Dessert

You don’t need to have a camp fire to make these s’mores-like bars.

It’s all pretty simple, making it a perfect recipe for the trepidatious baker. You mix up a few ingredients and bake until the marshmallows are a wonderful gooey mess. These have been described as “crack” by a few people, so use at your own risk.

Recipe from Alice Medrich’s Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies

You can find the recipe here

I always get suckered when I see things claiming to be the “best”. I then feel obligated to try it and to see if the claim is true. Most of the time I’m pretty disappointed with the outcome.

So when I saw the cook book Beat This saying that it had the best recipes, I had to test it out.

With strawberry season at full peak, the strawberry pie recipe was meant to be. Instead of rolling out the crust, you just press it in making the whole process less time consuming. I had doubts that the crust would turn out, but it actually does. The downside? If you haven’t given your pie pan a good greasing, it’ll stick and crumble when you try and slice it out. The dough turned out to be much more powdery looking than I had hoped for. I think you can add a bit of water, but I left mine as is to see if it would turn out (and it did).

After the crust is cooled, the you beat heavy whipping cream and cream cheese that then turns into a light and fluffy filling. The strawberries aren’t baked, so make sure you’re using the best you can find.

Strawberry Pie from Beat This

Pastry
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons confectioner’s sugar
8 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into small cubes
Salt

Filling
3 ounces cream cheese (room temperature)
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

Topping
1 quart strawberries, hulled
1/2 cup currant or seedless raspberry jelly

Directions:
1. Have a rack in the bottom third of the oven. Preheat oven to 350F.
2. Generously butter a 9 inch pie pan.
3. Mix the pastry ingredients together until the dough starts coming together. It will still be a bit powdery looking, but once baked it’ll be fine.
4. Press in the crust and prick it with a fork in a few places.
5. Bake 15-20 minutes or until golden brown. Cool.
6. Whip the cream until soft peaks form and add the other ingredients until combined.
7. Pour into crust, smooth it out and chill for an hour.
8. Put the berries on the filling, points up. Melt the jelly on low heat and use a pastry brush to put the glaze on.
9. Refrigerate for 3 hours.

It’s scorching hot in Toronto right now. Over on the West Coast? Not so much. I’m really missing the crazy and humid Toronto heat until I acclimatize to the breezy weather here.

This was the last ice cream I made in Toronto before I had to return the ice cream maker to my sister. In The Perfect Scoop, the recipe references this ice cream tasting similar to an orange creamsicle, a favourite of mine when I was a child. Every other kid I knew always bought those rocket popsicles (now called Mega Missiles?!) because of the cool colours, but I was all about the creamy filling hidden underneath the crisp cool orange exterior. So of course I had to make this.

There was never a chance that this ice cream would develop freezer burn.

The sour cream gives it an extra creaminess and a tang to it. Did it taste similar to my childhood favourite? I recently had a creamsicle and it just wasn’t as good. So I’m saying goodbye to creamsicles and saying hello to this ice cream.

Recipe here.

I collect cookie cutters. I love the different shapes and the way they can make an ordinary cookie look fantastic. The weird part about my cookie cutter collection? I don’t like using them. They’re generally too fussy to make: letting the dough chill, rolling it out, chilling it again…I’m more of a drop cookie kind of girl.

When it’s a special occasion, I will reach for the cookie cutters. I thought these cute Message-in-a-Cookie cutters from Williams-Sonoma.

I turned to Alice Medrich’s Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy for a recipe. The recipe makes a huge batch, but the cookie cutters are huge so it produced about 18 cookies. I used vanilla paste instead of vanilla extract. It’s worth the splurge if you’re looking to wow others.

To prevent the dough from sticking to the cutter, lightly dip the cookie cutter in flour first. You want to press firm, but not too deeply to get a good impression onto the cookie. Usually I like to roll my dough thicker than called for to make soft cookies, but if you do that here, the wording gets all marred. It should be rolled out to 1/8″.

Along with the cookies I decided to try my hand at a red velvet cake from Rose’s Heavenly Cakes. People rave about red velvet. I find it a bit scary with all that red food colouring. What used to be a natural chemical reaction with an acid reacting to the cocoa powder has turned into how much red dye #47 we can shove into a cake. Despite the scary almost neon colour, it received rave reviews. Scary colour aside, it was moist and the cream cheese frosting didn’t feel heavy.

Recipe for red velvet cake from Heavenly Cakes can be found here.

Sugar cookie recipe can be found here.

My niece can’t eat eggs or dairy, but that doesn’t stop me from baking up something tasty for her. She’s a chocolate fiend and judging by the pictures, she enjoyed every bite.

Recipe here.