Food, Photography and Bons Mots
This is one wonderful salad dressing. A real keeper. This Creamy Sesame-Ginger Dressing is a Samin Nosrat recipe from The New York Times. You can find the original recipe here. Nosrat is the gifted author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, an exceptional cookbook that should…
My beautiful friend Michelle had the good fortune to visit San Francisco’s Buena Vista Cafe recently and enjoyed a glass of their legendary Irish Coffee. As she described the coffee’s deliciousness, I knew I needed to try this. And, of course, it was wonderful. Here…
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 but, so far no luck.
This year the apricots here have been subpar until last Sunday when I found some beautiful ones at the large Long Beach (California) Farmer’s Market on Second Street. They were about twice as large as the golf-ball sized apricots in my local supermarkets. And, they have that sweet tang that, I think, distinguishes the apricot from most of the other stone fruits.
So, I was off to make an apricot cake. This recipe if from Yossy Arefi’s widely-acclaimed little cake cookbook, Snacking Cakes. Her cookbook is available through your local bookstore or on Amazon here. It’s a small cookbook with a large collection of inventive cake recipes. It is such a favorite of mine that I’ve gifted it to several friends.
Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen.
It’s flaky. It’s tender. It’s sweet. It’s savory. There is a bit of a sour feta bite. It’s wonderful. This is a riff on Greek Tiropita–layers of crisp and flaky phyllo dough stuffed with pungent feta cheese. This recipe brings back memories of glorious stays…
This is a delicious hybrid recipe. It’s a riff on a hummus recipe we ran on Blue Cayenne back in April of 2019 here It occurred to us that a rich topping of roasted grape (or cherry) tomatoes and roasted eggplant cubes would complement the…
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 to dive deeper into our recipe archive? Just click one of the categories at the top of this page or use the category search drop down menu on the right side of this page.
And…here is a link to Blue Cayenne’s main page: Blue Cayenne.If you are in the mood to cook (or eat!), we hope you will take a moment to look at the many excellent recipes we have featured.
I’ve had this recipe in my burgeoning to-do file for some time. The original recipe is from The New York Times and the reviews are pretty strong. A reader named Isabel, for example, wrote that this cake may be one of the best things she’s…
Just about every food culture has a fritter–a fried and battered morsel of vegetables, fruits or meats. There are Indian bhajias, Japanese tempura, American apple fritters, and on and on. The love of a fried morsel is all but universal. This fritter has a Greek…
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 historians, the Greeks celebrated the birthdays of their deities with a cake. The goddess Artemis, for example, was celebrated by her followers with a honey and flour cake on the sixth day of each month. Interestingly, her tribute cakes were topped with candles signifying the moonlight. Love that touch. I think I will try to think of candles as moonlight from now on.
In that spirit of celebration, here is a great Banana Birthday Cake With Buttercream Vanilla Frosting. In this case, it was to celebrate an important birthday this week for my neighbor and friend, Sarah. (Happy Birthday, Sarah!)
This recipe is adapted from one that appears on the King Arthur Baking site. You can find the original recipe for Rich and Tender Banana Cake here.
I particularly enjoyed this cake because it combines a delicate texture with a delightful banana fragrance.
The original King Arthur Baking cake called for a sour cream glaze but this is a birthday cake and we needed a decadent buttercream. I used the buttercream recipe posted here recently for a Tahini Cake, modifying it to omit the tahini and increasing the powdered sugar. You will find that recipe here.
Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen.
Just WOW! This is such a good cake and a relatively unique cake flavor to place on your table to entertain your guests. I have to confess, though, that I’m not having a party and this cake is quickly disappearing off my counter! This is…
