Grilled Summer Dessert

When I do have time to watch television (which doesn't seem to be much these days), my tv is tuned to The Food Network. This morning, thanks to my cat, I was up watching this very network at 7am this morning. Though I wish I had slept a bit longer, I did get the chance to catch a great idea for a summer fruit dessert. This recipe requires very few ingredients and only about 40 minutes - most of which is just waiting.

I'm a huge fruit fan, so of course I needed to try this right away. I ran up to my local grocery store & picked up three types of fruit: a red plum, a white plum & a nectarine. You can really use whatever sweet fruit you want - Giada (the chef showing this recipe on TFN) recommended strawberries & pineapple as great alternatives.

So - you want to buy stone fruit that is firm but gives slightly to the touch. You need one of each fruit for every two people you'll be serving.

First, soak the appropriate number of bamboo skewers in water for about 30 minutes. This keeps them from burning during the grilling process.

Once your skewers are ready, slice each of your pieces of fruit in half & remove the pits. Next, skewer 1/2 of each type of fruit onto your skewer (so you have 1/2 nectarine, 1/2 red plum, 1/2 white plum - or whatever fruit you've decided to use).

Place your skewered fruite cut side up on a plate & sprinkle lightly with granulated sugar. This recipe would be excellent by itself, but the inclusion of sugar gives the surface a sweet crispy taste that is to die for!

Heat up your grill and place skewers cut side down. Grill for about 5 minutes. Remove & plate on a serving platter along with some pretty green adornments - Giada used mint leaves, which I thought looked beautiful.

Hamentashen - It's a Jewish Thing...

Hamentashen is the traditional cookie eaten during the Jewish holiday Purim. Purim is a festival that commemorates the deliverance of the Jewish people of the ancient Persian Empire from Haman's plot to annihilate them.

Aside from their religious significance, Hamentashen are simply very delicious cookies! A wheat based butter cookie filled with a variety of fruit (chosen to your liking), these cookies can be enjoyed by anyone!

I recently participated in this group for young Jewish professionals in my area - great time & made some amazing friends. Last night we had a mini-reunion full of delicious food. As the resident baker, I decided to stay with the Jewish theme & made Hamentashen.


I found a great recipe on RecipeZaar.com. For the filling I used the Italian Wild Cherries that I won last fall with my Pie of the Vine Grape Pie. These were the perfect fruity adornment to my Hamentashen. You can use any flavor you want, though: strawberry, apricot, peach, poppy seed, prune...really, whatever your heart desires! I'll bet chocolate would be good too...Nuetella anyone??

Here is the recipe - again, very delicious!

Purim's Hamentashen Cookies

3/4 cups Butter (1 1/2 sticks)
3/4 cup Sugar
1 large Egg
1 tsp grated Lemon Zest or 1 tsp Lemon Juice
1 tsp Vanilla
1/4 tsp Salt
Filling of choice
Additional Sugar (for sprinkling)
2 1/4 cups Flour

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cream butter in a bowl. Add sugar & beat until fluffy.

Beat in egg, lemon and vanilla.

Add flour & salt in 3 portions, mixing each time thoroughly. (If batter is still sticking to the sides of the bowl, add water at 1 drop increments until batter pulls away from the side of the bowl)

Place dough in a ziplock bag & refrigerate for 1-2 hours (until workable).

Roll dough out between two waxed paper sheets to 1/4 inch thickness. Using a cookie cutter, cut dough into circles ~ 2.5 - 3 inches in diameter. Place on pre-greased cookie sheet.

Spoon a small amount of filling into the center of each circle. **Note: you are going to want to put more filling in than needed - too much will ruin the way the cookies bake & will cause the dough to spread too thinly across the cookie sheet. If you're using cherries, you want to place only 2 cherries (3 if they're very small) in the center of your dough.


Fold & pinch up the side of your cookie in three places using your thumbs & two fingers so that you create the triangle shape. Pinch the corners together so they're completely sealed. You only want a small portion of the filling exposed - all else should be covered by the folded up dough.

Sprinkle a small amount of sugar over each cookie. Bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes (until the edges JUST start becoming pale golden. Any longer and the dough will start to spread too much.

Cool for 5 minutes on the cookie sheet & then move to cooling racks until your cookies are completely cool.

And finally, of course......Enjoy!

95th Beach Birthday

Aside from beach time, this Memorial Day weekend marked the 95th birthday of my grandfather. Friends and family gathered from all parts of the country: Hartford, CT, Washington DC, Cleveland Ohio, Boston, NYC & more to help celebrate the big day in New London, CT. It should come as no surprise to you that I offered to bake the cake for the occasion.


I've been coming to New London, CT for my entire life. Every summer for a week (and more frequently now that I live in Boston) I have come here, to the beach, to enjoy the warm weather & to visit with my family. Memories of sand castles, sea glass, beach umbrellas and 60's style yellow bed comforters fill my head when I think of this town (the cottage that my family owns is cute, but it needs a little decoration updating).

Using most of these memories, I began to craft the idea for a beach style birthday cake. Before I get into the details of the cake creation, I have to say a HUGE thank you to the best cake creation assistant in the word: Miss Sophie Hannah Ludgin. Sophie is my 6 1/2 year old cousin from Washington DC. She is very smart & very creative, so she was a HUGE help to me when deciding exactly how to decorate the cake. Sophie mixed the icing & created the "sand" for the cake, as well as decided how to adorn the cake with the gold & silver dragee balls. Here is a picture of us with our cake:


I've seen many examples (online & on one of my favorite TV shows - Ace of Cakes) of beach themed cakes using both brown sugar and graham cracker crumbs to simulate sand. I went with the graham cracker version.

Tip 1: if you use chocolate frosting & the graham cracker crumbs, you achieve a s'mores - like tasting treat - really good! Make sure the crumbs are mostly finely crushed so that they spread easily.

Tip 2: Another tip to get the surface area looking "beach like": mix vanilla & chocolate icing together to achieve a camel-colored frosting. It makes your job a lot easier than trying to cover the entire surface area with graham cracker crumbs (a little hard to get the crumbs to complete cover the cake surface area).


Tip 3: Make sure each layer of your cake is leveled before you stack the next level. If not, you might have cake tipping problems. I ran into this - as a fix, I stuck a folded paper plate under the side of the serving platter in order to ensure the cake sat level until time for serving.

Warning: Do NOT mix the graham cracker crumbs into the frosting. They soak up the moisture from the frosting & make it very hard to spread. It might work if you use the crumbs sparingly & have very sticky frosting, but I suggest first spreading the frosting & then, using your hands, cover the frosting surface area with the crumbs.

Using gum paste & royal icing, I crafted beach umbrellas & a shovel and pale for decorations. Dragees served as fancy adornments. I also made chocolate shells using old Madeleine cookie pans (this worked REALLY well).


**Note about the umbrella with "Budweiser" on it - inside family joke. My grandfather won a beach umbrella that looked like that about five years ago & insisted on our using it instead of buying a new one - slightly embarrassing with all of the little kids & older residents on the beach...

The cake came out as a huge success - everyone loved it & it tasted great. Highly recommend a similar style for a beach themed party!

"Carrots" to Satisfy Summer Time Cravings

I've always lived in an area that experiences the four seasons....though to be honest, it's more like 3 months of awesome summer, 2 months each of spring/fall, and then 7 freezing months of winter. Don't get me wrong, the snow is beautiful & can be fun. But, it makes my morning commute close to unbearable when the wind is blowing across the Mass Ave. bridge, bringing the temperature down to close to negative degrees as I'm hurriedly shuffling to the Prudential Center. Not my favorite thing to do...

But we don't need to talk about that now - it's almost summer! Late spring/summer/early fall is my FAVORITE time of year. You know - no jackets needed, warm air blowing...so nice! Yes, some days can be very hot, but I personally prefer that to the freezing cold described above. And, you know what else is great about the summer? Frozen Yogurt! I'm not talking about the Pinkberry stuff that tastes like you put a cup of Dannon yogurt into the freezer...I'm talking about non-fat frozen ice cream. The sweet stuff. This is, by far, the best summer treat available.


1.) It tastes amazing - the consistency is perfect for sliding down your throat & cooling your body temperature without needing to pause in your mouth to melt as some ice creams do.

2.) Two words: non fat (or in some cases, low fat). I'm always watching my caloric intake, so the fact that most frozen yogurt (ice cream) places serve a non-fat option is awesome to me.

3.) The swirl factor. Not only can you get this tasty, non fat treat in many places - but you can enjoy two flavors at once! Usually I'm a chocolate/vanilla swirl kind of girl. I don't like the artificial flavors that some places pump into their froyo - too fake.

So now are you with me? Froyo = awesome. Moving along, this past weekend I visited a friend in NYC (the same friend who went on the cupcake excursion with me last fall - delicious but SO much sugar!. The more I visit NYC the more I love it - maybe a move in my near future?? I'm hoping so). For brunch on Sunday we went to the famous "40 Carrots" inside Bloomingdales. Let me tell you, it was awesome! I highly recommend it to anyone living in/visiting NYC. The food was quite good, but the highlight was, of course, their selection of frozen yogurt.

They have three consistent flavors & then a flavor of the day (alternating each day of the week). The consistent flavors are vanilla (this is the tart pinkberry type), chocolate & coffee. The flavor of the day yesterday (and every Sunday) was blueberry. I opted into a combination coffee/blueberry dish with some chocolate covered Gogi berries on the side.


Looks good, right? A few tips for you:

1.) Try to go on a Sunday - the blueberry is AMAZING. (The coffee was also incredible).
2.) Chocolate covered Gogi berries - while rich in antioxidents, not so tasty. They're kind of dry & not worth the extra calories (in my opinion).
3.) Get the regular size (not the large). As you can see from my photo, the regular size gives you a LOT of frozen yogurt. I saw a woman order the large...it was about the amount of ice cream you'd get out of a pint of Ben & Jerry's. While not as bad for you as B&J's, believe me - too much!

If you get the chance to go & try another one of their special flavors, let me know how it is. I may need to make a special trip out to try again! (Who are we kidding...I'll definitely be stopping back in.)

Back in Boston now, I'd highly recommend a stop at J.P. licks. They have a good selection of the soft serve stuff, complete with any toppings you'd like.

Welcome Back Recipe, Just in Time for Spring!

So sorry to everyone following this blog for my absence - it was a very busy end of the winter. Now that the sun is shining, the weather is warming up, and there are leaves on the trees, I promise to make more regular posts, filled with AMAZINGLY DELICIOUS recipes for your enjoyment :).

I was out in California about 4 weeks ago, visiting a childhood friend of mine. If you ever make it to LA, I highly suggest you check out the horseback riding to the Hollywood sign - it was SO fun. The guides were very friendly & the horses were safe & steady. Check it out:


Also while in L.A., my friend and I flexed our baking muscles both to share our mutual love for sweets & to celebrate her boyfriend's birthday. What better ingredient to choose during the spring than a lemon? Think about it...lemonade, lemon ice, lemon-lime popsicles...they all scream warm weather.

Our baking item of choice: Lemon filled Vanilla cupcakes with a sweet Meringue Frosting. Believe me...delicious! I think her boyfriend actually downed three of them in one sitting. Check them out:

And, of course, here is the recipe :)

Vanilla cupcakes: recipe provided in a previous post - find it HERE.

Once you've baked the cupcakes and have let them cool, cut out a small section from the top center of the cupcake (about 1/2 inch deep and with a thick border to ensure the stability of your cupcakes). With the cut out portion: cut the soft middle part of the cake off, but keep the top portion to place on top of the lemon filling once placed in the hole you've created. See images below:

Lemon Filling:
(makes 1 cup)

1/4 cup butter
1/3 cup fresh lemon juice
2 large eggs + 2 egg yolks
1 cup sugar
2 TBSP cornstarch, dissolved in 1/4 cup water
1 tsp grated lemon zest

- Heat butter & lemon juice in med pan until mixture is hot - 130 degrees.
- In med bowl whisk sugar & eggs/yolks until blended. Add dissolved cornstarch.
- Whisking constantly, add butter/lemon juice mixture slowly.
- Return to pan & cook over med heat until thickened & just boiling ~ 6 minutes - thickened sauce will allow for a path created with finger on back of spoon
- Press plastic wrap to top of sauce once placed in cool bowl - refrigerate until chilled.

Finally, top with Meringue Frosting (recipe below)

1 c. sugar
1/2 c. water
2 egg whites
1/2 tsp. vanilla flavoring extract

Boil sugar and water over heat until syrup spins a thread.
Pour very slowly onto stiffly beaten whites and beat until smooth and stiff enough to spread.
Add flavoring.
Spread on cake.

Get ready for more to come!