Summer Fruit Cocktail Pie: A Love Affair
In our family we are not big on traditions, to say the least. Even on birthdays, we don’t usually do much, beyond a card and sometimes a practical gift. Us adults are usually happier to get rid of things than to accumulate new ones. Still, we do have a semi-tradition of making a special cake for each other’s birthdays. Birthdays in our family – it’s mostly about the baking For the past few years I’ve made Maya a Blueberry Ice Cream cake. It involved a chocolate base with a layer of homemade blueberry ice cream and then a layer of either blueberry sauce or blueberry sorbet, homemade as well, of…
Homemade Blueberry Ice Cream Cake: My Way or No Way
Maya’s birthday was coming up. I asked her what she wanted, and she said she wanted to have a fridge full of blueberries the whole season. That’s something I could easily commit to, given our joint love of fruit in general, and especially blueberries. So, every week during this season, I’d come home with a 20-30lbs box of blueberries, seemingly filling our fridge with blueberries for that week. But lo and behold, they would be gone by the end of the week. How do two and a half people finish 20-30lbs blueberries in one week? I think we must be bears in disguise… Maya’s other request was an ice cream…
How to Make Bourekas at Home: the Wonders of Phyllo Pastry
Growing up in Israel, trips to the supermarket were often rewarded by some Bourekas: crispy and often still warm flaky pastry triangles, filled with salty cheese and decorated with sesame seeds. At the time, it seemed like the best thing ever. It was only later that I realized that it was a low quality product – most Bourekas in Israel is made with margarine-based flaky pastry. Some time later I came across phyllo, a paper-thin dough, which is very versatile and easy to work with. Using it, making homemade Bourekas is a snap! There’s a lot of room for creativity, both in the choice of filling, and the shape. Here…
The Journey of Cherry on a Bike
We are once again in Granada, Nicaragua, where the idea of Cherry on a Bike first started. When you’re on a trip, especially a cycle tour, your mind often wanders. Although we tried to live in the moment as much as we could, thoughts about the future always came up. When we stopped in Granada where Gili’s aunt Peta and her husband Ben lived at that time, many of our conversations were on this topic. Since we both have a weakness for food, especially fruit, we first thought of a fruit drying business, with a baking component, my favourite hobby at the time. In a brainstorming session the name Cherry on a…
The Baking Project: Tales From Our Kitchen
In 2010 I started “the project”. It was in the dark days when I was working on my thesis and was looking for something that would keep me happy. I admit that I was a bit inspired by the movie “Julie & Julia”, but my idea was a bit less ambitious. I wanted to try to bake at least one new recipe a week. We have many cookbooks at home so it wasn’t a problem to find new recipes. I kept a list and baked away. By the end of the year I reached 56 new recipes. On average it was more than one recipe per week (the goal was…
Plums, Plums & More Plums
We always say that my friend Mari knows everyone, and in a way it’s sort of true. So when I mentioned at work how much Gili and I love picking fruit, and that we would be happy to pick some plums, she immediately connected us with friends of hers in Burnaby. We cycled to their place on a beautiful Sunday morning, and we weren’t sure what to expect. When we arrived, we knew we didn’t ride for nothing – the tree was absolutely full of fruit. We immediately got started and as soon as I tasted one plum I was in heaven. These dark purple prunes were so sweet and…
What to do with 130 pounds of Cherries?
A few weeks ago we had a crisis. While driving back from the Rockies we stopped at friends in Creston and returned with about 130lbs of intensely purple cherries. Like my sister said, it’s like we drove home with a whole person worth of cherries. And a very tasty person at that. We had to figure out what to do with them before they went bad. After giving some to friends, we still had a lot. I couldn’t resist and immediately began baking, which is when I discovered the sore reality of pitting cherries by hand – it is a lot of work. The next day we bought a cherry…
Triple Chocolate Brownie Cookies
I bite into a cookie and think: chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. These are the ultimate in chocolate cookies. Their texture is like a moist brownie, but they are shaped like a cookie. The moist dark chocolate loveliness is intertwined with the chocolate chips, reminding us that these cookies come from solid chocolate. Maya’s ingenious addition of white chocolate chips makes them all the more elegant. Whenever Maya makes these cookies they get rave reviews from friends, and I usually end up gobbling a quarter of a tray before they cool enough to be transferred to a box. Good luck resisting these! Triple Chocolate Brownie Cookies (Makes 40, based on a recipe…
Rolled Up Red Pepper Bread
The smell of roasting peppers is irresistible. I have observed this fact over the past few years, and yet still manage to be amazed by it every time. A person walking into your kitchen while you are busy roasting peppers, is sure to be dumbfounded by the exquisite aroma emanating from your oven. I made this bread twice. The first time I followed the original recipe, which called for mixing the peppers into the bread. This is all very nice, but I ended up with a wet mess that was impossible to knead, and a bread that took forever to dry out in the oven. The second time I made…
New Recipes From the Baking Project
New recipes from the Baking Project: 1. Chocolate Croissants: http://homecooking.about.com/od/breadrecipes/r/blbread91.htm מאפה תפוחים עם קרם וניל ומרנג (אהרוני – ארוחות ערוכות.2.) 3.Chocolate Lemon Tart – Baking 164 4.Lemon Mousse Cheese Cake (give it enough time in the fridge) – baking 238 5.Chocolate Orange Bread – The home baker 173 לחמניות להמבורגר -אורנה ואלה 6.66 מוס שוקולד 1 – מנות אחרונות אהרוני 7.102 עוגת לימון – אהרוני, ארוחות ערוכות. עמ’ 8.187. 9. Lemon Delicious – The essential dessert cookbook – p. 173 10. Cheese and Onion Quiche – Best Ever Pastry p. 90 11. Self-Saucing Chocolate Pudding – The essential dessert cookbook p. 172 (OK, but texture is a bit weird) 12.…
