Food Diary

Macadamia nuts and white chocolate are a match made in heaven as far as I’m concerned. Macadamia nuts can go well with a wide variety of ingredients, of course, but their buttery nuttiness pairs perfectly with the creamy vanilla of white chocolate. Anyone who has eaten a good white chocolate macadamia nut cookie can confirm this, as it is one of the most popular ways to use macadamia nuts in the kitchen. As good as they are, those cookies aren’t the only option for baking with macadamia nuts and these Macadamia Nut White Chocolate Tea Cakes are a great way to start expanding your repertoire. The tea cakes are similar to cupcakes, but they’re a touch sweeter than your average cupcake and don’t need any frosting to finish them off. These start with a batter made with ground macadamia nuts. You can grind them into meal – just like almond meal or flour – in your food processor in just a few seconds. I recommend starting with toasted macadamia nuts (they’re most often sold toasted), sin

Friends! Happy Sunday to you!  My head is spinning with springtime New Orleans vibes so please excuse the brevity.  I hope this finds you happy and well and wearing shorts despite the lack of tan.  We’re all in this together and we’ll make it to summer tan on way or another.   Here are a few of the links that resonated with me this week, please:   •  If you’re into true crime and the podcast My Favorite Murder you might also be into the most incredible book I’ll Be Gone In The Dark in which case you’re maybe never going to sleep again which leaves you plenty of time to read about how (in epic news!) The Golden State Killer was arrested this week !!! Continue reading Let It Be Sunday, 169! at Joy the Baker.

Friends!   Are you on your way?  Has the sound of brass bands and the smell of gardenias, beignets, and fresh strawberries called you home to New Orleans, yet?  We’re down here living our best days and it only makes sense if you join us!   It’s Jazz Fest season and it feels like the city is swelling with visitors.  The vibes are good, the river is movin’ fast, and the flower beds are healing from that bully of a winter frost. Continue reading What To Do In New Orleans This Spring, 2018 at Joy the Baker.

I enjoy any cookie that includes oatmeal in the dough. Oatmeal is wonderfully nutty that adds an extra layer of flavor to a dough, as well as adding texture to finished cookies. These Cinnamon Raisin Granola Cookies use granola instead of oatmeal to put a twist on a traditional oatmeal raisin cookie recipe. You’re going to need about 2 cups of granola for this recipe. I recommend having a little bit extra on hand because, if you’re like me, you’ll probably snack your way though a handful or so while you put together the cookies. There are many kinds of granola out there to choose from. While I used an easy homemade granola , you can certainly use store-bought granola in this recipe. You simply want to look for a granola that is oatmeal-based or at least features lots of oatmeal to get the texture right. I prefer one made with dried fruits and nuts, though a granola with chocolate bits in it is not a bad idea either. Since my homemade granola includes both raisins and pecans, I added

I saw this recipe on pinterest recently and given I (ironically, it is a long list) had all of these ingredients, I could not stop thinking about it. I strayed really far from the original, but am happy with where I ended up. I could eat this all day long. I am aware it is not a truly authentic Thai list of ingredients, but it tastes delicious at the end so I'm not concerned. I don't like rambling on to sell you a recipe so instead, here are a few podcasts I listened to this past week that I really enjoyed. Not sure how you listen to podcasts, I trust you can search for them.  Oprah Super Soul Conversations : Brene Brown and Shonda Rhimes The Liturgists : Body Image How I Built This : Howard Schultz/Starbucks and Gary Hirshberg/Stonyfield Yogurt THAI-ISH CAULIFLOWER RICE SALAD Serves 4-6 Recipe inspired by The Awesome Green It is a long list of ingredients, and quite a bit of chopping, but worth the time. I add some grilled chicken or tofu, both of which I marinate

Listen, every few months I like to pop in here and remind you that it’s time to make the doughnuts.   Literally and figuratively .   This Spring marks the 1 year birthday of my sweet little brunch book, OVER EASY ?  Does one throw a birthday party for a book? Certainly not.  But you can’t stop me from making doughnuts about it. I’ve surrounded myself with strawberries the past few weeks. Continue reading Strawberry Shortcake Doughnuts at Joy the Baker.

My grandma had rhubarbs growing in her garden and would cook them into a sweet, tangy and unfortunately quite stringy soup with lots of little bits in it. I never liked that soup. I was only 11 when she passed away so I don’t remember a lot about her. But I do still remember that soup. How annoying is that!? One of the few memories you have of a person is something they cooked for you that you didn’t like. Eight year old David preferred supermarket box carton soups and powder soups that you just added water to. That ungrateful little schmuck. Since then, I have of course come to my senses and learned to appreciate any food that someone cooks for me. Even tangy and stringy rhubarb soup. But since I don’t want to risk being remembered for a stringy soup, we give you a smooth one instead. It’s approved by eight year old David. And his children. We made this video for our youtube channel to show how easy it is. We like this soup because it’s so simple and fresh and comes together in

Friends!  I hope there’s a lightness to your Spring weekend.  Lightness and rest, and at least one wood-fired pizza.   My friend Jon and I shot a new batch of recipes for the site this week so there’s some good stuff coming up!  We celebrated our hard work with pizza, at a new place called Echo’s in New Orleans.  It’s easily on my list of perfect Spring-time meals in the city. Continue reading Let It Be Sunday, 168! at Joy the Baker.

Lots of kids looked forward to a big glass of chocolate milk as a treat when they were growing up. While I liked chocolate milk, I preferred to sip bright pink Strawberry Milk when I had the chance. I loved the sweet berry flavor and the oh-so-pretty color – and I’ll even have the occasional glass to this very day, though I make my all natural Homemade Strawberry Milk instead of opting for the store-bought powder. This year, Baileys released a Strawberries n’ Cream liqueur that definitely brings back memories of my childhood favorite – even if it is in a much more adult package. The creamy liqueur is similar in consistency to Baileys classic Irish Cream liqueur, but it is a soft pink color and has a soft strawberry and vanilla flavor to it. It tastes a lot like strawberry ice cream, but with a hint of alcohol at the end. It’s sweet, but very tasty, and it inspired me to get a little creative in the kitchen to see how else I could use it besides in a cocktail. These Baileys Strawbe

Over the past couple of years, mug cakes have skyrocketed in popularity to the point where they’re a regular afternoon snack for bakers looking for a quick fix. There was a time when I experimented with cake mix mug cakes by taking just a few tablespoons of mix from a much larger box, but these days there are pre-measured mixes just for making mug cakes! Duncan Hines Perfect Size for 1 line of mixes comes in a variety of flavors and I’ve tried the brownie mix before. I recently picked up one of their newest offerings – a Color Changing Cake Mix – to give it a try. The box contains four packets of dry ingredients, each yielding one serving of cake. The box recommends that you add applesauce to the mix, but you can also use water or milk without problem if you don’t have applesauce on hand. The mix can be stirred up right in the mug before it goes into the microwave. With this particular mix, it appears white when you open the packet and changes color to a vivid pink when liquid is a

I was skimming a goop article last week (I have a love hate with all things goop - I appreciate the health angle, but I don't like that the average advertised clothing article is $480. You had me at hormone balancing but I disconnected with the suggestion of using $50 bath salts). Anyway. I liked the interview in the article and I jotted down this line to remember: "The goal is to gain greater awareness of yourself on every level: what makes you tick and what makes you sick, what your passion and purpose are, what you want to express in your lifetime, and what makes you most fulfilled" ... "When you wake up to the awareness of who and what you are, you can discover the confidence to live your way, the courage to make choices that serve you best, and the compassion to be kind to yourself along the way—a compassion that inevitably ripples outward to others." - Dr. Frank Lipman Both Hugh and I are trying to be proactive about growing/changing our businesses thi

There’s a spot for sour dairy in my refrigerator.  Not the accidental soured dairy that’s been left too long, forgotten behind the orange juice.  I’m talking about the intentional soured diary that has claimed its space on the lower door shelf of fridge.  It’s a spot of honor really, next to other highly reached-for items like ketchup, hot sauce, and white wine.  I have this hazy memory of a Frasier episode wherein Frasier reprimands Nigel (? Continue reading Yogurt Pita and Baked Chicken Shawarma at Joy the Baker.

Every ice cream brand has their own signature flavors and, while classics like chocolate and vanilla may be bestsellers, those unique flavors are the ones that build long-time fans. One of my favorite Baskin Robbins flavors is Jamocha Almond Fudge, a coffee ice cream that is studded with almonds and swirled with a ribbon of chocolate fudge. It isn’t always available in-store, so I have a homemade version  that I’ve been known to whip up when a craving strikes. These Jamocha Almond Fudge Muffins are inspired by that ice cream flavor, but are a more breakfast-friendly option than a big bowl of ice cream! It’s almost a one-bowl recipe, so these tasty treats are also easy to put together. Chocolate fudge sauce is delicious in ice cream, but didn’t seem like an obvious choice in a batch of muffins to me, so I opted to start the recipe out with a mocha muffin batter to capture the chocolate and coffee flavors in the ice cream. A little bit of cocoa powder goes a long way in developing a d

Picnic season is finally upon us and we are kicking it off with two new favorite things. The first one is a bike and the other is a bread. We have been dreaming of a Danish cargo bike for years and years, and last month we finally splurged on this one . It’s the perfect vehicle for us because we can fit all three kids in it with seatbelts and all. It’s ideal to bring home heavy grocery bags with. And it’s environmentally friendly. All practicalities aside, it is also so much fun to ride around with and we are roaming from playground to picnic spots without a hitch. Just packing a few blankets, a big smoothie, a rhubarb compote and this beauty of a bread. We created this recipe for all type of picnic situations. We wanted something spring-y and savory that tasted awesome and could manage a bumpy bike ride. It’s basically like a savory muffin that we bake in a sheet pan. It serves many, is easy to make, super moist and flavorful and you can make lots of variations on it (although I lo

I’ve waited on this magnolia in my backyard for weeks and weeks and here it is in all its glory. It smelled like sweet new syrup and the bees were absolutely love drunk.   This week synopsis with a lot of omissions:  I found a package of peanut butter cups in my travel purse this week and thanked my past travel self for the indulgence.  I walked in the sunshine, had one of those weird nightmares where I screamed myself awake, had dinner with my older sister and her boss, and drove to Ponchatoula Louisiana for the best strawberries I’ve ever eaten. Continue reading Let It Be Sunday, 167! at Joy the Baker.

I have a long string of posts in my draft folder. Many of them are recipe ideas – and, in some cases fully developed recipes – that I never got around to finishing up and sharing. Some are holiday-specific recipes that get saved for the next year, while some of them are everyday recipes. This 5-Minute Nutella Mug Cake is an everyday recipe that got caught in the backlog. I’ve been making it here and there, but never posted the recipe because I honestly thought I had already shared it! This is a great reminder for me to get started on my spring cleaning – of my draft folder, as well as of my inbox and my physical desk. This recipe is also a great motivator, since it only takes a few minutes out of your day and is a nice way to treat yourself while taking a break from all that cleaning. This recipe makes a single-serving chocolate cake that has a molten Nutella center. It’s indulgent, but even more importantly, it’s easy to make. The mug cake recipe is made in the microwave, and takes

Chocolate chip cookies are a cookie jar staple and I make them on a regular basis – even if they’re in a lot of different sizes . Chocolate chips tend to come in just one size and, with a few exceptions, the only way to get some variety into your chocolate chip size is by cutting a bar of chocolate into chunks of your desired size by hand. Guittard’s Super Cookie Chips are an option for non-traditionally sized chocolate chips that you can pick up at the grocery store in the baking aisle. The chocolate chips are much larger and flatter than your average chocolate chip, designed to deliver a more chocolaty cookie experience. The chips are irregular disc shapes and they cover a lot of area in each cookie. This means that you’re going to find much larger pockets of chocolate as you nibble your way through a batch of homemade cookies. They’re still made with semisweet chocolate, so they maintain their shape during baking and have a good balance of bittersweet cacaco and sweetness that w

Let me tell you about my FAVORITE holiday of the year.  It involves Spring weather, show-stopping hats, bourbon,  and very fast horses!  It’s The Kentucky Derby and just around the corner!  Here’s why the Derby is so so great whether you’re in Louisville Kentucky or not – it’s not just the greatest two minutes in sports – it’s an all-encompassing celebration of Southern food, cocktail, and style.  Y’all, we’re lifestyling!  While flocks of people to Churchill Downs every May for Mint Juleps, horses, and Southern-style hat fashion, for years I’ve been celebrating the Derby with my dear Kentucky friend Whitney. Continue reading Bourbon Caramel Brownies + A KENTUCKY DERBY GIVEAWAY! at Joy the Baker.

Tangy cream cheese makes a great addition to a wide variety of baked goods, from cheesecake to cream cheese frosting. These Mini Chocolate Chip Cookie Cheesecake Bites combine chocolate chip cookies with cheesecake in an unexpected and delicious way. The bite-sized cheesecakes have equally tiny chocolate chip cookies as their base and as a topping, bringing in flavors of butter, brown sugar and – of course – chocolate without having to make traditional crusts. You’re going to need some miniature chocolate chip cookies to make these cheesecakes. You can use my homemade Tiny Chocolate Chip Cookies or store bought cookies. Trader Joe’s has some great miniature chocolate chip cookies and you can even use something like Cookie Crisp cereal if you can’t find any other tiny chocolate chip cookies. You want the cookies to be crisp and small enough to fit in a mini muffin pan. The homemade cookies work extremely well, so make those if you don’t see any store-bought options (plus, they’re eve

This is likely not the first time, nor will it be the last, you'll hear praises for Melissa's cookbook, The Minimalist Kitchen , in the food blogsphere. Over the last few years, Melissa has pared down her kitchen and cooking to focus her work on a "less is more" approach to food. It is concise and reasonable. Delicious by way of straight forward techniques. This recipe for example. I usually roast our cauliflower straight from florets, but the pre-steam made such a difference in their texture, more tender and gentle. I like them both ways. It's little things like that. I believe there are a few kinds of cookbook consumers; this book is for the person looking for quick, weeknight, crowd-pleasers made from ingredients you likely have in your pantry, or will have no trouble finding - Chilaquiles, Thai Spiced Rice Bowls, Make-Ahead Yeast Rolls - timeless sorts of things. She has tips for staying organized and decluttering your equipment and make ahead tips or pairing

Hello friends!  I want to come here and lament about how last week was a doozy… but I think I offered the same sentiment last Sunday.  This feels like it goes beyond a Mercury Retrograde situation and into the real of daaaang we’re just working hard, aren’t we?  The good news is that in the past few weeks I’ve had a sweet visit from my Mama and some quality paper flowering making times with new friends. Continue reading Let It Be Sunday, 166! at Joy the Baker.

I feel extra enthusiastic about this post partly because I think we are on to something good here. But also because this headline speaks so much to my magazine-publishing-heart (from my previous career). This is a dinner concept that we have played around with lately and it works particularly well for families with sensitive eaters or allergies. The idea is built around cooking one recipe base and then making some last minute add-ins to suit various preferences. Or to simply turn the leftovers of one dish into a new one the next day by using other add-ins. The base can be anything from a salad, a basic stew, a cooked grain, a good sauce or, as here, a soup. In this recipe we are taking a simple tomato broth soup in three different directions. The kids love this with tortellini (or any other pasta) dropped into it. They actually prefer it to tomato sauce. Luise and I like to let a chunk of mozzarella (or burrata cheese) melt in the soup and serve it with some leftover cooked quinoa

Poppy seeds are a fun ingredient to bake with because they add a surprising amount of texture to cakes, muffins and cookies, even though they don’t add a tremendous amount of flavor in most recipes. Just like adding nuts to a cookie recipe, it is nice to add different textures as well as different flavors to recipes to change things up. Poppy seeds are frequently paired with lemon  and in this Lemon Lime Poppy Seed Bundt Cake I’ve added lime to the mix, as well. While lemon on its own is delicious, the lime really amps up the citrus flavor that you get in every bite, making this cake surprisingly refreshing. The bundt cake has a tight, tender crumb that allows for a great distribution of the poppy seeds throughout the cake. It isn’t as dense as a pound cake, but it is still a sturdy cake that will give you a great shape from just about any bundt pan you want to put it in. The citrus flavor in the cake comes from a very generous amount of lemon and lime zest. The zest of the citrus –

Hey friends!  I made us burgers out of one freezer item + one canned bean item and every green thing you might have in your produce drawer.   It’s more likely that I have frozen peas and a can of garbanzo beans in my kitchen than a package of meat, so I always make some sort of miss-mash of a vegetable patty the is equal parts easy and satisfying.  The flavors are simple but totally malleable. Continue reading Spring Pea Veggie Burgers at Joy the Baker.

I always have a box of graham crackers or two in my pantry. They can be a tasty snack on their own, but they’re also essential for making things like graham cracker crusts , s’mores and other s’mores-inspired goodies . If you’re a fan of graham crackers, you might want to skip the s’mores and give these Graham Cracker Blondies a try. It’s a unique recipe for a tasty bar cookie that makes these classic crackers the star. The recipe starts out with ingredients that you’ll find in most blondie recipes, including butter, sugar, vanilla and an egg. Instead of using flour to bind those ingredients together, you use graham cracker crumbs instead. I made the crumbs by pulverizing whole graham crackers in the food processor , just as I would do if I were about to make a graham cracker crust. The crumbs are stirred right into the batter. It may look a bit sandy at first glance, but the blondies come together very well as they bake in the oven and the result is absolutely delicious. The finis

I am very proud to let you all in on some exciting news: my upcoming cookbook Perfectly Creamy Frozen Yogurt: 56 Amazing Flavors plus Recipes for Pies, Cakes & Other Frozen Desserts is available for pre-order! This may not be quite such a news flash to those of you following Baking Bites on Facebook or on Instagram, as I’ve mentioned it more than a few times on those channels, but if you didn’t know yet – you do now! Almost four years ago, a book called How to Make Frozen Yogurt was published as part of a series of books I wrote on how to make a variety of frozen desserts. The other two books in the series were How to Make Ice Cream and Making Vegan Frozen Treats . It offered readers a nice introduction to making frozen yogurt, but when I had the opportunity to more than double the size of the book and add in chapters about making a variety of frozen yogurt desserts, I jumped at it. This book walks you through everything you need to know about making frozen yogurt at home –

We’ve all got plenty on our everyday To-Do Lists – things like, put on pants, brush teeth, don’t lock your keys in your car.  We usually nail it, we’ve gotten good at this.   Then there’s the Weekend List that’s usually a bit more fun and may or may not involve pants.  There’s also the To-Email list that is well… just deeply stressful. And the To-Dust list that we willfully ignore because of the All The Things You Can Do Besides Dust List which is suddenly very relevant every time dusting crosses our minds.  I’m here with a new submission. Continue reading 10 Things I Do To Refresh In Spring! at Joy the Baker.

Friends!   I’ll tell you now that there is no April Fools Day moment in this post.  I don’t fancy myself much of a trickster save for the one time I put vaseline all over the toilet seat one April Fools Day when I was little.  The slippery seat was met with less than enthusiastic reviews from my family. That joke didn’t go over well and I mostly stopped with the pranks right there. Continue reading Let It Be Sunday, 165! at Joy the Baker.