Food, Photography and Bons Mots
This lemon-spice cake is my recipe gift to you today. It’s a visiting cake. The occasion? This week marks Blue Cayenne’s second birthday. Woo-hoo! Let’s party! But, what in the world is a visiting cake? Cooking diva Dorie Greenspan (Dorie’s Cookies, Baking Chez Moi, Around…
Yotam Ottolenghi. This Ottolenghi recipe was featured recently on the NY Times food site and it is wonderful. The crumb is light and the almond flour gives this little cake a delightful texture. This cake is so good, in fact, that it is almost worth…
Apparently Queen Elizabeth is a foodie. She loves raspberry jam cookie sandwiches, white peaches, Dubonnet and gin, and chocolate biscuit cake. Scones are a constant at her tea table where she reportedly crumbles some of them up and slips them under the table to…
Join Juliet and me as we conga around the kitchen island singing Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat Song . Got you in the mood for a banana recipe? The way I figure it, everyone needs a few good banana recipes. Bananas are a health food, after…
Olive oil in a cake? Yuck. Don’t get me wrong. I love olive oil. I regularly drive to Los Alamitos’ Antica Olive Oil store to buy the best olive oils I can find. There, I enthusiastically swirl, sniff, sip and swallow the various offerings freshly poured…
Joseph Campbell famously wrote: “Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.” Good advice but not always easy to do. The bliss I’ve been following at the moment happens to be a cake, and it is a wonderful cake…
I have a parrot, actually an umbrella cockatoo, named Moti. Moti is twenty-seven years old and quite the diva, especially about her food. In Moti’s world there is no sunshine if she doesn’t find a half a banana in her food dish each morning. Moti…
During the Middle Ages, rich European ladies slipped their favorite knights a bit of gingerbread before an important tournament. Sweet, aromatic, crumbly, swoon-worthy gingerbread. How utterly romantic is that!? If you need proof, the painting below portrays a lady and her knight. Theirs was…
Cutting the lemon the knife leaves a little cathedral: alcoves unguessed by the eye that open acidulous glass to the light; topazes riding the droplets, altars, aromatic facades. –Pablo Neruda I’ve always…
Carrots improve your eyesight. Right? Therefore, if you are going to have a sweet, decadent dessert, you are somewhat forgiven for eating carrot cake. It’s a health food, for heaven’s sake! This line of argument works for me. If carrot desserts seem odd to…
