Let’s Party With Chocolate Bourbon Pecan Torte! Blue Cayenne is three!!!

It’s Blue Cayenne’s Birthday!

This improbable journey started on a blustery October day three years ago.  I desperately wanted to be a better writer, a better cook, and a better photographer, but I needed a nudge–a structured project to bring all those elements together in my life. I needed deadlines, too.

So, after a lot of false starts, my direction became obvious. I would start a food blog. How hard could that be?

Well…

I remember the electric moment when Blue Cayenne went live. I had worked on the project for a couple of months. I’d told no one except my sainted photography teacher. I guess I wanted to see if he laughed riotously when I broached the possibility of posting my photographs on the Internet. (He didn’t. He is a keeper.)

I’ll be honest. My struggles with the technical details of starting a blog were daunting. I didn’t know a plug-in from a widget, but finally, in October of 2015, I had pages ready to publish. All I needed was the courage to actually do it. That was the hard part–the personally risky part– and I’ll admit that I sat staring at the “Publish” button for a very long time.

Could I? Should I? Would it work?

Then, in a moment of wild abandon and fortified by a couple glasses of very good Malbec, I pushed the button and Blue Cayenne was born.

That first blog post featured a black-eyed pea salad recipe. Black-eye pea recipes augur good luck, or, at least they do on New Year’s Day. Blue Cayenne, I knew, needed a whole lot of good luck. We were wading into a very crowded field. (Here is a link to that original recipe if you haven’t tried it: Senegalese Bean Salad. It’s a great recipe.)

For those of you who have wondered about the name, blue–saturated and intense– is a favorite color and spicy and impossibly hot cayenne pepper is a favorite spice. So, Blue Cayenne it was and we became bluecayenne.com.

Since that first post, I have posted 257 recipes. Whew!  (I try to publish five recipes a month.) Blue Cayenne’s readership has grown over the three years to somewhere between a very respectable 100 and 200 readers on an average day. Our best day ever was 544 readers. We’re ad free, too. We’re all about food.

Our operation is spartan. This is a one person (me) and a one pup (Juliet) operation, so our overhead is very low. I work for free. Juliet works for pumpkin treats and an occasional bowl of strawberry ice cream.  I cook, write and photograph. Juliet is the face of Blue Cayenne–our “Betty Crocker.” She appears on all of our pages. Blue Cayenne’s Juliet is a looker.

Thank you for reading this blog.  We’re still having fun and we’re ever so glad you are here.

Now, will you share a piece of fudgy pecan birthday torte with us?

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This recipe is an adaptation of one that appeared in Bon Appetit Magazine.