to make a dish and then all three of us (me, Sean, Jennifer) sit down and eat it–that doesn’t happen much any more, and almost NEVER with a dessert. Sean and Jennifer both commented on that as we ate our way through the experiments, in fact.
Caramel corn. I love the stuff. I love it oh so much. I have to cut myself off, and it doesn’t always work. Sean’s dad makes really great
traditional caramel corn, but of course the usual recipe has massive amounts of corn syrup, which Sean can’t have. So, I have invented a new version. It is delicious, if I do say so myself, and has Sean’s stamp of approval as well.
| I love ice cream cones. A lot. My favorite part is always the very last bite, when you pop the bottom tip of the cone into your mouth and crunch into it, and just the right amount of ice cream oozes out. I spent a summer in college working at a Coldstone Creamery, mostly in the early afternoon, so I made a lot of waffle cones every day, to the point of being dubbed “the waffle queen” by my coworkers. |  |
Today’s blog post will be a little different: Instead of doing just one recipe of my own, I want to share a few recipes from other blogs or sites that I use all the time and really love (sometimes with a little modification): graham crackers, German chocolate cake, and frozen chocolate pie.
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| Yes, 8-bit nerds all around, that is supposed to be the Magikoopa magic spell symbol thingy. 🙂 What can I say, my brother’s exploits defy expression through any medium but the ludo-arcane. Or at least, his birthday cake did. 😀 |  |
| These cookie sandwiches started as an attempt to recreate Thin Mints (and if you stop before adding the filling, you’re reasonably close to them), but ended up as an accidental experiment in the taste buds of my various family and friends and which of them tasted which part of the deliciousness the most. Out of four male and four female tasters, the men always tasted one flavor, and the women always tasted another — but which tasted raspberry and which tasted mint, I’ll leave it to you to find out for yourself. 🙂 |  |
Hey look, no soup! Since I had a chance to work on the blog post recipe before Friday, you get a dessert (or breakfast) instead. Yes, I just said these muffins could be dessert
OR breakfast. But it isn’t healthy to eat desserts instead of breakfast, is it? Well, no. However, these muffins are not nearly the sugar-load that commercial muffins are. So, while these are a tasty enough treat to serve as dessert, you don’t have to feel too bad if you eat two for breakfast on the run (as I did this morning).
| It doesn’t look like much at first glance, maybe, but — it’s flaky. And boy does gluten-free not like to do flaky. This is a treat you have to work for, but it’s worth it in the end. |  |
| Not long after my friend Ginny got diagnosed with celiac disease, she set me a challenge — to make a dough that could hold up to frying. I told her I already had — since, as it turned out, I already had — but, it wasn’t a dough I was thrilled with. Roll time forward, and happy breakthroughs on how to make flexible dough have brought me to the tasty, sweet, warm, crisp donut. |  |
