Millionaire's Shortbread

Can you think of anything more boring than having to go to a philosophy seminar on a Friday afternoon, after a long week of classes and assignments and trying to make sense of the dry, dry texts you were supposed to read? Then, even worse, having to discuss those dry texts, trying desperately to sound like you have a clue about what's going on. That's how I felt before I had my first Friday seminar when I was going to school in London a few years ago - total dread.

... But then I actually went, and it wasn't that bad. We were just a small group of girls having a conversation for a couple hours before the weekend. Our instructor was awesome and made us feel like there were no stupid questions, and gently led us in meaningful, interesting conversations. I started to really look forward to Friday afternoons. It didn't hurt, of course, that we all started bringing wine and chocolate and cookies to these little seminars of ours.

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French Coconut Pie with Dark Chocolate Sauce

 

I've been wanting to dedicate a post to Paris for a while now, but just never got around to it. I didn't know what to make, since most of what I ate when I was there was cheese and fruit and more cheese. Then finally it dawned on me: the first night we were there we ate at Le Café du Marché near the Eiffel Tower, and although our dinner was rich and kind of "meh", we split the most delicious coconut pie with the darkest, blackest chocolate sauce I'd ever tasted.

My friend (and then roommate) Christina and I went on a little trip to Paris in September 2011 to celebrate finishing our theses and finally being done with school. As soon as we stepped off the train, I immediately understood what all the fuss was about. Paris is magical. I was swept off my feet.

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Banana Chocolate Chip Doughnuts with Peanut Butter Glaze

I don't know about you, but whenever I buy a bunch of bananas, I can never seem to finish eating all of them before they get too ripe. I do like my bananas a bit on the unripe side, so maybe my criteria for bad bananas is a little too harsh. Luckily, there are a million delicious recipes that use up over-ripe bananas... in fact, maybe I just let them get that way because my subconscious craves banana bread. My subconscious effing loves banana bread.

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Love Bars

 

I know that our sense of smell is supposed to be the sense most strongly linked to memory, but I think you'll all agree that certain foods can act as little time machines, zooming us back to a time and place buried in the past. Love Bars, which are sold at Pret A Manger (a sandwich chain in the UK that sells really tasty to-go meals), have this time machine effect on me; one bite and I'm back on the slow train to Chelmsford, eating my lunch after a long morning in the library. The ironic thing is that I would've been in the library researching nostalgia - the subject of my thesis - and now I'm waxing nostalgic about the delicious treats I enjoyed after studying (...and before studying, and during studying).

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Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies

There are few things better in this world than a really, really good chocolate chip cookie. Everything about them, from the dough (not ashamed to admit I eat it!), to the smell of them baking in the oven, is classic and comforting and delicious. And biting into a chocolate chip cookie warm from the oven... that's pretty hard to top in terms of heart-melting goodness.

My mom has used the same chocolate chip cookie recipe for years (scrawled on a piece of loose leaf by a co-worker) and I've adopted it as my gold standard cookie recipe. But recently I was listening to the chocolate chip cookie episode of my favourite food podcast, Spilled Milk, and they brought something to light that I didn't know before: chilling the dough for at least 24 hours will result in much, much better cookies. Chilling the dough, they explained, allows the sugars to get completely absorbed by the liquids, and the cookies turn out soft and chewy with a richer flavour - kind of toffee-like. Apparently, even the original Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie recipe called for chilling the dough overnight - a step that for some reason has been left out of the famous package instructions. 

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Crack Mix

I love it when you go to a friend's house or have people over, fully intending to watch a movie together, and then you end up just talking or goofing around for 5 hours instead. That has happened to me twice in the past few weeks, and it doesn't bother me one bit that we didn't watch those movies. At both of those get togethers, there was no shortage of nibbles (I happened to make this mix on both occasions) - plenty of fuel for long conversations or epic game nights.

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Salted Caramel Brownies

 

I don't make New Year's resolutions. Maybe I should, but I just can't be bothered... especially since January has got to be the worst time to summon the motivation to go for a run or cut back on carbs. January/February is the time of year when I feel like napping, eating warm things from the oven, and watching every season of Friday Night Lights.

It was that kind of a weekend about a year ago when we visited my boyfriend's mom in Calgary. We kind of just stayed in, ate good food, cuddled with her dog and watched SNL. It was so nice. She had made a pan of Ina Garten's salted caramel brownies and we nibbled on them all weekend (and for a while afterwards, since she packed them up and sent them with us).
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Extra Chocolatey Zucchini Loaves

I'm not lucky enough to have my own garden (and even if I did, I don't have a very green thumb), but last week I found out I am lucky enough to work in an office with some gardeners. I love it when people come in with surplus rhubarb or apples or, in this case, zucchinis. Then, after I've gone home and turned perfectly healthy fruits and veggies into sweet, sweet desserts, I can bring the finished product in to share with my co-workers. It's the circle of life... or secondary industry... or something.
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Strawberry Oreos

America, on the whole, has better junk food than the rest of the world. Well, maybe not better (Belgium knows what's up), but American snack aisles certainly have more variety than their international counterparts. Case in point: Oreos. I thought Canada had a huge range of Oreo products... Golden, Double Stuf, those chocolate covered ones you get at Christmas sometimes... but in the States: Birthday Cake, Cool Mint, Creamsicle, Gingerbread, Peanut Butter, Mega Stuf, Neopolitan, Candy Corn, and Berry Burst Ice Cream. Browsing Amazon.com's Oreo selection makes me want to drive 7 hours to Montana right now.

Last summer, my mom did just that, and when she came back she brought me all kinds of American treats, including Berry Burst Ice Cream Oreos. They went in the freezer so I wouldn't eat them all at once, but they still disappeared pretty fast.


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Chocolate Torta with Salted Hazelnuts

As a relatively new Edmontonian and food-obsessive, I've been wanting to go to Corso 32 pretty much since I moved here. It's been featured on some "Best Restaurants in Canada" lists (enRoute and Maclean's), and Avenue and VUE have both named Corso 32 on their Best Restaurants lists.

So imagine my dreamy, drooling delight when Corso 32 turned out to be the secret location of my Valentine's date. My boyfriend is a very smart man.

After four courses of impossibly delicious food and wine, this happened. Chocolate Torta with salty hazelnuts. Incredibly silky and intensely chocolatey, with a salty-sweet crunch on top... a wave of pleasure will flood your brain, your eyes will glaze over, and all you'll be able to do is make "omagahhhh" sounds in between mouthfuls.
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Dark Chocolate & Sour Cherry Cookies

These are insane. I first made them last Christmas – I can’t remember how I stumbled across the recipe, but I’m really glad I did. These cookies are one of the many delicious looking things that Sydney’s Bourke Street Bakery has to offer - a chewy, intensely chocolately cookie studded with tart cherries... decadent yet balanced. Straight up delicious.

This particular batch came about for a few reasons: first, my brother recently came back from Toronto, and he brought me a jar of Soma Dutched cocoa powder (which I wanted to use). Secondly, he and I struck a deal that if I baked something good with that cocoa powder, he would put on my winter tires. Bonus reason: I wanted to include these in a box of goodies for a certain special guy on our second date. The results have been amazing. Having traction on ice is alright, too.

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Sex and the City Cupcakes

Fair warning: this post contains content that is all kinds of girly. A miniature cupcake with a swirl of pink frosting, named after the girliest show on television... pinning it! I could go into all the trouble with anti-feminist caricatures and how the cupcake is a symbol of everything that's wrong with society, but I won't. That's not what we're here for.


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Ode to a Hometown

For my very first post, I thought it would be fitting to make something in tribute to my first home: Red Deer, Alberta. Not really the type of place that inspires confectionary creativity; our official cookie was chosen in a mid-nineties attempt to contrive some kind of "Red Deerian" culture. New Yorkers have their black-and-white cookies, Paris has its macarons... and we have the Caramel Surprise. I know. It needs a new name.

I'm not really sure how they represent Red Deer, but they're delicious (which is all that really matters, right?): a soft, chewy chocolate cookie filled with caramel and topped with chopped pecans. Yum.


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