Food Diary

Hello my friends,  Welcome to another fine Sunday.  I hope this finds you resting, taking some time, and easing into this day.  There’s a meme going around Instagram about laundry.  Wash: 30 minutes. Dry: 60 minutes. Folding and putting away: 7 t0 10 business days.   Accurate.  And since that felt like a personal attack (probably to all of us), I have some things to address in my closet today.  Well, after I spend some quality time trying to run my body through the park since (on a whim) I signed up for a 10k.  Listen… what WON’T I do to avoid laundry? Continue reading Let It Be Sunday, 216! at Joy the Baker.

Trader Joe’s has introduced a new cake mix to its baking lineup recently and it’s another gluten free option! The popular grocery store chain already has a couple of gluten free choices in its repertoire and Trader Joe’s Fudgy Chocolate Quinoa Loaf & Cake Mix is a new addition to their product gluten free offerings. The mix is made with quinoa flour, a whole grain flour that is made by grinding quinoa until it is a fine powder. It contains no gluten, so it is a great choice for those who need to avoid gluten, though it can be incorporated into regular wheat flour recipes by substituting 25% or 50% of the flour. It has a bitter flavor on its own and you will notice that if you happen to taste this cake mix, even though the mix also contains a generous amount of cocoa powder to give it a deep chocolate flavor. Once baked, that bitter flavor will be gone. The mix comes together easily and is relatively liquid. You need to add 3/4 vegetable oil, 4 large eggs and 1 1/2 cups of wat

I’m knocking on your door this Saturday with a little bit of exactly what you need.  It’s the warmth and melted chocolate perfect for a lazy weekend when indulgence feels so close and equal parts necessary and life-affirming.  I’ve spent most of my week walking circles around my house in service to… my house?  That’s what it has felt like at least. There’s a forever list of plants to water, animals to feed, dishwashers to empty, flour jars to put away, and flour jars to hustle out of the pantry.  I think the air of spring has be fluttering in circles trying to tick down the list.   I know you know.  These are all a symptom of being a human in the world.  And really, with all these tasks we’re acting in service to ourselves so we can better serve one another – somehow that even includes dishes and laundry.  Today’s offering is one very delicious way to be of service to yourself and to a lucky few.  It’s a skillet cake, served warm, with glossy chocolate and melting ice cream designe

Whole wheat flour can be great to bake with, adding whole grains and a nutty flavor to a wide variety of recipes. But whole wheat flour doesn’t always deliver the same results as all purpose flour, so substituting it directly into your favorite recipe might not give you the results that you’re looking for. These Perfect Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies are calibrated to work perfectly with whole wheat flour as a base, resulting in cookies with just the right amount of chewiness and plenty of chocolate chips. The cookie dough is a little bit unusual in that it uses both butter and vegetable oil, along with both brown sugar and confectioners’ sugar (powdered sugar). Vegetable oil tends to help baked goods retain a little bit more moisture than butter alone, preventing the cookies from being too dry – a common complaint about cookies made with whole wheat flour. Confectioners’ sugar plays a similar role, adding sweetness while helping to add additional tenderness to the cookies. Confe

Hello friends!   I’m here with some offerings. Some springtime unsolicited offerings that might help us ease into this new season.  I love the transition from winter to spring.  I love the way the light changes around the house and the days lengthen.  I marvel at the bright green of the new leaves on the fig tree (it’s more of a bush – it’s a shock, really).  I deeply appreciate these handful of incredible spring days we’ve had in New Orleans because they are short indeed. Continue reading Nine Things I’m Doing To Refresh For Spring at Joy the Baker.

Like you, I find it hard to pass up a slice of crumb-topped coffee cake. There is just something about the combination of tender, fluffy cake and buttery, sugary streusel that is downright irresistible. Coffee cake fans will fall in love with this Raspberry Crumb Coffee Cake, an easy to make brunch favorite that is loaded with raspberries and finished with a buttery streusel. The straightforward coffee cake batter is made with buttermilk and a generous dose of vanilla extract. I folded in one and a half cups of raspberries, which add a burst of color and fruitiness to the cake. You can use fresh or frozen raspberries. If you are using fresh, fold them in carefully so they don’t get smushed into the cake batter. If you are using frozen, do not defrost them before folding them in. The crumb topping is made separately from the cake batter. It mixes up easily in one bowl and will look like wet sand after you have mixed it all up. Once the ingredients are combined, grab handfuls of the s

Hello my friends! I have so much to thank you for! Thank you for the kindness and understanding in my last post about the changes I’m making to my diet.  Thank you for sharing your own experiences with chronic illness and diet change. You’re generous and I feel so thankful for your generosity.  None of this is to say that I’m done with butter, because I’m not – I’m just exploring what makes my body feel best and I appreciate you being on this journey with me.  Thank you also for the recommendations and encouragement about sewing! Continue reading Let It Be Sunday, 215! at Joy the Baker.

You probably use olive oil in your kitchen on a regular basis for savory cooking, but it can be a great addition to desserts, as well. Olive oil has a natural fruitiness that is balanced with a bright acidity, so it works particularly well in desserts that include berries or citrus. These Lemon Honey Olive Oil Muffins are a great addition to a spring or summer brunch, made with olive oil, sweetened with honey and kissed with lemon. The muffins include both sugar and honey in the batter. Honey is a wonderful sweetener with a delicious flavor, but sugar helps to lighten the texture of the muffins and balances the sweetness of the honey (honey actually tastes sweeter than sugar). You’ll still get a nice honey flavor in the finished muffins and the overall texture will be lighter than a muffin sweetened with honey alone. In addition to the honey, you’ll get a balance of lemon and olive oil in each bite. The muffins use plenty of lemon zest and it is important to use fresh lemons to get

Blood oranges just might be some of the most beautiful citrus fruits out there, with a sweet and colorful flesh that ranges from a hint of red to a deep purple. Blood oranges are always an excellent choice for juicing and look beautiful just sliced into a fruit salad, but that fresh juice can be incorporated into some stunning desserts, as well. These Blood Orange Curd Tarts offer a surprisingly easy way to show off the colorful citrus in a perfectly pink springtime tart. The filling for the tart is a blood orange curd. The curd is made separately from the tart crusts and is poured into the already baked crust, then left to set in the refrigerator. You will need fresh blood oranges for the curd and the juice should be strained for best results. I add a small amount of lemon juice to the orange juice to boost the acidity slightly, as blood orange juice is so sweet on its own. The curd is easy to make and only takes a few minutes to put together. It may look fairly liquid when it is ho

Hello friends!   Let’s take a break from formal baking recipes.  I’d like to show you what I’m eating for breakfast, lunch, and dinner these days.  The real deal.  Not fancy.  Very little sugar and gluten. Everyday delicious food.   I’m putting some work into my health and diet these past few months.  It’s not a revamping of my New Year’s Resolution but rather a (deep-breath) real commitment to my health and my body as I learn how to combat the symptoms of my Stage IV endometriosis that I’ve really struggled with the past several years.  I’m using the food I eat more strategically, avoiding things like gluten, dairy, and white sugar for a bit / increasing things like beans and dark greens and nuts and seeds, to see if I can cut some of the pain and inflammation in my body.   It’s been hard in some ways – because butter and gluten and sugar are such a huge part of my life.  It’s been easy in a lot of ways – because I can function with noticeably less puffiness and pain. Continue re

Microwave single-serving cakes are a trend that aren’t going away any time soon. You can make them from scratch , of course, but the section of mixes dedicated to these quick-fix sweets is getting bigger all the time. One of the newest entries to the category is Ghirardelli, with a variety of single-serving microwave brownie mixes. The Ghirardelli Dark Chocolate Microwave Brownie Mix box contains four packets of mix, each of which just requires a little bit of water and can be mixed up in the mug that you microwave it in. The mix is made with ingredients that you would find in any brownie mix – flour, sugar, cocoa, etc – including real chocolate chips and it takes just seconds to put it all together. The brownie cooks in the microwave in about 1 minute and is ready to eat as soon as it has cooled down enough not to burn your tongue. The brownies are fudgy and moist when you dig into them warm, and tended towards being slightly underbaked (not a bad thing, for a brownie) when I opte

Hello sweet friends! SUNDAY! Gosh what a week. I made hundreds of cookies, booked some future travel, did five days of yoga, took a lot of dog walks, almost put all of my laundry away, and focused very hard on anti-inflammatory meals .  In a rare move, I’m going to pat myself on the back and I would encourage you to do the same. I’m sure you tackled this week as dang best you could and honestly? Continue reading Let It Be Sunday, 214! at Joy the Baker.

Guinness beer is a stout that is beloved by beer fans and bakers all over the world. Guinness is the secret ingredient in many chocolate cakes , where it enhances the chocolate flavor and helps to produce a moist, tender cake. This Vanilla Guinness Sheet Cake leaves out the chocolate, but keeps the stout for an unusual twist on a classic vanilla cake! The batter starts out like most vanilla cakes, with butter, sugar, eggs and plenty of vanilla. Instead of adding milk or another dairy product, Guinness beer is added to the mixture. It will give the cake a slightly deeper color than most vanilla cakes, but it adds a surprising amount of flavor once the cake has baked. When you cut into the cake, you’ll get a hint of that bready beer flavor – that somehow really works well with the buttery vanilla of the rest of the cake. There are also hints of coffee and chocolate that come through more clearly as you go back for bite after bite – and this cake is surprisingly addictive, so I suspect

I have always been a fan of breakfast cereals. There are some that I usually enjoy in a bowl of milk as a way to start the day and other, sweeter cereals that I often snack on later in the day. But I have been known to think outside the bowl and turn cereal into all kinds of other treats, from cereal bars to ice cream to these Crisp Lucky Charms Cereal Cookies. These crisp cookies are made with Lucky Charms and use both the cereal and the marshmallows! They’re delicious even if you’re not usually a cereal-lover and a must-try if you are. These cookies are crisp and have that buttery, melt-in-your-mouth texture that will remind you of shortbread, but they’re not a classic shortbread cookie. Shortbread cookies are typically made with all butter, while these are made with both vegetable oil and butter. This combination gives the cookies a wonderfully crisp texture without the finished cookies getting too hard. The cereal itself needs to be sorted by hand before you start baking, sep

I woke up last weekend and thought, TORTILLAS.  The thing about thinking tortillas so fiercely is that you’re likely to make tortillas from scratch.  Of course, once you start making tortillas from scratch it’s hard to not.  They’re so fresh and tender, such little clouds of soft corn, well…  there’s no going back.  This is an invitation and a warning.  Make the tortillas.  You’ll never stop.  Here’s what you’ll need for taco town:  •  masa harina (instant corn masa that you can find in most grocery stores) for making tacos from scratch. Continue reading Roasted Cauliflower and Plantain Tacos at Joy the Baker.

I never seem to have a shortage of bananas in my kitchen and everyone knows that means I also rarely have a shortage of banana bread. Banana bread is my go-to when I want a coffee-time snack for myself or an easy brunch bake for the weekends. This Sour Cream Banana Bread is a great basic recipe that has a moist, dense crumb and is packed with plenty of classic banana bread flavors. The banana bread is flavored with cinnamon, nutmeg and vanilla extract, flavors that I often feature in my banana breads. The ingredients are straightforward and the batter should come together in just a couple of minutes. It is baked in a standard loaf pan, which should be either greased before pouring the batter into it or lined with parchment paper to ensure that you get a good release after the bread comes out of the oven. The loaf uses a generous amount of both mashed banana and sour cream. The banana, of course, adds flavor and moisture to the bread. Sour cream is known for adding richness to baked

Hello friends! I’ve been in Kansas City, MO the past few days with my dearheart of a friend Cara Nicoletti .  Go on with your sweet self, Kansas City!  I see you have the absolute best croissant I’ve ever had a Messenger Coffee/Ibis Bakery and some of the kindest people I’ve come across. Well done. What a dang good town.  Back in New Orleans we’ve made it through Mardi Gras and thank goodness… we have work to do. Continue reading Let It Be Sunday, 213! at Joy the Baker.

Shamrock shakes are seasonal milkshakes that McDonald’s releases every year around St Patrick’s Day. The green shakes are actually mint flavored – mint and vanilla, not mint chocolate – and are surprisingly refreshing for an indulgent treat, especially if you’re a mint fan to begin with. This Shamrock Shake Cheesecake is inspired by the original Shamrock Shake! It’s a creamy vanilla and mint cheesecake that has a fun green tint to it, making it a great choice for St Patrick’s Day celebrations. The cheesecake is very easy to make. This particular recipe is baked in a pie crust, which gives it a great ratio of crust to creamy filling. The cheesecake is flavored with both vanilla and peppermint extracts. Peppermint extract is very potent and you should measure it carefully, as a little bit can go a long way. I use no more than 3/4 of a teaspoon in this recipe to ensure that I get a good mint flavor without overtaking the vanilla and cream cheese. When it comes to the food coloring, you

I can’t do strict diets. They inspire an otherwise absent rebellious streak in me and I go headlong into a sugar spiral. I remember trying the master cleanse many years ago, fully stocked on all the... Please visit Sprouted Kitchen to view this Recipe.

Just an old dog here with some new tricks, a handful of cheese, and a spicy peppers. A few weeks ago I watched Carla Hall make biscuits here in New Orleans and a lovely new place for culinary people called Nochi .  Carla is a biscuit queen – this coming from someone who thinks herself a bit of a biscuit queen… in the most modest way those thoughts can manifest.  Carla taught me a few new biscuit tricks.  1) Using a bit of vegetable shortening along with a good dose of butter.  2) Grating frozen butter which really does help you work the butter less, keeping it nice and cold.  and 3) Folding the biscuit dough to help foster a really layered and flaky biscuit.   There are great biscuits and then there are… every other biscuit.  I’m only accepting great biscuits these days, maybe topped with cheese.   These are are great biscuits, folded up to flaky. Continue reading Chili and Cheese Buttery Biscuits at Joy the Baker.

Apple crisps are one of my favorite apple desserts. They were popular in my family when I was growing up – even more popular than apple pie – so they really hit that nostalgic comfort-food note for me every time I take a bite. This Cinnamon Oatmeal Apple Crisp definitely tastes like the apple crisps of my childhood, but it is probably even more delicious. The apple crisp is made with loads of lightly sweetened apples topped with a buttery, crisp oatmeal and cinnamon topping that will remind you of oatmeal cookies, but better. The recipe starts with lots of apples. You’ll need about 4 lbs of apples to fill up the baking pan completely and get a good ratio of apples to crisp topping. If your pan is on the deeper side, you can even throw an extra apple or two in there. The apples should be peeled, cored and cut in half. Each half should then be cut into six slices (make it 7 or 8 if your apples are particularly large). Aim to get the apple slices as even as possible so that they all coo

Irish soda breads are wonderful loaves that everyone should make at least a few times in their lives. These quick breads require no yeast and are instead leavened only with baking soda. The use of a chemical leavener in this bread means that there is no rising time and minimal mixing to do before you can put your loaf in the oven, so you can have freshly baked bread in no time at all.  It is also easy to put a unique twist on a basic soda bread by using mix-ins to make the loaves sweeter or more savory. I took a sweeter track with this delicious Cherry and Pistachio Irish Soda Bread. The bread has a buttery tang and a slight sweetness to it that really sets off the fruity cherries. I used dried bing cherries, however any type of dried cherry that you have on hand can be used. To spread the cherries out more evenly in the loaf, chop them into small pieces instead of using them whole. Pistachios add some color and a bit of crunch to the bread, and pair well with the cherries in genera

Hello my dears! I’ll tell you what – we’re in the thiiiiiick of Mardi Gras here in New Orleans. Parades everyday, a new layer of plastic beads hanging from the trees, incredible costumes, and a warmth from everyone to everyone.  It’s madness, but it’s also such a wonder.  I’ve fashioned this cake out of foam and felt to wear on my head this Fat Tuesday.  Listen… I can make a cake out of just about anything.  New Orleans is the most creative and artistic city I’ve ever experienced, and this time of year sparkles with that pride.  Also… if you’re looking for any hot glue guns – we have them all. Continue reading Let It Be Sunday, 212! at Joy the Baker.

Lemon is a bright, sunny flavor that always makes me think of spring, even though I incorporate lemon into my desserts all year round. Lemon Sour Cream Bundt Cake is a zesty bundt cake loaded with lemon flavor that is the perfect way to celebrate any spring occasion – and simply a nice citrus dessert to treat yourself to all year round. It is topped with a light lemon glaze that boosts the citrus flavor in the cake and adds a touch of extra sweetness to every bite! The cake has a dense, tender crumb that almost melts in your mouth, which is reminiscent of a pound cake even though the ratios in this recipe are not exactly what you would see in a typical pound cake (pound cakes typically have quite a few more eggs in the recipe). It is the type of cake that pairs perfectly with coffee or tea, either as an afternoon snack or as an after-dinner treat. The lemon flavor comes from both lemon juice and lemon zest, with the lemon zest playing the most important role in boosting that lemon f