Treats for appetites of every size
It feels like forever ago that I made this cake. (It was Thursday.) I brought it to brunch on Friday with some coworkers, but since then I’ve spent two nights up in Vermont with my cousins, making Friday brunch a distant memory. Fortunately, I remember that it got a lot of compliments.
I’m usually pretty wary of gluten free recipes that seem to be making odd substitutions, or just eliminating flour and thinking the baked good will come out the same. If they don’t do that, they require weird ingredients (has anyone ever actually found xanthan gum?) before they’ll reach a kind of close-to-right consistency.
I have a new theory in the kitchen: cinnamon belongs in everything. Perhaps controversial, but I’m pretty sold on the stuff. It’s amazing what the addition of some cinnamon does to what would otherwise just be a cakey sugar cookie in this recipe. Literally game changing.
Finally, another baking adventure out of my own kitchen. I’ve been a baby the past couple of weeks and baked only at my parents’ house, with the promise of central AC. But Neha was up for an afternoon of revelry, so Cambridge baking it was!
Everyone needs a recipe that they can make on a moment’s notice with ingredients they always have on hand. That’s not necessarily what I was looking for this week with this recipe, but I was definitely pleasantly surprised when it worked out.
Anyone following my Instagram (@smilesbymeg) knows that Easter dessert involved more than just a Carrot Cake Roll, but also some coconut cupcakes. Since it’s my parents’ anniversary – Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad! – and my mom always insists on celebrating with coconut cake, it seemed fitting to post this recipe now.
Things that happen when you have a big paper due on Monday morning: you push off your blog post until past 10pm. But I’m yet to skip a Sunday entry since starting law school, and I refused to let a little assignment get in the way.
It has been a long time since I’ve seriously considered not baking on a Sunday. It’s been a busy couple of weeks. I spent all day working on a paper. I still hadn’t started reading for my other classes. And I was tired. But then I remembered what I had told myself at the beginning of law school: if I didn’t have time to bake, I was taking myself too seriously. There really isn’t an excuse not to take a couple hours out of my weekend to do something I enjoy, and I really had been dying to try the …
This week’s recipe was very much a learning experience. Some important lessons: Whole Foods doesn’t sell regular shortening. So I had to get some weird coconut and palm oil variety. Pro: it was yellow. You can melt shortening. As a former science teacher, this shouldn’t have been as surprising to me as it was. Orange zest has a tendency to stick to the attachment of your stand mixer like hair instead of incorporating into the batter. Even if you fully submerge and douse a cookie in powdered sugar, after it bakes it will still look like you did no such …