SMiLes by Meg

Tag: vanilla

Ice Cream Cone Cupcakes

This week the humidity finally broke, meaning mornings and nights were once again bearable for baking. To take advantage, and because I had promised a friend I’d bring dessert to dinner on Friday (hi, Josh!), I decided to make something from my pre-blog life that I was actually astonished I hadn’t posted before: Ice Cream Cone Cupcakes. These cupcakes were a team dinner staple at the Baran household in high school (hi, Jen!), and I always had at least two. I made them once or twice in college, but college was pre-SMiLes by Meg, and I have no idea why …

Sesame Seed Cookies

To be honest, I did NOT want to turn on the oven today. It is ridiculously hot. And while we have AC in the bedroom, there is not AC in the rest of the apartment. The thought of taking a kitchen that was already 90+° and turning an oven up to 375° seemed insane. But after spending a lot of time looking through no-bake and icebox recipes, I just couldn’t find anything I was actually excited about. And I’ve been meaning to make these cookies for weeks, since I found them and thought they sounded interesting. So I sucked it …

Icebox Cake

Happy Father’s Day to the best dad a girl could ask for! Today, I spent an absolutely wonderful day with my dad, reading at the beach, kayaking/paddle boarding, and generally enjoying South Shore life. And, because it’s his day, I made a recipe this week that is one of his favorites: Icebox Cake. Icebox Cake is good for a number of reasons. It only has three ingredients. You don’t have to turn on the oven. And the finished product kind of tastes like Oreos but better.

Halvah Ice Cream

If you’re reading this on the Sunday it’s supposed to appear, it means that my posting from Italy worked! I’m actually typing it on Tuesday, the day Erik and I leave for a bike tour through Piedmont. To say I’m excited is an understatement. It has been far too long since I’ve been able to go on vacation and not even think about bringing my laptop with me – my only electronics will be my phone, my kindle, and a camera.

Strawberry Shortcake

Happy Easter! After a wonderful day with family out in Duxbury, I’m still not quite ready to go back to school work, so blogging it is! This year’s Easter recipe evolved quite a bit from its original idea, and strangely went from more adventurous to more traditional, rather than vice versa. Every year, my mom and I think it will be a good idea to make some big and beautiful Easter dessert, and every year we all get too full on brunch to actually eat dessert, leaving full cakes untouched. This year, I wanted to be cognizant of that.

Lemon Berry Stripe Cake

This weekend I decided to bake something exciting. I had the time. I had a book club (which meant it would disappear quickly). I hadn’t made a cake in far too long. Also, Cate made it a couple weeks ago and I got jealous. So I pulled out Ottolenghi’s Sweet cookbook and found the most colorful, interesting looking cake I could: Lemon Berry Stripe Cake.

Rugelach

Last week, I baked my first recipe out of Sweet, but did so down in DC with Cate and Jonathan. This week, I baked my first recipe out of my own copy of Sweet, and did so here in Cambridge, during a much-needed weekend without travel. I had originally planned on making Torrone, but decided to wait on that. Then, I thought I’d make Ottolenghi’s peanut butter s’more cookies, but again decided it seemed a little too involved. Finally, I settled on Rugelach: impressive looking, but not overly time-consuming. And, as luck would have it, they got one of my …

Gluten Free Peppermint Whoopie Pies

The last of the Christmas cookies: candy cane whoopie pies. If you read my blog often, you know that for family events with my mom’s siblings, I try to make something gluten free. Usually, this means flourless cake or haystacks or something of that sort, which on their own don’t have flour, but this year I decided to try to use an ingredient I see pop up a lot in gluten free recipes: xantham gum. This stuff is supposed to help mimic a recipe that would otherwise call for flour, so if you want to make something recognizable as a …

Classic Cherry Pie

This is Part 1 of 2 Thanksgiving pie posts coming at you in the next couple of weeks. Good news: they can just as easily be Christmas pies (if you don’t make the one true Christmas dessert: Chocolate Trifle), so keep these on hand as the holiday parties start piling up. Also, I’ve done a little bit of test kitchen work on these, trying out different pie crust recipes and combining some filling recipes to figure our what works well together. The results were pretty good, and have made for some tasty breakfasts in the Thanksgiving aftermath.