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Dulce de Leche Oatmeal Crumb Bars
I give you the ultimate sweet and salty treat: a crumbly oat cookie smeared with rich and creamy dulce de leche and finished with a sprinkle of flake sea salt.
Now you don’t have to decide between a sweet or salty snack: these addicting oatmeal cookie bars combine the best of both!
I’ve been itching to adapt my Oatmeal Jam Bars like this for some time now, and finally hunkered down and did it. Not sure what took me so long because these bars are legit.
You’re welcome.
I tested both this oat version as well as a brown sugar shortbread (since it’s obvious that dulce de leche and shortbread were meant to be). But the oat version was the resounding winner: something about the crunchy texture of the oats and the optimal proportion of caramel to crumb was simply perfection.
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Why Croatia Needs to be on Your Bucket List
Croatia. Land of turquoise waters and rocky beaches, medieval walls and Roman ruins, towering mountains and majestic waterfalls. It truly is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.
We spent about 2 weeks in the region this past May, traveling with our good friends Phillip & Billy for part of the time, then continuing on our own for the rest.
The majority of our major international trips so far have been focused on just one or two big cities: Paris & Barcelona, Lisbon & Porto, Tokyo & Kyoto. But the nature of Croatia lends itself to a slightly different style of trip, mainly because the charm of the place is less in the cities and more in the small towns and the stunning landscapes between them. Even the bigger cities of Zagreb and Split aren’t the kind of cities you’d spend 5 or 7 days in, at least not without a car and a good number of day trips planned.
With that in mind, we divided our 11 nights in Croatia into 5 main destinations. (Technically we were gone for 14 nights, but the first two and the last nights were in Vienna, more of a long layover than anything, so I’ll exclude those nights from our general itinerary). This took a surprising amount of thought and planning on our part, and a lot more work finding accommodations in 5 different locations, but ultimately allowed for us to see a good bit of the country and make the most of our time there.
With so many different locations, each worthy of its own post, I figured I’d break up my documentation for this trip into multiple short posts rather than overload you with one giant photo dump (3500+ photos, oh boy!)
I thought I’d start with a general overview into our 12 day/11 night Croatia itinerary, why we chose to stay where and break it up the way we did. I’ll follow this post in the coming months with individual posts for each of the places we stayed, including restaurant and activity recommendations at that time. I’m hoping this format will prove the most helpful when it comes time to plan your own Croatia trip (which is hopefully very soon!)
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Funfetti Fours (Birthday Cake Petit Fours)
Traditional petit fours get a sprinkle of fun: tart apricot and raspberry jam sandwiched between layers of rich, almond pound cake dotted with rainbow sprinkles, all covered in a colorful poured fondant glaze.
These adorable confetti petit four cakes are as fun as they are delicious! Glazed with a traditional poured fondant, but decorated not-so-traditionally with colorful buttercream accents, rainbow sprinkles and edible gold leaf.
Funfetti petit fours… aka funfetti fours. Get it?
I often draw on wordplay as inspiration for my recipes, coming up with the name of the recipe well before I fiddle with flavors or processes. Case in point: strawciatella ice cream; strawbanero jam; ampersandwich cookies.
So I knew I wanted to make funfetti fours for some time now, I just needed to figure out how to make it happen.
(Also, Taylor suggested that next time I should make Tom Pettyfours. 😂 He gets me.)
The cake itself is a rich, almond pound cake. It’s quite dense, but you want a cake that will hold its own against the thick glaze. Since many petit fours include a layer of marzipan in the middle, I figured I’d kill two birds and make the cake itself basically marzipan cake (yum!) I added a generous amount of rainbow sprinkles to the cake to give it that funfetti effect.
In between the three thin layers of cake are two jam layers; I opted to do one layer of raspberry and one of apricot because I liked how the different colors looked. You could certainly use just one kind of jam, or even fill them with buttercream (although I really like the hint of tart fruit that the jam brings).
My favorite sprinkles for funfetti cakes are confetti quin sprinkles, as they hold their shape better when baked (nonpareils and jimmies tend to bleed) and they add a delightful bit of crunch to the final cake.
These Sweetapolita pastel quins are my current favorite, the pastel colors come through beautifully in the final cake.
Also, today happens to be Sweetapolita herself – Rosie’s birthday, so this sprinkle-filled confection seemed like a perfect way to celebrate! To celebrate, today only you’ll get a free 4oz “Love Rosie, xo” sprinkle mix on any order over $25. Also, don’t forget to use code LOVEANDOLIVEOIL15 to get 15% off your order any time!
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Spicy Garlic Dill Refrigerator Pickles
Sweet, salty, spicy, tangy: these quick refrigerator pickles have it all! Made with garden fresh dill, lots of pungent garlic, and a few chiles for extra spice.
Crisp, flavorful pickles like these make a great side for hot dogs or burgers, or you can even slice them and put them inside an epic grilled cheese, or batter and fry them for the ultimate sandwich topper.
I realized that I have recipes for spicy pickled peppers, pickled green tomatoes, quick pickled red onions… even homemade pickled ginger and pickled sweet cherries… but no recipe for plain old cucumber pickles, despite the fact that I make them on a regular basis all summer long.
Oh, the humanity!
So here it is, our ultra simple and infinitely customizable recipe for refrigerator pickles, with loads of garlic and fresh dill, and a few Thai chiles for a spicy kick (you can also use jalapeno or habanero peppers, or even red pepper flakes – like I said, infinitely customizable).
Refrigerator pickles are bar my favorite kind of pickles, since they stay extra fresh and crispy (heat-processed pickles, while they keep longer, are not nearly as crisp).
This recipe makes two pint jars (I like using wide-mouth jars as it is easier to get the pickles in and out).
The pickles are best after 24-48 hours in the fridge, but are good for up to 2 weeks.
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Cold Brew Peach Iced Tea
Sweet and perfectly peachy, you’ll want to keep this refreshing cold-brewed peach iced tea stocked and steeped in your fridge all summer long!
The cold brew method makes for a crisp and clean iced tea, combined with a sweet peach sugar syrup for the perfect hint of sweetness and fruity flavor. Also: for some grown up fun, add a splash of bourbon.
A peach-infused sugar syrup is what gives this tea its subtle peach flavor, basically water and sugar (I used organic unrefined sugar which has a more pronounced flavor than regular granulated sugar) simmered with fresh peaches. It’s very simple to make ahead of time; the syrup keeps remarkably well in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.
The hint of peach is just enough fruity flavor to grab your attention without overwhelming the true nature, both bitter and sweet, of the tea itself.
I tested both hot brew and cold brew methods to make iced tea, and the cold brew was clearly the winner (literally clearly – the hot-brewed-and-chilled tea was dark, bitter and unappealingly cloudy). The cold brew method is clear and crisp, the robust black tea flavor free of any excessive and undesirable bitterness.
The only downside to the cold brew method is it requires advanced planning: ideally you should let your iced tea steep for about 12 hours (if you plan to serve it beyond that, I recommend removing the tea bags after 12 hours to prevent the tea from getting bitter.)
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Clips & Quips: I’m Melting! Edition
Summer is here and the heat and humidity are not playing around. I keep telling myself I need to plan ahead and shoot my ice cream recipes in the winter when it’s cold out, but, alas, here I am trying to photograph ice cream in the 2.5 seconds before it melts.
I’ve got two frozen recipes in the works, one that’ll make your pistachio-loving heart go pitter patter, and another for the cookies ‘n cream fanatics among us. Stay tuned!
Tip: When shooting ice cream, freeze everything, including the serving bowl you’ll be using. I’ll also pre-scoop my ice cream and put the scoops on a pre-frozen plate (line with parchment). Put the scoops back in the freezer for an hour or so, then you can transfer them straight into the frozen serving dish to shoot.
Also? Have your setup prepped before the ice cream comes out of the freezer. Use ice cream stand ins (our cat has these round puff ball toys that are perfectly sized for scoops of ice cream) to fine tune your composition and camera settings. This way, when you actually have real ice cream in there, you can get your shot before it starts to melt.
Even with these strategies ice cream is still a total pain to shoot, especially in the summer, but that’s not going to stop me from continuing to share ice cream recipes. :)
If the heat is melting more than just your ice cream… you might benefit from a few heat-less recipes, like these Raspberry Mousse Tartlets or Peanut Butter Banana Cream Pie. After dessert (because it always comes first, right?) this Lychee Ceviche is seriously refreshing, as is this Tomato Watermelon Gazpacho.
I recently returned from an 8-day Alaskan cruise with my mom and sister, celebrating my mom’s 70th birthday (this was one of her bucket list items and who were we to deny her?!) It was an incredible trip, and extra special in that it was just the 3 of us girls. I didn’t share much from this trip on social, in fact I had posts scheduled out beforehand so you probably didn’t even notice I was gone. Why? Well, it wasn’t a work trip, first of all, but also because we had a measly 250 internet minutes to share between the 3 of us (oh, the horror!) That said, I still took a boatload (literally) of pictures (I mean, it’s such a beautiful place how could I not?!) and may end up share them in a post very soon. Just as soon as I get my Croatia posts finished (another beautiful place where I took way too many pictures). These travel posts take 10 times as long as any recipe post, I tell you! But while they’re tedious to write, I really loving having that visual record of our adventures to return to anytime I want. So I’ll keep doing them, despite the work that goes in to them.
I don’t often cross-promote my other persona here (indeed, I still consider myself a full time graphic designer and just a food blogger on the side), but I wanted to let you know that I’ve just released a set of media kit templates designed specifically for food, lifestyle and travel bloggers. They are created in Adobe InDesign, but I’m working on translating the templates to Canva as well (I’ve also included a set of video screencasts to walk you through the editing process). And coming soon: ebook and business card templates!
More shameless self-promotion… for a limited time get 15% off fruit notepads and jam ebooks with code QUIPS15!
(psst… be sure you click through and scroll to the bottom of this post for a sweet surprise!)
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White Chocolate-Stuffed Chocolate Cookies
These superb stuffed cookies are everything and then some: ultra rich and deeply chocolate with a surprise nugget of warm white chocolate hidden inside.
Best enjoyed warm right out of oven (but, let’s face it, more than palatable even when they’re cold), these cookies are nothing short of a dream. And yet, here they are, as real and as solid as the dishes in the sink (ugh, I’ll get to those later, I promise, I’m having a moment with a cookie right now don’t ruin it for me).
These incredible cookies were inspired by Van Stapele Koekmakerij in Amsterdam, a tiny little bakery that serves one and only one kind of cookie: a rich chocolate cookie stuffed with white chocolate. If you’re lucky enough to stop by when a batch has just come out of the oven, well, you can thank me later. It’s quite possibly the best cookie I’ve ever eaten (and that’s not something I say lightly).
So obviously I had to recreate it.
You might think that a fairly basic chocolate cookie stuffed with white chocolate would be rather simple, but you’d be wrong. It took me more tries than I care to admit to get these just right, mainly with regards to the chocolate flavor of the cookie itself.
My normal MO when it comes to cocoa powder is my trusty Cacao Barry Extra Brute. It’s by far my favorite cocoa powder and I use it pretty much everywhere, from cakes to brownies to hot cocoa.
But for whatever reason, in these cookies it came out tasting… a bit one-dimensional. It was missing that robust chocolate oomph, that well-rounded flavor and sigh-inducing intensity that I remembered so vividly in Amsterdam.
I tested a few different cocoa powders and ultimately decided that a mix of Valrhona natural cocoa powder with a bit of the Cacao Barry dutch-processed was the best. The natural cocoa powder, especially the Valrhona, has an incredibly rich and profound chocolate flavor. Natural or pure cocoa powder is slightly more acidic and higher in fat than Dutch-processed, and also more intense in flavor.
You can use all natural cocoa powder here if you want instead of a mix, but I implore you either way to splurge on the good stuff. It’s really worth it!
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Fennel and Arugula Salad with Candied Orange Peel
The perfect balance of sweet, spicy, and crunchy all in one bowl, this fennel and arugula salad won’t disappoint.
Just in case your salad game is getting a little bit stale, here’s another unique salad recipe to spice up your repertoire, complete with raw fennel, baby arugula, and ribbons of candied orange peel.
You might be thinking, two salads in a row? Did Lindsay bump her head or something?
What can I say, I must be in a salad kind of mood lately.
Of course, the fact that the farmers’ markets are booming doesn’t hurt – all that fresh produce is just too tempting.
This one is obviously completely different (but no less impressive) than the lettuce-less Cumin-spiced Beet Salad I posted two weeks ago (another recipe inspired by my farmers’ market finds).
While this one might be more of a conventional salad (seeing that it starts with a pile of greens and all) it’s by no means boring. Spicy arugula, crunchy raw fennel, and sweet candied orange peel create a trifecta of awesome (and awesome is not a word I often use in the same sentence as salad, so take note).
(And don’t worry, I’ve got plenty of sweet recipes coming soon to break up all this healthy stuff. I’m not dumb, I know why y’all are really here.)
The dressing is fresh and light, made with champagne vinegar, shallot and a bit of honey. After I photographed this I added in some orange zest for a bit of extra orange oomph and to tie the flavors together with the orange peel (I tried using orange juice, but it just doesn’t have the same bright tang as the lemon in this case). Totally optional though, the dressing is stellar without it.
This recipe makes enough dressing for a double batch; any left over can be easily refrigerated in a jar or airtight container for up to 2 weeks.
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