This cake is obscenely rich; it is more of a custard or pudding than a cake, almost. It is so moist that it may seem undercooked until you remember just how many eggs and pureed kumquats you poured into that wet batter to make it.
It started out as a recipe for orange cake, but […]

First things first. I would really appreciate it if you would go vote for me in Culinate’s Death By Chocolate contest.
Also, I heard today is crepe day, so we made a Hungarian crepe cake!
My grandmother says that she used to make this with a different filling in each layer - jam, ground walnuts, chocolate cream, […]

This is a combination of two recipes from Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, one of the smartest and friendliest cookbook authors and food bloggers I know.
It remained moist and delicious almost a week later, and got rave reviews from my mother and Dave’s coworkers. (We bake a lot, so we have […]

Having a food blog makes you instantly popular. People email you recipes. Your mother may cut out recipes from magazines and ask you to make them for her, in fact. Even kids like you better once you start to blog about food.
My friend’s young nephew was eager to tell me of a recipe he had […]

Dave wanted something chocolate and something creamy. I wanted to play more with Aki and Alex’s bee pollen spice mix, and thought saffron would pull everything together.
I hesitate to call these brownies. They were based on a brownie recipe, but adjusted and baked in muffin tins so that they were practically transformed into rich […]

When is a bread not a bread? When it’s a monkey! Life has been pretty stressful for me lately, with some hard decisions still left for me to make, so my partner Dave and I decided to spend a recent evening just monkeying around.
We dipped balls of risen, yeasted dough into melted monkey butter (not […]

The Queen of Sheba was Solomon’s only match, as rich and wise as he, or more. Legend has it that it was she who told him of the lost vessel of blessed light that cast peace on anyone who stood in its presence, which became the greatest of his treasures. William Butler Yeats imagined the […]

Yet again, let me tell you why I love living in NYC, and in Brooklyn in particular, and in Park Slope in particular. We found a stack of clean, beautiful cooking magazines out in front of someone’s brownstone a few blocks away from our apartment just a few days ago.
We often find books this […]

Last time I saw him in concert, Arlo Guthrie told the story of how his grades dropped in 6th grade, leading his family to send him to see a shrink. His mother had to go with him. He put pegs into holes, looked at ink blots, took all the tests. The shrink sent Arlo out […]

Dave and I spent an entire weekend trying to make this cake, and we utterly failed at life at least twice during that time. On our first attempt, we undercooked it, and then we tried to remove it from the pan before giving it a chance to fully cool. Unsurprisingly, it oozed all over the […]