Hello, Lover.

What could be more seductive than the sweet promise of smooth, creamy, dense cheesecake, with a good old-fashioned graham cracker crust, topped with the freshest berries, a homemade strawberry sauce and cream whipped from scratch? Nothing, I think! Like the city named after it, this dessert has me by the heartstrings. This is the only kind of cheesecake I really like. And hence the only kind of cheesecake I make.

This was to celebrate my brother’s girlfriend’s graduation. It bakes for quite a bit—I start checking at 45 minutes—and cools in the oven for at least four hours after I’ve turned it off. The slow cooling in the oven prevents cracks on top of the cake. It’s a cheesecake purist’s dream when eaten on its own.

What even made it more special is that I finally had the chance to use this beautiful handcrafted cake stand and plate made for me by my friend Sara’s dad, a true artisan in every sense. He makes awesome pottery as a hobby in Hawaii—he shapes them, hand-paints the designs himself and glazes them in his own kiln. I casually asked her one day if he’d consider custom-making a cake plate for me, not really being serious about it. She brought back two of different sizes for me after Christmas, one of which had my letter “J” cleverly built into the design. I swear I was speechless. This kind of craftsmanship deserves only the best desserts!

After decorating the top with fresh strawberries and my standard berry syrup (simple sugar + berries = awesome), I thought it needed a little something extra.

I found a bar of white chocolate in the snacks bin at home and found that with a potato peeler, you can make these elegant white chocolate shavings that complete this divine dessert.

Perfect!

Hope you have a sweet weekend, all! It’ll be a long one for us here in the US because of Independence Day, and I’ll be busy cookin’ and craftin’, but I won’t be too much of a stranger this time!

I’ve been making these for years, ever since an aunt gifted me with the cookbook Mrs. Field’s Best Cookie Book Ever (ever!). Well, she didn’t so much give it to me as I hinted, repeatedly, that I’d really really really love a copy. So, she gave me hers. Maybe more to shut me up than anything. Haha.

Jessica’s Marshmallow Clouds are made with frozen mini marshmallows that you encase in chocolate cookie dough before baking. I wish I could post pictures of how I made these, but I have to say these are a bit on the messy side to make, so my hands were full of dough! The result is a gooey chocolate cookie that’s extra soft in the middle because of the marshmallow surprise. You see a little of the yummy stuff in between breaks on tops of the cookies. Heavenly! These are among my favorite cookies to make, despite the mess.

 I made these for a recent movie date with friends. Concession stands in movie houses here charge so much for snacks—so the next best thing is to sneak some of your own in! I packaged these in individual sandwich bags, along with little snack bags of gummi worms that I had gotten in bulk. The two snackies made for awesome theater treats! 

Hope your week is off to a sweet start!

I have a confession to make.

This confession is hidden in a sinful red box.

And if it were to be stamped with a shameful scarlet letter, that letter would be a burning “B.”

(Cue dramatic violin music…)

Ta-daaa!

I made the cake above with a doctored cake mix from Betty—Betty Crocker, that is! Oh the shame! And the wagging fingers! Oyoyoy. I can hear my aunts (one of who is ironically named Auntie Betty!) clucking their tongues at me. All sins aside, this Strawberry Dream Cake was nothing to be ashamed of! It was a great dessert for a barbeque: fruity, cool, moist and creamy in each mouthful.

There are several variations of Strawberry Dream Cake, some of which use strawberry gelatin. I brought this to a potluck at a vegetarian friend’s house, so I knew the gelatin version wouldn’t fly (some gelatin is from ground animal bones, did you know?)

The cake itself has pureed fresh strawberries in it, so the white-cake-mix batter turned a slight pink.

Now I have no idea how this Strawberry Dream Cake came to be named as such, but I DO know that the dreamy part of it is the whipped-cream topping. It has the perfect secret ingredient that works superbly with strawberries: white chocolate! Yum.

The whipped topping also has the surprising ingredient of cream cheese. That, with the chopped white chocolate and some scalded milk, gives you this creamy dreamy sauce that you fold into store-bought whipped-cream topping. (Make the clucking stop!)

The recipe didn’t call for it, but while the cake was a bit warm, I poked some holes through it with the wider end of a chopstick and poured some of the sauce on top. It made for an even moister cake, with the sauce seeping through the holes.

After folding the sauce into the whipped topping, I was worried that it would get thinned out. To my surprise, something in the white chocolate+cream cheese+warm milk concoction stabilizes the whipped topping, making it easy to spread on a cake and firm enough to hold the weight of some halved strawberries.

I wanted a final touch. I spied some of these French Vanilla Pirouette wafer sticks by Pepperidge Farm that were a gift from a friend sitting on the kitchen shelf.

I crushed some of those and sprinkled them on top. They set off the red strawberries beautifully and provided a sweet crunch.

Voila! A dream worth diving headlong into! Nomnomnom.

Interested in whipping up this dream of a cake yourself? HERE’S the recipe I used.

And now you’ve heard one of my kitchen confessions. My, how the mighty have fallen. Today, a boxed cake mix, tomorrow, who knows?

I’ve recently been on a sheet-cake binge!

Whenever these handi-foil Cook-N-Carry pans with lids go on sale, I stock up on them. They’re so handy to make sheet cakes in, decorate (the domed, clear lid allows you to frost the top however you like), package and just give away.

This means I don’t have to worry about asking for my pans back anymore. And believe me, I’ve lost so many pans over the years, that I think these are just the smarter way to go.

Last week, I had to make two cakes in one week: one for a birthday and another for a christening. Since my Red Velvet Cake calls for buttermilk and they never sell just a cup’s worth, I decided it would be more efficient to make the same kind of cake for the two occasions. I just made them different by changing the ribbons!

A Girly Merry Unbirthday Cake (it was a belated birthday present)

A Little Boy’s “Wow You’re Christian Now” (haha) Cake

The sprinkles are adorable Jumbo Confetti pastel dots from Wilton that I’d also gotten on sale after Easter.

Have a sweet weekend, everyone!

These are new at Trader Joe’s, a specialty food store in the US. When I spied these on a shelf  I had to do a double take. I’d never seen peanut butter cups in this mini size before, and thought they would be interesting in place of chocolate chips in my standard chocolate chip cookies.

They are “ka-ulomol!” That’s a word in my dialect that I don’t even have a direct English translation for. In Tagalog, it would be “nakakagigil,” I guess. Otherwise, it means something along the lines of, “They’re so cute and tiny and I just want to them to get in my belly!”

I had to stop myself from snacking on them while making the cookies. They’re just like little itty bitty Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, but since they’re teensy, you tend to pop them in your mouth more readily and easily like you would the regular-sized ones.

And they were absolutely yummy in the cookie dough! Had to stop myself from eating THAT too!

I hope Trader Joe’s keeps this product in stock. Some of their goods are seasonal, like that one time they weren’t selling my favorite lady fingers for some reason. I’d buy these again in a heartbeat, because these cookies were just ooey gooey good!

Now I want to try these next. They’ve been around for a while, but this mini-peanut-butter-cup experiment turned out so well that I’m thinking these would be great too!

Hope you’re having a sweet week, all! (Yum!)

Made these “dirty” cupcakes to celebrate Earth Day. Had loads of fun making them, despite the fact that I baked them on an extremely hot day in Los Angeles, upwards of 90 degrees even at 8:00 at night, with me standing in front of a fan in between batches so I wouldn’t pass out.

I really just wanted an excuse to bake! (Hee.) I feel like I’ve been cooking a lot lately, mostly meals, but not really getting the chance to do my “thing,” that is, to bake something from scratch, make frosting and hunker down to decorate it/them. And since today is Earth Day, I thought these “Earthworms In Dirt” cupcakes would be an apt cure for the baking itch. And really now, how can you go wrong with a chocolate cupcake, covered with chocolate frosting, dipped in crushed Oreos and topped off with a gummy worm?

So, here’s the dirt (pun alert!) on making these awesomely cute chocolatey treats.

Take a chocolate cupcake made with your favorite recipe and frost it with chocolate icing (no need to be perfect since it’s going to be covered up with crushed cookies anyway)…

…dip the cupcake in crushed Oreo cookies (I rolled mine into smithereens with a rolling pin)…

…use the round end of a wooden spoon to poke two holes in the cupcake…

…cut up a gummy worm in half and stick each in the holes you just made, as if you caught the thing mid-burrow!

Fun! Here’s one of my wormy friends chilling among my mom’s violets.

And here are all of them on the kitchen table at work, before they ended up in my co-workers’ bellies!

These would be great for Halloween, too, as truly disgusting desserts.

And, Disneynature’s Earth premieres in theaters today. Buy a ticket during release week and a tree will be planted in your honor in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. I hope to see it this Friday. Watch the awesome trailer—made even more awesome by Sigur Ros’ Hopipolla playing in the background!

Happy Earth Day, you curly worms!

From your coffee cup…

…to an ice cream cone!

I found out today that Starbucks recently released new ice-cream versions of their most popular drinks. They had already done this before, but have phased the old flavors out and is releasing this new set with other novelties like ice cream bars.

I’m sort of an odd duck when it comes to coffee. I hate the drink and shun it like a vampire does holy water. But make ice cream with it, and I’m like a moth to a flame!

Aside from the fact that I have a weakness for the stuff, I’m mainly interested in the coffee-flavored cold confections because I imagine they would go well with my favorite Chocolate Cake recipe. If I had the chance and patience, I’d really like to turn any of these into an Ice Cream Bombe. It’s is a dome-shaped dessert that’s made of layers of cake and ice cream, frozen, then unmolded. Doesn’t it look heavenly?

And I’ve always wanted to make homemade ice-cream sandwiches with these molds that look like farmyard animals. Oink! I mean, yum!

Now to find those Starbucks frozen treats!

Have a sweet weekend, all.

Despite the recent scarcity of posts on this blog, I’ve actually done a whole lot of cooking. Ask the right person, and you’ll confirm the crazy pace at which I’ve stewed, sautéed, casseroled, gratin-ed, mashed, souped, fried, baked, sugared, simmered and sauced my way through breakfast, lunch and dinner these past few weeks. And it’s something I don’t mind at all, of course. Cooking, as far-fetched as this may seem, gives me time to pause. In the kitchen, under a cloud of flour or behind the steady hiss of pots and pans, I have a chance to breathe. That’s why, no matter how tired or busy I am, I will always try to cook. Even if it means just scrambling an egg, I remain faithful to cooking as much as I can because of the fulfillment it gives. (A perfectly scrambled, fluffy egg the cheery color of sunshine is a beautiful thing!)

This past weekend, though, I found myself with a different kind of culinary faithfulness: I was in a Jewish kitchen, helping to make kosher Passover desserts. Now, that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write!

I can’t tell you much about the intricacies of keeping kosher for Passover. I was baptized Protestant and schooled Catholic, and though the exposure to two religions primed me for learning about a third one, I didn’t think I could wrap my curly brain around what the holiday meant, how it started and the symbols and rituals associated with it.

So, I asked the one question that made sense to me: What can be cooked? And the answer was: anything without wheat and leavening. In my effort to understand this, because I’ve never baked with anything else but flour in all its wheat-y glory, I found out about the culinary possibilities of matzos (a cracker-like flatbread), matzo meal (matzos ground into powder), potato starch (a substitute for white flour) and kosher chocolate chips!

Putting theory into practice, I was tasked to help make the Carmel Chocolate Matzo Crunch.

It involved lining a cookie sheet with matzos…

…cooking brown sugar and butter into toffee on the stove…

…pouring the sweet mixture and spreading it over the matzos (note to self: Do not use a cheap rubber spatula while doing this. No matter how much you convince it not to, the spatula WILL melt!)…

…baking the layered treat in the oven until the toffee bubbled…

…sprinkling the top with chocolate chips while hot…

…and spreading the chocolate over the whole thing in fun swirls once it melted.

The result was this divine toffeecrunchychocolatey dream that was broken into pieces once cool. I couldn’t eat just one. It was so good that it was ironically sinful.

With a plate full of toffee, fudge-iced brownies made with potato starch, macaroons and fruit, I remembered my own sweet memories of food eaten during Holy Week back home in the Philippines. My friend Ross had a Ilokana grandmother named Lola (Grandma) Rose who would make binanlay, which were rice cakes cooked in banana leaves and topped with thick panucha (a brown sugar syrup that tasted much like the one that topped the matzos) and latik (fried coconut milk bits). Getting those sticky things out of the steamed leaves was tricky and took forever (you had to peel the leaves away almost fiber by fiber!), which I always thought was so apt for all the suffering one’s supposed to do during Lent—you had to go through so much to get to the divine sweet stuff!

So now, I can say I’ve kind of cooked kosher. I never thought that I would in my life in the kitchen. But the fact that I can now write about it makes me appreciate the way food brings people together, and how despite all our religious differences, we all believe…in toffee.

Thank you to Jason for being especially helpful and patient with all my questions, and for thinking I’m only a little bit strange for wanting to snap pictures during the entire thing. Congratulations again on your new sweet little bundle of joy. Mazel tov!

We decided to give Häagen-Dazs FIVE ice cream line a shot this weekend. The new series of seven flavors (mint, ginger, coffee, vanilla bean, brown sugar, passion fruit and milk chocolate) is described as a return to old-fashioned ice cream basics because it’s made with only five ingredients: sugar, milk, cream, eggs and whichever flavor a specific variant is. It’s a purist’s dream.

I fell in love with the brown sugar version because it tastes just like frozen leche flan. That comforting flavor of brown sugar reminds me of the syrup that bathes one of my favorite childhood desserts. And the vanilla bean version was nothing to sneeze at either: The flavors were pure, whole and clean.

Häagen-Dazs says this of the newest addition to their family of frozen treats:

All-natural ice cream crafted with only five ingredients for incredibly pure, balanced flavor… and surprisingly less fat!

There was something utterly yummy about knowing that a spoonful of the FIVE was nothing but unadulterated ice cream bliss. Even my favorite Ben & Jerry’s flavor (and even the ones similar to those in the FIVE line like vanilla bean) has stuff called Guar Gum and Carageenan in it. The fact that those sound like characters from Star Wars rather than things I should be ingesting is a tad bit scary.

I was all set to declare undying love for the new Häagen-Dazs line. I wanted to hunt down all the flavors, even if it meant going to every grocery store in the city. Gimme ginger! Make room for mint! Whoa, passionfruit!

But then.

After perusing the Häagen-Dazs website I discovered something. Comparing labels and nutritional info for the FIVE variants and the original Häagen-Dazs flavors, I found out that for at least two of the flavors, it wasn’t ALL that different in terms of ingredients.

Original Coffee

Five Coffee

Original Chocolate

Five Chocolate

What gives? An evil marketing plot? Granted, there IS a difference in the fat content of each, but their claim of the FIVE line being new isn’t entirely truthful! Hmmmm.

Oh well. I’m now undecided about declaring undying love for FIVE. While I ruminate on these facts and try to come to a conclusion I can live with, let me take a scoop (or two) of the brown sugar FIVE ice cream, set it on top of a warm brownie, surround it with warm mango cubes cooked in syrup jubilee-style, and dig into it like it was going out of style. Yum! (Hee.)

…for heart-y cupcakes!

These are the Red Velvet Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting that I made for Valentine’s Day. I know this post is nearly two weeks old, but I finally just got the chance to dowload the bajillion photos from my camera last night (even pictures from Christmas!). I hope you enjoy them!

Something I realized as I was decorating these, as pointed out by my brother: When you work with a palette of coordinating colors, in this case red, pink and white, you get a cohesive design element together, even if each cupcake is decorated differently. The result is eye candy that’s just as fun to eat! I’m keeping this in mind for when I decorate other cupcakes with a theme in the future.

Yum!

By the way, I haven’t been by most of your blogs because I’m just now finally buckling down to blog duties after months of running around like a headless chicken. I hope to be by real soon and can’t wait to see what everyone’s been up to!