We started from this recipe on epicurious, added some cinnamon and then made up our own molasses frosting! Yum!
Ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar OR sucanat
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
8 tablespoons unsalted butter, chilled
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1/2 cup currants, cranberries or raisins
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1 tablespoon molasses
cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and ginger to taste
Adapted from When Harry Met Salad Check out the blog for some more gorgeous photographs!
Ingredients:
¾ cup sugar OR sucanat
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons dried lavender
1¾ cup whole wheat flour (or a mixture of ww & white)
¼ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
12 tablespoon (1½ sticks) cold butter cubes
1 egg yolk
½ teaspoons vanilla extract
Laurie inspired this creation with her talk of having a slice of cheese with your apple pie. After gushing about the pleasures of combining sweet and salty, we asked the obvious question… why not just put both sweet and salty in one pie? Here’s the before and after. We fully baked the apple pie and then broiled the organic white cheddar cheese on top to get it nice and gooey!
While we were in Kauai we overdosed on these Killer Bars that we would buy at Banana Joe’s almost everyday. Once we got back we made them for a baby shower. They’re actually made by Country Moon Rising Bakery, but we found a recipe that we used as a starting point on planetgreen.com.
Ingredients:
1 stick butter
1 package of graham cracker crumbs (equals about 2 cups)
1.5 cups organic chocolate chips
1/2 cup butterscotch chips
1 cup shredded coconut
1 cup macadamia nuts, chopped
15 oz sweetened condensed milk
We’ve been super obsessed with lemons recently, so Tami made up this fresh dessert! Top with strawberries and chocolate sauce for an uber-decedant treat! Cut back on the amount of lemon juice for a more subtle flavor!
Crust Ingredients:
2 (generous) cups graham cracker crumbs
1 stick melted butter
1 tablespoon lemon zest
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
Cheesecake Ingredients:
16 ounces cream cheese
2 large eggs
1 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons lemon zest
6 tablespoons lemon juice
Straight from the Esalen Cookbook. Healthy, moist, sweet (but not too sweet) and yummy! Perfect straight out of the oven, just cool enough to handle with butter melted over it!
Ingredients:
5 tablespoons butter, softened
1.25 cups sucanat
2 eggs
1 cup mashed ripe banana
1/3 cup buttermilk
1 cup unbleached flour
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 cup unsweetened coconut
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
chopped walnuts for topping (or any other type of nut, if desired)
Laurie surprised us with this scrumptious dessert that she discovered on marthastewart.com. You can make the whole process easier by using a box mix and way more fun by using a creme brule torch to brown the meringue.
All right. Here they are. The world famous (infamous?) cookies… they’ve been called snickerdoodles, sugar cookies and even the “crack” cookies. These are the cookies that people eat so many of they literally make themselves sick. We take no responsibility for stomach aches. If you can’t control yourself, don’t make them!
These cookies have literally been passed down from generation to generation… with no actual instructions, just the ingredient list, the temperature and cooking time. We’ve included some helpful tips to get the softest, most addicting cookies possible!
Ingredients:
Originally drooled over these on foodporndaily.com and then every so slightly adapted the recipe from kitchenrunway.com to our needs. Which simply means a little more lemon zest & juice!
Crust Ingredients:
1 C of unsalted butter, at room temperature
½ C sugar
2 C flour
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon Meyer lemon zest
Filling Ingredients:
6 extra large eggs, at room temperature
3 cups sugar
2 tablespoons grated Meyer lemon zest (4 to 6 lemons)
1 cup freshly squeezed Meyer lemon juice
1 cup all-purpose flour
powder sugar for dusting
From our guest baker/blogger Laurie. Adapted from a recipe she found on epicurious.com, we totally love her version–just the perfect amount of sweet. We were all talking about second helpings before we even finished our first slice! Yum!
Cake Ingredients
1 1/2 cups cake flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
2/3 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 Golden Delicious apple, peeled, cored, finely chopped (about 3/4 cup)
Apple Ingredients
6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) unsalted butter
1/3 cup (packed) dark brown sugar
2 8-ounce Golden Delicious apples, peeled, halved, cored, cut into 1/4-inch-thick slices
Find full instructions on epicurious.com
These intense brownies came from our desire to fuse two love affairs: chocolate and mint!
The first iteration of these brownies started with a single bar of Lindt Dark Chocolate Mint chopped up super fine and mixed into the batter. While that version was pretty good, it just wasn’t minty enough. This time we not only found normal Andes, we found a conveniently pre-chopped up bag of Andes, which saved some prep time. So with mint mixed in and turned into a frosting, we’re finally satisfied with these brownies!
It’s probably the only time you’ll see a box mix on our blog; but Ghirardelli’s are so phenomenal there’s really no reason to waste time making brownies from scratch!
Ingredients:
Box mix of Ghirardelli brownies
1 egg
1/3 cup water
1/3 cup canola oil, butter, coconut oil or your prefered oil
1 bag chopped Andes Mints (can generally be found in baking aisle with chocolate chips)
1 box of whole Andes Mints
These are the kind of cookies that you eat and then you can’t stop talking about how good they are. They’re SO good. Really. It’s hard to explain how a cookie can be so good. Like, seriously. The only reason you’d regret trying them is because you can’t stop eating them. Because they’re SO good.
Originally seen on foodporndaily.com and then adapted from hotpolkadot.com.
Ingredients:
1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 cup demerara sugar
2 eggs
2 cup flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
2 cups 60% chocolate chips
1 cup finely chopped semi-sweet chocolate
These muffins can be made as healthy as you want… use all sprouted whole wheat flour instead of a mixture of wheat and white, don’t add the topping to cut out more sugar (in the form of honey), use whole milk or lowfat milk… there are lots of ways to customize this recipe!
Muffin Ingredients:
1 egg
1/2 cup coconut oil
1/4 cup raw honey
2/3 cup flour
2/3 cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup whole milk
1 1/2 cups cubed fresh bananas
Topping Ingredients:
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
2 tablespoons oats
1 tablespoon raw honey
1 tablespoon coconut oil
The most time consuming part of these cookies is unwrapping all the Andes Mints. SO worth the effort though!
Ingredients:
1 cups butter
2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 cups granulated sugar
1 cups brown sugar
2.5 cups blended oatmeal
.5 tsp. salt
8 oz. Andes Mints, unwrapped and chopped into chuncks
2 eggs
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. vanilla
Our first recipe from food.com. It went really well with meatloaf, though not very many of the rolls actually made it to the table! They were pretty easy for homemade bread too… we might just make them again to go with tomorrow’s turkey!
Ingredients:
1 cup sourdough starter
1 1/2 cups warm water
1 tablespoon yeast
1 tablespoon salt
2 tablespoons white sugar OR 2 tablespoons brown sugar OR sucanat
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 -4 cups flour (we used half whole wheat, half bread flour)
butter, melted
Ingredients:
2 cups luke warm water
1/3 cup sourdough starter
1 1/4 cups unbleached bread flour
3 cups semolina flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup pumpkin seeds
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
Sourdough Starter recipe taken directly from the Esalen cookbook!
Ingredients:
2 teaspoons of active dry yeast
2 cups warm water
2 cups whole wheat flour
Instructions:
Mix the ingredients in a glass, plastic or ceramic bowl using a wooden spoon
(Don’t use metal, it will react with the fermentation)
Cover the bowl with a plate and leave at 65 to 70 F for 4 days or until small bubble appear
The starter will smell like sourdough
Keep your started in a glass or plastic jar
If you use it every couple days you can keep it at room temperature
If you use it less often than that, keep it in the fridge to slow its growth
As you use the started for baking replenish the starter with equal parts flour and water
This way you’ll always have a bit of old starter that’s already cultured
Sometimes the best discoveries come out of the silliest mistakes! It turns out that if you leave the white flour out entirely and then bake as directed you get a really AMAZING ice cream topping. Like really good. Just scrape it off the tray and right on to your ice cream!
Ingredients:
1 1/2 cube margarine
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup white flour
1/2 cup wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
dash of salt
rasins, if desired
Here’s our declaration of the week: we’re going to cook our way through the Esalen Cookbook!
It’s not quite as ambitious as the Julia Child cookbook, but it should be a yummy challenge! So far we love everything we’ve tried from the cookbook and are excited to sample everything! Just a note: while these are healthy, mouth-watering recipes they are not generally quick; so we’ll make sure to mix it up with some less time-intense ideas!
We hope you enjoy our culinary journey, we sure will!!!
Ingredients:
1 large yellow onion
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 medium yams
8 ounces artichoke hearts in water
1 3/4 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1.5 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1.5 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
pinch cayenne pepper
1 cup unsalted butter
2.5 cups Asiago, grated
1/2 pound crumbled blue cheese
2 tablespoons chopped sage
There are a couple options when making these cookies… you can make them the healthy way or the good way! We’re all for healthy desserts, but this time the healthy option just doesn’t measure up to the white flour and sugar version! We made them with sucanat & whole wheat flour and then sugar & white flour. There was no contest. The sugar & white flour version has a much smoother consistency, though if you were only presented with the sucanat and whole wheat flour version you probably wouldn’t complain… they just can’t hold their own in a comparison.
Two warnings:
#1 These cookies are super addicting!
#2 We’ve made these cookies without the chocolate chips and had friends ask why we wasted our time not putting chocolate chips in!
Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter
1 1/2 cup sugar OR sucanat
1 egg
1 cup canned pumpkin
1 tsp vanilla
2 1/2 cup flour OR whole wheat pastry flour OR a mixture of the two
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup+ Ghiradelli chocolate chips (optional)
We found this recipe here, but made just a couple substitutions and upped the amount of spices.
Muffins Ingredients:
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup cornmeal
1/2 cup oats
1/4 cup sugar OR sucanat
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon allspice
1 cup buttermilk (or make your own with 1 cup whole milk with 1 tablespoon vinegar)
1/2 cup mashed, roasted butternut squash (or pumpkin puree, if you prefer)
2 large eggs
1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1/4 cup yogurt
Topping Ingredients:
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/3 cup oats
1/4 cup brown sugar OR sucanat
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1 tablespoon whole wheat flour
1/4 cup melted butter
Ingredients:
3 cups flour (we used 1/2 unbleached all-purpose & 1/2 whole wheat pastry)
2 tablespoons non-aluminum baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons butter — frozen and grated
1 cup buttermilk (we made our own by adding 1 tablespoon vinegar to 1 cup of whole milk)
melted butter or buttermilk for brushing on the tops
We were so excited to make this cheesecake that we forgot to take pictures when we started! Whoops! The original recipe came from Epicurious–we left some things out, tried the pecan topping but couldn’t get it right, so what follows is our version! The cheesecake also got ravaged at the party we took it to before we could snap any respectable pictures. So you’re going to have to take our word for it that it turned out beautifully!
Crust Ingredients
2 cups gingersnap cookie crumbs
(we only had one cup of crispy store bought cookies, so we used our soft molasses cookies for the second cup)
1+ teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 stick unsalted butter, melted
Filling Ingredients
4 8-ounce packages cream cheese, room temperature
1.5 cups sugar or sucanat
3+ tablespoons all purpose flour
1.5+ teaspoons ground cinnamon
1+ teaspoon ground ginger
4 large eggs
1 15-ounce can solid pack pumpkin
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
From the Esalon Cookbook! We can’t wait to try more things out of this cookbook!
Piecrust
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1.25 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoons sucanat
1 cup cold butter
1/2 cup ice water
Pie Filling
6 cups cored , peeled apples, sliced into 1/4 inches slices
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/4 cup sucanat OR honey
2 teaspoons cinnamon
2 tablespoons unbleached all-purpose flour
1/3 cup maple syrup
Maple Pecan Crumb Topping
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/3 cup whole pastry flour
1/4 cup sucanat
1/3 cup rolled oats
1 teaspoon cinnamon
3 tablespoons maple syrup
1/2 cup chopped pecans
Crust:
3 cups all-purpose flour (we did 1/2 whole wheat pastry flour and 1/2 white flour)
1 tablespoon sugar or succanat
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
20 tablespoons (2 1/2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
4 to 5 tablespoons ice-cold water
Filling:
3 pounds ripe peaches (approximately)
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 cup blueberries
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1/3 cup (packed) light-brown sugar OR succanat
1/4 cup granulated sugar OR succanat OR honey
1 packet Stevia
1/4 cup all-purpose flour OR whole wheat pastry flour
1 large egg white, lightly beaten
2 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
2 tablespoons heavy cream
