When one has an ice cream maker at home it is so much fun to get creative with ice cream flavors. The best part of having an easy to use ice cream maker is that we can make small-batch ice creams – just enough for one evening. This also means that we can experiment with different flavors in small quantities. The twins and I love trying out new and creative ice cream flavors over the hot summer months.
Saffron pistachio ice cream is a classic ice cream flavor in India called Kesar Pista, which translates to Saffron Pistachio. Used to be I could only find this flavor at Indian grocery stores or at Indian restaurants and ice cream parlors. But now with my easy to use ice cream maker, making Saffron Pistachio Ice Cream at home has become a breeze. Here is the recipe.
This recipe is for a strawberry mint lemonade simple syrup which is a concentrated syrup that can be stored in the refrigerator until you are ready to make a lemonade drink.
One of my twins Rani got in the mood to make some chocolate cupcakes a few weekends ago. But Rani is a picky one; she likes dark chocolate, even in her cupcakes. YES! I thought. I am going to be treated to an adult cupcake made with dark chocolate!
Now as you may know, there are countless chocolate cupcake recipes out there, hundreds of recipes actually. Yet somehow Rani was able to narrow down her search to this one recipe from Gimmesomeoven.com. She asked me to take a look at the recipe for 1: do we have the ingredients and 2: for approval – i.e. is this an easy recipe to follow. I gave her the thumbs up 👍. This is how Rani’s chocolate cupcakes turned out. Pretty cool!
I have been wanting to make this cake for a while now as I’ve been thinking lately of a sweet my Mom used to make when I was younger called coconut burfi – which is a cross between a cookie and a brownie like texture – kind of like a blondie bar but without the eggs. I typically make coconut burfi with coconut, ghee, milk, cardamom, and sugar, all condensed down into thick creamy dough. It is poured into a mould and then cut into pieces after it is cooled. It takes a long time to make and is a lot of work. This coconut cardamom cake is my attempt to replicate a coconut burfi flavor but in a cake form.
If you are like me, you may not be familiar with the pineapple guava fruit. To be honest, I only discovered this fruit five years ago after we moved to our new home. In this beautiful landscape we saw these evergreen bushes with the most gorgeous blossoms.
Berries and cream is our family’s all time favorite berry dessert. This sweet treat allows one to enjoy the fresh berry fruit flavor while at the same time elevating it into a dessert worthy of a special dinner. You only need 3 ingredients – berries, honey, and cream – that’s it. From these three pure all-natural ingredients you get a dessert that looks and tastes amazing.
Many berries and cream recipes involve whipping cream with sugar and vanilla or making a custard of sorts – both of which require that you mix and stir and use another pot and utensil or gadget. Not this recipe – I promise you. It’s the easiest dessert to make, it’s fresh, quick, easy, and delicious. Here is the recipe for our family’s tried and true Berries and Cream. Continue reading Berries and Cream→
I posted a recipe a while back for lemonade syrup that used over 80 lemons that my friend Elaine gave me. Well, a few weeks later she dropped off another 100 lemons through our mutual friend Rose. Here’s the thing, I already made over 10 bottles of lemonade syrup from my previous batch, and a few more bottles from the new batch, but no matter how much we love lemonade, it was time for me to get creative with these lemons. I thought let me experiment with making a couple of flavored lemonade syrups. Continue reading Blackberry Port Lemonade→
I recently made a couple of hummingbird cakes to show of some gorgeous nasturtium blossoms that were blooming in my springtime garden. I made one cake with cream cheese frosting, shredded coconut, and orange nasturtium flowers; and a second cake decorated with yellow nasturtiums, pecans and edible leaves and flowers.
In this post I would like to share with you the second hummingbird cake I made with yellow nasturtium flowers, toasted pecans, edible pansies, scented geraniums, and mint leaves.
I had this delicious piece of cake at Peets when I met my friend Roli for coffee one morning. Called Hummingbird Cake, it was moist and light, chock full of nuts, with a soft cream cheese frosting, and it was just perfect 😋.
I assumed it was called hummingbird cake because of all the nuts in the cake, because it reminded me of a birdseed mixture – you know what I mean? But as it turns out when I was looking for a recipe for hummingbird cake what I found out is that the reason it is called a hummingbird cake is because it tastes so good that it makes people hum – go figure 🤔.
What got me motivated to make a hummingbird cake is the opportunity to decorate the cake with my spring blooming nasturtiums. These nasturtium blooms were looking so glorious in my springtime garden that I wanted to show them off in a beautiful dessert. The hummingbird cake with cream cheese frosting made the perfect backdrop for these lovely nasturtium blossoms.
I got a bunch of lemons from Elaine whom I met through my other friend Rose. Elaine had buckets and buckets of lemons – literally buckets of lemons to give away. I met Elaine recently to pick up over 200 lemons – did I count them? Yes! In fact I counted 275 lemons to be exact. Continue reading Lemonade Syrup→
It was a cold wet February afternoon when I was craving a deep dark gingerbread cake. Dark as dark can be, almost glistening black in color, super moist and intensely gingery is the type of gingerbread cake I wanted on this wet and cold afternoon.
For years my friend Georgina made this amazing dark ginger cake any time I requested a sweet treat from her. Georgina’s ginger cake was the best gingerbread I had ever had. Deep Dark Dense Ginger Cake is what I call this fresh ginger cake and nothing came close to it, absolutely nothing. Continue reading Deep Dark Gingerbread Cake→
