The Best of 2024

Farewell, 2024 (or as I like to call it, 2020 version 4.0). Hard to believe another year has come and gone, and yet here we are again looking at the yearly roundup of the best recipes published this year!

TLDR: this year was the year of kittens and pistachios.

We published only 28 recipes this year, even less than last year. Why so few? Well, as in previous years I’ve been focusing more on quality over quantity, testing recipes more times and spending more time writing in-depth, helpful posts with detailed process images (and also a few videos!)

But let’s be honest… the real reason(s) there hasn’t been nearly as many new recipes this year? Kittens. Blame the kittens.

It’s true, we started fostering kittens through our local animal shelter this summer and have since had 9 kittens (and 1 cat) come through on their way to their forever homes, including a litter of three 10-day old bottle babies (whew boy that’s a lot of work!) and a mama cat and her 5 adorably stripey babies who we named after mushrooms (ahem—Meowshrooms). Be sure to check out my dedicated kitten instagram account @loveandlittlecats for more cuteness, and while we don’t have any kittens at the moment there will definitely be more come spring.

The Meowshrooms

Bruce Stringsteen

Mama Bella, Shiitake & Oyster

Colby Jack

Daisy Mewchanan

Button & Oyster

Oyster & Shiitake

Enoki (Bah Humbug!)

Bruce and Lucy

(Psst! That adorable little grumpy santa up there is Enoki, and if you want to get a head start on next year’s Christmas cards you can purchase them—plus one of the whole gang—in the L&OO shop!)

Anyway. I’ve done a best of post every year for the past 15 years, and want to continue that tradition, if only just because it’s fun to look back and reminisce.

These year-end posts are always interesting, seeing which recipes you all loved the most and how they differed from the ones I was most excited about (although to be honest, I don’t usually post about recipes I’m not excited about.)

(Click through to see which recipe came out on top!)

(more…)

from Love and Olive Oil https://ift.tt/V4ksJvz

Chewy Chocolate Molasses Cookies

Chewy, chocolatey and perfectly spiced, these chocolate molasses cookies are the perfect addition to your holiday cookie boxes. With a deep chocolate flavor and chewy, fudgy texture with a delicate crunch of granulated sugar on the outside, they are sure to become a fast favorite!

The secret to extra chewy, fudgy cookies that stay soft for days is threefold: brown sugar instead of white, an extra egg yolk, and melted butter instead of creamed—melted butter also means no electric mixer is required (though you can certainly use one if you like!)

Soft, chewy molasses cookies are some of my favorite holiday cookies, but I always lament the lack of chocolate. Personally, I love the combination of gingerbread and chocolate (it’s a combo I’ve used multiple times before with delightful results). So I figured, why not take the perfectly chewy, crinkly molasses cookie and make it chocolate?

The result is nothing short of decadent: an intensely flavored, satisfyingly chewy cookie spiked with sultry molasses flavor, fragrant ginger and cinnamon spices, plus a intense hit of cocoa powder. Oh, and a pinch of instant espresso powder to enhance the bittersweet flavor of the chocolate even more (it’s such a small amount that the cookies don’t actually taste like coffee, I promise, though you can certainly leave it out if you wish).

(more…)

from Love and Olive Oil https://ift.tt/Cfx85FT

Spiced Persimmon Bread

Moist and flavorful and perfectly spiced, this persimmon quick bread is made with extra ripe Hachiya persimmons for a unique fall bake that can be enjoyed morning, afternoon or night!

Everyone is familiar with banana bread and pumpkin bread, but have you ever had persimmon bread? It might taste a little like you snuck a banana into a loaf of pumpkin bread, but the unique autumnal flavor of persimmon plays beautifully with seasonal fall spices (dare I say that persimmon spice is the new pumpkin spice?)

Would you believe I’ve been working on this recipe for 5 years?

Indeed, it’s hard to test a recipe whose star ingredient is only available a few weeks every year (and can sometimes take a few weeks to fully ripen at that).

For the past 5 years, I’d buy a dozen persimmons as soon as they appeared in the grocery store, then wait patiently for them to ripen to be baked into lush, fragrant persimmon bread. Unfortunately, by the time I’d baked them all into loaf after loaf of good-but-still-not-perfect persimmon bread, the short season would be over and I could not get any more for further tests. So I would dog-ear that page in my recipe notebook to try again the next year. And the next… and the next… and, well, now you see why it’s been 5 years!

(more…)

from Love and Olive Oil https://ift.tt/1U67J9T