I always avoided pies/cakes that called for graham cracker crusts. Something just seemed not right about buying graham crackers, mushing them up, and pressing it into a pie pan. Sort of like how I don’t like to buy pre-made pie crusts (maybe I’m neurotic?). So imagine my delight when happened upon a better way to make a graham cracker batter (and crust) from scratch!
The common mush-up-the-store-bought-graham-cracker method is pretty tough to compete with when it comes to difficulty, but this is also quite easy (much easier than a pâte brisée, so breathe easy!) and need I say that it tastes better? Plus, if you have leftover batter after you line your pie pans, you can just roll it out and make graham crackers! Its a piece of cake…er, easy as pie…crust. Yea, onto the recipe.
- 1 cup (2 sticks) butter
- 1/4 cup dark brown sugar
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1/4 cup honey
- 2 cups all purpose flour
- 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
- 1 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
This makes
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Posted by mike on June 18th, 2008 in Dessert, Pie
Who doesn’t love apricots? Honestly though, I’m only a recent convert myself–I always used to think they were sour and the peach’s short, ugly cousin. Turns out, I’d only tried not-quite-ripe apricots–the really ripe ones are tender, ready to burst, and lusciously sweet and velvetty. Sounds perfect for an ice cream, right?
Now that apricots are in season and surprisingly cheap, its a great time to try this sexy little fruit in its fresh rather than the much more familiar dried form. The only tough thing is managing them–I’ll buy a bunch that are just shy of being ripe, wait for them to ripen just right, and they almost always all are ready at the same time, at which point, you have a very small window before they go bad. Frustrating, but all the more reason to gobble them up in a hurry and get more, right?
So for this ice cream, you start with a bunch of these so-ripe-they-bruise-to-the-touch apricots, poach
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Posted by mike on June 12th, 2008 in Dessert, Fruit, Ice Cream/Sorbet
After the big success of Strawberry Seduction a few months back, I’ve been eager to put together another food blog event. I was floored by the enthusiasm, creativity, and mouth-watering dishes that you all sent in. So I decided it was finally time to host another seasonally appropriate event: You Scream, I Scream, We All Scream for Frozen Desserts!
Regular readers of my blog know I’m a big fan of ice cream. I was happily the odd one out there making ice creams in the dead of winter. But now with the heat of summer finally bearing down on many of us, there won’t be quite so many raised eye brows over ice cream. So I’m calling on you, fellow food bloggers, to put your creativity towards cooling off with something sweet this summer. Create some delicious, summery frozen desserts–whether they be ice creams, gelatos, sorbets, granitas, frozen mousses, frozen yogurts, kulfis, etc–and send them in!
So here’s the rules:
- Your entry must be
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Posted by mike on June 7th, 2008 in Ice Cream/Sorbet
Once I conquered my fear of making crepes and realized I could quite easily make these at home rather than reserving them as a treat best left to the hands of someone more experienced, they found their way into my weekend breakfast repertoire. Pancakes, waffles, bagels, and omelettes are all great Saturday morning breakfast food, but there’s no reason not to include some delicious Mango Nutella Crêpes in your routine as well.
After having made my first batch of crêpes, I still had a ton of nutella in the pantry, and nutella just screams crêpes to me (and in unison, my belly was also screaming crêpes, so it was decided). So while local strawberries have come and gone, it was onto another favorite fruit that has been looking pretty darn good on the store shelves these days: mangoes! Yes, this isn’t tremendously different from the prior crêpes, but can you ever have too many? 
This was a delicious way to start the
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Posted by mike on May 31st, 2008 in Breakfast, Dessert, Fruit, Mediterranean, Snacks
This was really delicious. I must confess, when I made baklava, I didn’t make it just for the baklava–I made it for this dessert. This isn’t to say baklava by itself isn’t amazing (which it most definitely is), but why settle for one amazing thing when you can have two? Yes, I made baklava so that I could use it as an additive to cardamom honey ice cream.
The cardamom-honey ice cream custard-base really stole the show–it was intense, just the right creamy texture, sweet, and just out of the ordinary. Cardamom is one of my favorite spices that really is beyond my ability to describe–it works so well in savory and sweet applications, kind of like cinnamon–and in this case, it really gave the ice cream an incredible flavor backbone.
Combined with chunks of baklava, you had a great contrast visually, texturally, and flavorally (go, made up words, go!)–crunchy, cinnamon spiced nuts, delicate, flakes of buttery pastry, pockets of honeyed, rose-scented
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Posted by mike on May 28th, 2008 in Dessert, Ice Cream/Sorbet, Indian, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern
I don’t typically do much for breakfast, especially during weekdays when I normally just eat some store-bought granola bar with my coffee as I run out the door. I usually don’t have the time or appetite to have much more, but I did have the urge recently to improve on the quality of my breakfast, so trying my hand at my own granola bars seemed like a great place to start.
In addition to the obvious inclusion of oats and nuts, I also employed some spices (cardamom and ginger) as I thought these would rather nicely complement the filling: strawberries (since I know how nicely they can go together)! I was a bit worried that using fresh strawberries would result in a wet, mushy granola mess (since they macerate and get quite wet in the presence of sugar), so I sliced them thin and insulated the granola from them with a thin layer of strawberry rhubarb jam, hoping that the presence
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Posted by mike on May 25th, 2008 in Breakfast, Dessert, Fruit
