Fruit of the Underworld (Pomegranate lime vanilla cake)

Pretty in pink can be difficult to achieve without food dye. Unfortunately, taking an all-natural approach might not always turn out as you expected. This was the case with a batch of blood orange cinnamon rolls Aaron prepared one day. While delicious, the attempt to stain the icing ruby red with blood orange juice instead yielded a deeply unappetizing mauve-taupe. My attempts to correct with the trusty dropper of food dye resulted in nuclear pink. Ultimately, the project was abandoned for photographic purposes. This pomegranate lime vanilla yogurt cake, on the other hand, is perfectly calibrated to yield a beautiful finish using only the most natural of ingredients.

Au naturale

The Gingerbread Man (Honey stout gingerbread cake, honey glaze)

As the Thanksgiving dust settles, baking cakes may be the last thing on your mind, but as winter drags on, I expect that you (like me) will come creeping back into the kitchen. Call it culinary therapy. Winter demands sturdier, more substantial, more warming foods, and this month's honey stout gingerbread cake fits the bill, perfectly.    A bundt cake, this takes advantage of the pretty, fluted mold and uses a simple glaze you can just pour over the top, rather than fussing with layers and smoothing icing. Triple-spiked with fresh, ground, and crystallized ginger, it's an easy pick-me-up with just the right amount of not-to-sweet gingery fire.

Fyah

New Year's Eats (Black tie mini cheesecakes, cherry sauce)

Happy New Year, everyone! Heading into February, love is in the air, and I always like to include a sweet treat for Valentine's Day. Usually, I've focused on treats for a smaller gathering, but this time around, it's sweets for a crowd. The more the merrier! This recipe for black tie mini cheesecakes and boozy cherry sauce makes enough for 24, so you can splurge with a special someone, have a party for all your friends, or hoard a private stash of cheesecake for days on end. Whatever February throws your way, I've got you covered.

Covered in cherries

Holiday Cheer (Cranberry orange spice cheesecake bars)

For me, the holidays mark open season for baking. Cooler weather makes it more comfortable to blast the oven all day and subtly increases the caloric load, or at least I like to tell myself so. "I'm storing up for the long winter" is a frequent excuse I make, while eating a dozen cookies at a time. At first, I wanted to make one of my mother's requisite holiday recipes: Pecan Tassies. Like miniature pecan pies, nestled in a bite-sized tart shell of cream cheese crust, they've always been a favorite in my family. Owing to Aaron's unfortunate upbringing beside several pecan trees, however, he still suffers from perennial pecan fatigue and refuses to eat them. Seeking a different source of holiday cheer, I settled on cranberry orange spice cheesecake bars: rich, sweet-tart and 100% holiday-approved in color and flavor profile, these are an ideal nut-free treat for the bleak midwinter.

Sweet!

Curried Away (Massaman Curry)

To Aaron's distress, I absolutely love Thai food. Not that he doesn't, but I tend to take things to extremes. I'll recommend we order Thai takeout multiple times per week, sometimes on consecutive days (Aaron usually says no to that). I simply can't get enough. Thai food utilizes a number of flavors somewhat unique to Southeast Asia: fiery, licorice-y Thai basil, sour tamarind, darkly sweet palm sugar, citrusy notes from lemongrass and kaffir limes, and a somewhat surprising lilt of seafood from savory shrimp paste and salty fish sauce, which end up in almost everything. These ingredients combine to give Thai cooking, like many Asian cuisines, a spicy, sweet-and-sour character that was once prevalent in European cooking throughout the Middle Ages, but fell out of fashion in favor of the simply savory. One of the most familiar dishes to a Western audience will be curry - a dish decidedly lacking a Western analogue. Curries are soup- or stew-like dishes with rich flavors imparted from curry pastes or powders, themselves made from copious amounts of spices. Common throughout South and Southeast Asia, an Indian curry can often be identified by use of more dried spice powders and a thicker, richer texture, whereas Thai curry is often a bit soupier and relies more on fresh, moist seasonings (curry paste).

Nom

Jumbled Together (Russian Tea Cakes)

Russian Tea Cakes may be my very favorite variety of cookie. Also known as Italian wedding cakes, Mexican wedding cakes, Flexicans, polvorones, butterballs, and snowballs, you may know them best just as those buttery little spheres coated in powdered sugar, studded with finely ground nuts, and flavored with a variety of subtle seasonings. With their snowy white coats and elegant proportions, they make the perfect cookie to serve throughout the winter, arrayed on plates with doilies or tucked into gift bags. They're innocently sweet, utterly inoffensive, and melt on the tongue beautifully. Russian tea cakes, as the name suggests,  are the ideal pairing for strong tea served with lemon or cream and sugar. Less traditionally, but just as deliciously, I encourage the adoption of the "Russian coffee cake" and also offering coffee or cappuccino as accompaniment.

Cake: it's what's for dinner

The Forbidden Fruit (Grapefruit Mascarpone Pound Cake)

I was trying to come up with something special for the holiday season, seeking a treat that was not just seasonally appropriate, but also a bit off the beaten path. It seems to me that stereotypical winter desserts always either go straight for the chocolate (not that I can blame them) or some variation of cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg. Those flavors are all well and good, but ever the iconoclast, I set my heart upon creating a grapefruit cake. Moistened with butter and mascarpone cheese, this rich cake allows the delicately sweet-tart perfume of grapefruit to bloom beautifully.

Sadly less pink than I'd hoped

To Drive the Cold Winter Away (French Onion Soup)

Jon, my father-in-law, has a French onion soup recipe that is famous throughout our family, and I was lucky enough to get my hands on it. Jon's recipes reflect the instinctive, free-form simplicity of a great home cook-a list of ingredients and a general idea rather than a rigid set of measurements. This is a large part of the mystique of historical recipes, which in addition to amazingly creative spelling, almost never do the math. "Take ye a vasty amount onions, and likewyse a potte full of stronge broth, and seethe it well over greate fyre" is all well and good, but to really guarantee an outcome, you need a formula. I always measure things out when first trying a new recipe or jotting down something for the blog. 

Meticulously measured

Winter Whiteout (White Chicken Cheddar Chili)

Also published in Williamsport Sun-Gazette.

I don't know about you, but after the holidays, I usually feel a little wiped out. If you've spent your cooking mojo with friends and family, or just have a busy week, a slow cooker is invaluable. Pinterest and the internet at large abound with slow cooker recipes with good reason, because this kitchen device is extremely versatile. It also lends itself to brewing up vast cauldrons of food, which should suit those with families, visitors, or bottomless appetites like mine. In this case, to ward off the winter chill, I decided to make chili.

Chili blanco

Simple is Elegant (Prosciutto Roasted Chicken with Winter Vegetables)

Greetings Ladies and Gents!

While J learned much of his culinary skills from Martha, my early years of cooking were mostly me experimenting with recipes taught to me by my mother. That said, over the past half dozen years or so, I've gotten much of my inspiration and style from a royalty in the cooking world: Ina Garten, Barefoot Contessa. While she is more than capable of making the most intricate of culinary delights, her guidance to creating amazing and memorable dishes is this: simple is elegant.

Simply elegant

Snap to It (Gingersnap Crusted Lemon Bars)

A long time ago, when we lived in Worcester, we made a habit of frequenting a little grocery called The Living Earth, especially because of it's amazing local and organic restaurant: Evo. Sunday brunch was our prime target, but I have to say the ultimate treat is the lemon bars they sell in the deli. Tender, tart, sweet, buttery, heady with the fragrance of fresh lemons... sheer perfection.

Can't hardly wait