Desserts

Good Luck With These Cookies! Peanut and Black Sesame Sand Cookies

Good Luck With These Cookies! Peanut and Black Sesame Sand Cookies

This is a truly great cookie. This recipe is from Helen Goh’s new baking cookbook, Baking And The Meaning of Life. (Great title, by the way!) You can order her cookbook through your local bookstore or on Amazon. This is Goh’s debut solo cookbook. She…

Persimmons!

Persimmons!

My good friend Joyce does just about everything perfectly. She cooks, she sews, she grows orchids.  She takes gentle and loving care of her family and friends. Joyce is a keeper. Her nemesis for the last few years, however, has been a type of tree–…

Oldies But Goodies: RIP Marian Burros and Long Live Her Plum Torte

Oldies But Goodies: RIP Marian Burros and Long Live Her Plum Torte

Marian Burros has died. She developed the famous Plum Torte recipe that ran for years in The New York Times Cooking Section. It is a wonderful recipe. It would be perfect to make right now as this year’s plum season winds down. Here is Burros’…

Lemon-Strawberry Cake

Lemon-Strawberry Cake

OK. It’s another cake. It’s been THAT kind of month. This is a recipe from The New York Times Sunday Magazine. You will find the original recipe here. The original recipe gave permission to use blackberries, blueberries, raspberries or  chopped strawberries in this recipe. You have…

Soft Chocolate and Fig Cake

Soft Chocolate and Fig Cake

My husband could talk incessantly about his love for home-grown figs. Seems there was a fig tree in the yard of the house he lived in in Berkeley while in college. So, for him, there were glorious memories of fresh figs galore—jams, pastries, au naturel.…

What to do with those strawberries at the back of your refrigerator? Roast them!

What to do with those strawberries at the back of your refrigerator? Roast them!

I lost my  admittedly limited self-control at the local farmers’ market the other day and bought a flat of strawberries. Whoa! That’s a lot of strawberries for one cook and a sweet pup who enjoys a fresh strawberry treat now and then.  What to make?…

Elegant and Intense: Plum Ice Cream

Elegant and Intense: Plum Ice Cream

I’m a unashamed stone fruit devotee. I particularly love plums. This is my season! There were perfectly ripe plums at my local farmers’ market this week. So, it being summer, I decided to make ice cream. This is a David Lebovitz recipe from his cookbook…

Birthdays and Apricot Cakes

Birthdays and Apricot Cakes

Apricots and I go back a long way.  Growing up, I always had a “Paradise Cake” for my birthday. The cake was two layers of yellow cake slathered with a tangy dried apricot puree and covered in coconut. I’ve tried to find the recipe online…

Oldies But Goodies: Plum Cakes

Oldies But Goodies: Plum Cakes

  Every month Blue Cayenne features recipes from our archive of more than four hundred recipes. These recipes are our “Oldies But Goodies.” Today’s Oldie But Goodie recipes are for plum cakes–two different plum cakes but equally delicious. Your call.  ( Here is the recipe.)  Want…

Light Those Candles!  It’s Birthday Banana Cake

Light Those Candles! It’s Birthday Banana Cake

So, where did the idea of celebrating birthdays with cakes come from?  It was the Greeks!!!, as my Greek friend Michelle would be quick to say. (Michelle proudly maintains that most good things originated with the Greeks. ) Michelle may have a point. According to…