Brown Butter Banana Cake with Chocolate Fudge Frosting

I’d like to introduce you to the brown butter banana cake, your new BFF (or should I say, BBBCwCFF?) It’s surprisingly light for a banana cake, with the perfect balance of sweetness and ripe banana flavor that’s enhanced by toasty nuttiness of brown butter. Best of all, both the cake and frosting can be mixed by hand, no electric mixer needed.

The fudge frosting is deeply and intensely chocolate—made with both melted chocolate and cocoa powder—with a silky smooth texture and shiny finish that stays soft even after being refrigerated. It’s the perfect fudgy compliment to the moist and tender banana cake, without the overpowering sweetness of other frostings (no powdered sugar in sight!)

When it comes to developing recipes, which comes first, the cake or the frosting? Normally, for me, it’s the cake, but not here. No, this recipe started from the top—luscious swirls of deeply chocolate fudge frosting—and the cake soon followed.

Would you believe that this fudge frosting was a complete accident? I found myself with a few random bowls of ganache/fudge left from my candied orange fudge swirl ice cream recipe (getting a fudge swirl that stayed soft and chewy even when frozen solid took a few tries to get right).

Not wanting to waste the remnants, I combined the bowls of ganachey fudge and fudgey ganache, added a splash of cream, and whipped it with an electric mixer to smooth it all out. The result made a surprisingly delicious whipped fudge frosting, which I then slathered on top of a thrown-together-because-those-three-overripe-bananas-need-to-be-used-stat banana cake to bring to ceramics class, which my classmates promptly devoured.

But despite the accidental awesomeness that was the first test cake, I somehow found myself sitting on this recipe for upwards of a year. Why? I can’t quite explain it. At first it was just about not wanting to post two square-ish bakes in a row, or posting too many cake recipes back to back, but when I finally revisited it, enough time had passed that the accidental frosting didn’t quite pass my exacting standards. It was close, but I knew I could make it better.

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Buttered Popcorn Ice Cream (Eggless!)

Sweet, salty, buttery, and fabulous, this unique ice cream flavor will have you craving more! Made with an eggless ice cream base steeped with real buttered popcorn, then churned into a dreamy, ultra-creamy ice cream that’ll satisfy sweet and salty snackers alike!

Imagine the flavor of freshly popped popcorn drizzled in melted butter and generously sprinkled with sea salt. And then imagine that flavor transformed into a sweet, salty, and ultra creamy homemade ice cream. It might sound like strange magic—and, to be fair, the way the cream absorbs so much of the popcorn flavor kinda is—this frozen mashup needs to go on your to-make list this summer!

A few years ago Jeni’s had a limited edition ice cream flavor called Sun-Popped Corn.

It was a pint-sized miracle. Truly. And I know you’re skeptical right now, considering the horror that is the popcorn jelly bean (seriously, who thinks that tastes good?) but trust me when I say that Jeni’s magical popcorn ice cream tasted nothing like that artificially flavored abomination.

I’ve been wishing and hoping it’d come back for years, always checking the seasonal flavors when summer rolls around, but I’ve yet to see it again (there is a caramel popcorn flavor this summer, but it’s not quite the same).

So, rather than pining for this elusive flavor for yet another summer, I decided I’d make my own instead.

And let me tell you, it turned out way better than I ever could have imagined.

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Fresh Peach Pie with Vanilla Bean

What does summer taste like? I’d argue it tastes something like this pie: bright and vibrant and bursting with fresh peach flavor, perfumed with vanilla bean, and encased in a buttery, flaky pastry crust. If that’s not summer in a pie crust, I don’t know what is.

Fresh vanilla bean is the secret to making this pie extra special, in the form of a freckled vanilla sugar that’s used in 3 different places: the fresh peach filling, generously sprinkled on top of the crust, and mixed in to the freshly whipped cream as a finishing touch (the icing on the pie, if you will.)

For a fruit pie to knock my socks off, it really has to be something special. I’m talking about eyes-rolling-back-in-your-head level good. And that’s a characteristic I rarely ascribe to warm fruit. I typically prefer more robust, chocolate-filled desserts to a fruit one, but this peach pie—with its balanced sweetness and visible vanilla bean freckles—has my full attention.

Even Taylor admitted it was passable (high praise from the man who claims a mediocre cake is preferable to a good pie).

The whole thing is bursting with bright and vibrant peach flavor and nestled in a buttery, flaky crust, and topped with a generous dollop of freshly whipped vanilla bean whipped cream for good measure (vanilla bean ice cream would also be acceptable).

The distinguishing feature of this peach pie, however, is the vanilla sugar, which gets incorporated into every component of this pie (filling, crust, and whipped cream on top). It’s what takes this pie from ordinary to the best peach pie—scratch that, best, any kind of pie—I’ve ever had. And that’s not hyperbole, it’s the gosh darn truth.

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Introducing: Fresh Baked Puns

It’s no mystery that I love me a good food pun… if you follow me on Instagram or if you read this blog with any regularity that fact is glaringly obvious.

At this point I have a notebook filled with pages and pages of food puns.

It’s one of those things I’ve always thought I should do more with, and in fact, people have told me on multiple occasions (when I posted a particularly good pun), “you should put that on a t-shirt!”

And, well…

I’m finally doing just that!

Introducing… Fresh Baked Puns, a new line of punderful tees, accessories, and apparel with a flair for flavor and fashion. Featuring original punny illustrations (hand drawn by me!) and screen-printed on soft cotton tees with eco-friendly inks, these shirts are guaranteed to make your outfit the main course.

Our grand flan, er, plan, is to dish out delicious new designs quarterly, and our first design drops… NOW!

Are you ready?

More importantly, are you hungry?

The ultimate shirt for snack-lovers features bold pop-art-inspired cheese crackers, and hot pink lettering reading “Snaccident Prone”. You know, if you’ve ever found yourself accidentally consuming most of the box, bag, or batch without realizing it.

Shirts are screen printed locally in Nashville, TN with eco-friendly inks, providing a high quality design that lasts through numerous washes.

And even better news, we’re offering an exclusive 15% off discount when you preorder. We have both women’s and unisex shirt styles available in the preorder (all soft 100% cotton shirts in a cool vintage white color), but depending on how the preorder goes we may not stock both shirt styles after that, so be sure to preorder now to guarantee you get the size/style you want! (See preorder page for sizing information).

Don’t delay, preorder yours today!

Preorders close on August 14th, and shirts will ship the first week of September.

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Homemade Gummy Peach Rings (made with Real Fruit and Gelatin)

These homemade peach rings are bursting with bright, summery peach flavor—made with real fruit and set with gelatin for that perfect bouncy, stretchy gummy texture.

Any gummy candy lover is surely familiar with peach rings, the bi-colored peach-flavored rings of jellied delight. And now you can make them at home using real fruit for a fresh peach flavor that pops.

Back on my candy-making train… this year the focus is peach, most notably, a homemade version of the classic peach ring.

Unlike my previous strawberry and raspberry gummy recipes, this recipe is gelatin based instead of pectin; my ultimate goal was to achieve the ultra stretchy, bouncy texture of a gummy bear, and you simply can’t do that with pectin alone. (I’m curious what a combo pecin-and-gelatin gummy might be, but that’s another recipe for another day).

The results are well worth the many rounds of tests it took me to get there, with a bright and peachy flavor and a stretchy texture that’s incredibly satisfying.

Do plan to give yourself a solid 2-4 days to complete the whole process, as the gummies need plenty of time to set and then to cure. That said, it’s only about 60 minutes of total active time involved, even if it is spread out over the course of a few days.

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Blackberry Butter Cake

Tender and buttery and bursting with pockets of ripe summer berries, this blackberry butter cake is what I’d call an ideal snack cake—a snackberry cake, if you will—that’s easy to prepare and even easier to eat.

Sometimes simple is best, and this blackberry cake is proof in its perfection, no fancy frostings or fillings needed! It comes together quickly with minimal time and effort (remembering to get your ingredients out ahead of time is probably the hardest part), and the result is a casual yet impressive muffin-like cake that’s a perfect way to use up those summer berries.

The recipe is loosely based on my trusty sour cream coffee cake recipe, with slightly different proportions to accommodate the berries in an 8-inch square pan. And hey, if you want to call it a coffee cake and eat it for breakfast, I’m not going to judge you (it’s basically a muffin masquerading as a cake).

Using sour cream is really my favorite way to get a moist and flavorful butter cake; the fat adds moisture and flavor, and the acidity balances out the sugar. (Psst, sour cream also makes for an awesome chocolate cake too).

The dusting of granulated sugar on top makes for a delightfully crispy finish, without the need for a separate crumb mixture (as much as I love a crumb topping, I don’t love the extra dishes it creates). In fact, this cake can practically be prepared in a single bowl, either the bowl of a stand mixer or a large mixing bowl with an electric mixer.

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Strawberry Elderflower Tiramisu (with Eggless Mascarpone Cream)

A cross between classic tiramisu and a springy strawberry shortcake, this strawberry tiramisu has a dreamy eggless mascarpone cream and a splash of elderflower flavor to bring out the fragrant, floral notes of the berries.

The mascarpone whipped cream is eggless, meaning no concerns about raw eggs nor fussy tempering custards! It’s simply whipped cream stabilized with mascarpone, making for a fluffy, cloud-like cream in between layers of softened ladyfinger cookies and jammy strawberries. (Note that ladyfinger cookies DO contain eggs, so this recipe isn’t completely egg-free, just the cream part is).

The tiramisu renaissance is upon us. Sure there will always be the sticklers that insist that it’s not really tiramisu unless it’s got espresso, mascarpone cream and cocoa powder, but I like to take a looser interpretation. Really, anything that involves ladyfinger cookies layered with mascarpone cream can be called a tiramisu in my opinion.

In the past I’ve made an orange marmalade variation on the classic, swapping the coffee for orange juice, marmalade, and Grand Marnier liqueur (spoiler alert: it’s wonderful).

But here I wanted something a bit more… springy.

And what’s more springy than ripe spring strawberries, picked straight from the field?

This strawberry tiramisu features the layers of ladyfinger cookies and mascarpone cream like the classic version (though this mascarpone is lighter and made without eggs), but that’s where the similarities end.

Instead of espresso, we’re using a loose strawberry jam that’s been spiked with a bit of St. Germain elderflower liqueur, and an extra brush of elderflower syrup for added flavor and moisture.

The classic dusting of cocoa powder? It’s now a vibrant flurry of freeze dried strawberry powder dusting the tops of the mascarpone mountains.

What you get is part tiramisu, part strawberry shortcake: an elegant dessert that’s entirely delectable. It’s impressive but surprisingly easy to throw together, and throw together well ahead of your dinner party to free up your time for other tasks (and in fact, the make-ahead nature of tiramisu is not a can, rather a must—allowing at least 3-4 hours or more for the layers to soften and meld is non-negotiable, overnight is even better).

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