I tried making creme caramel for the first time, from Tom Douglas’ recipe in Seattle Kitchen (if you’ve ever been to one of his restaurants, this is almost always on the menu, along with coconut creme pie). Ten egg yolks, four cups of heavy cream, with sugar and vanilla. Serves 8. Yes, it was every bit as rich as it sounds.

I have no pictures of the final product. We were able to unmold the custards, with some difficulty, but they all got eaten, practically within seconds. Then people took the emptied ramekins, poured Cardamaro inside, and scraped them out with spoons. There was no remaining evidence.

You may have noticed by now that I don’t make a lot of sweets – I honestly don’t have much of a sweet tooth, and when I do crave dessert it’s usually chocolate chip cookies. One type of dessert I do go for, however, is custard. Whether it’s an old fashioned cup custard, a fancy crème brûlée, or a pear custard pie, I love the creamy tartness of it.

I had had a piece of plain custard pie – no fruit - a few years ago when we happened across the Pie Lady’s shop in Blackwater, a tiny town in central Missouri. It was incredible, and I always said I was going to make it at home – then, of course, never did. But I recently became aware of the existence of something called chess pie. A plain, very sweet custard pie, it’s a classic Southern dessert often made with cornmeal and lemon, but sometimes buttermilk. I had buttermilk in the fridge this week, and decided to see what I could do with it.

After some hunting, I found that I had a few recipes for chess pie, buttermilk and otherwise, but I decided on this version I found at npr.org because it had adjustments for the less aggressive sweet tooth. It doesn’t have cornmeal, though, so I might need to try it again replacing the flour with corn. It was one of the easiest pies I ever made – once I had the crust ready, I just needed to whisk all the ingredients together and pour them into the shell. The hard part turned out to be waiting a whole hour for the pie to bake, as it filled the house with golden buttery smells.

It puffed up a lot during baking, then settled into a lovely crusty smoothness. We served it with fresh local blueberries, which perfectly suited the sweet-tart-butteriness of the pie.

Buttermilk Chess Pie

Borrowed from Natalie Y. Moore on npr.org.

This is the only version I’ve made so far – next time I’m substituting cornmeal for the flour. For a more traditional, sweeter version, omit one egg and scale the buttermilk back to 1 cup. A little lemon zest would probably not go amiss here, either.

You could use a boughten unbaked crust here, but I used my usual pie dough approach of 1 cup flour, 2 Tbsp butter, 2 Tbsp lard, a pinch of salt, and ice water.

• 4 eggs
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 tablespoons flour, plus a little for dusting
• ½ cup melted butter
• 1 ½ cup buttermilk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 unbaked 9-inch pie shell

Preheat oven to 325°.

Beat the eggs and add sugar and flour. Then add melted butter and mix well. Whisk in the buttermilk and vanilla.

Dust the unbaked pie shell with a little bit of flour. Pour batter into shell, and then sprinkle a little more flour on top.

Bake at 325° until the custard is set and the pie is golden on top, approximately 1 hour. Let cool before serving.

How about something sweet ? This confection, which I’ve known about as long as I’ve known my husband (that would be…19 years or so, yikes), is no longer something I can eat, as it has almonds – but I remember it fondly from our college days (when he made it recently for a work potluck he got roundly scolded for making something his wife couldn’t eat). It’s been handwritten in the back of our old Moosewood Cookbook forever, along with the Sour Cream Coffeecake and the Red Bell Pepper Pesto. I hadn’t realized the story behind the recipe’s name until recently, so I asked him to write a little about it: 

It’s amazing how one rarely questions the things with which one has grown up. Take this dessert. Chocolatey and creamy, it’s almost a mousse, but then there are the ground almonds, giving it a firmer texture and a little bit of gritty crunch before it dissolves. That’s not a mousse; it’s caribou. Or at least that’s what we called it in my family.

Only when I got into cooking and baking in college and begged the recipe from my mother did I discover that it had another name – La Reine de Saba (the Queen of Sheba). Once again, I didn’t question the name. I had suspected that caribou was not the actual name, and La Reine de Saba sounded reasonable.

Except that this dessert isn’t like any of the other versions of La Reine de Saba that I have found. Those versions all have eggs, and most have at least a little bit of flour, yielding a dense, fudgy cakelike product. My family’s version is definitely not fudgy or cakelike. But it is mighty tasty.

Caribou (Reine de Saba)

Melt:

• 12 oz chocolate chips
• 4 oz German sweet chocolate
• 1 stick unsalted butter

then add:

• 4 oz ground almonds
• 2 Tbsp Creme de Cacao, Grand Marnier, Tuaca or other liqueur

Cool.

Whip 1 cup cream. Fold it into the chocolate mixture. Scrape into a buttered 1 qt casserole and chill 2-3 hours. Cut into squares and serve. Getting the first piece out is always hard – better eat that one.

We made this cake for my grandfather’s 97th birthday. I’m not going to write down the recipe for it, because you really should just go buy Dorie Greenspan’s book Baking: From My Home to Yours, and make it out of that (it’s the one on the cover, with cake crumbs patted all over the outside). I do recommend our one embellishment, which was to stuff the frosting layers with fresh raspberries, and have lots of additional raspberries available to scatter over the top. Raspberries + chocolate cake + marshmallow creme frosting. Oh, yes.

It was a bit of a messy dessert, as the marshmallow frosting got soft and melty in the sun, and the raspberries were so ripe they turned people’s hands crimson. But it’s not like that was a real problem.

Here’s something a little different. I wanted to make a pie, but couldn’t decide what kind (pear? apple? brown butter cheesecake?), so I started flipping through a few baking books. What caught my eye was a recipe for “Warm Cranberry Crumble Tart” in The Art and Soul of Baking, one of the books I brought home from the International Food Blogger’s Conference last spring. Festive, seasonal and something I’d never thought of trying – perfect.

In some ways, this tart is kind of odd. The cranberry-orange flavor is so strongly associated in my mind with turkey that I find it hard to remember I’m eating dessert. But it goes great with vanilla ice cream (especially homemade), which makes up for the fact that the tart isn’t very sweet on its own. The more I ate, the more I liked it.

I made this with my usual Joy of Cooking all-butter pie crust, but it might be better with more of a shortbread crust, or a pressed-in cracker or nut crust. More experimentation, I think, is called for.

Cranberry Crumble Tart

adapted from The Art and Soul of Baking by Cindy Mushet and Sur La Table

Cranberry Tart:

• 1 prebaked tart shell, your choice
• 10 oz cranberries, fresh or thawed
• 1/3 cup sugar
• zest of one orange
• 2 tsp flour

Crumble Topping:

• 1/2 stick butter
• 1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
• 1/2 cup flour

Preheat the oven to 350°.

Roughly chop half the cranberries, then combine all of them in a bowl with the sugar, zest and flour. Spread this mixture into the tart shell.

For the crumble, mix together the sugar and flour, then work in the butter either with your fingers or in a processor, until you have a rough sandy texture. Sprinkle this over the tart.

Bake 40 minutes or until the berries are bubbling up around the edges and the crumble is turning golden. Serve with vanilla ice cream, and perhaps a glass of chilled orange muscat. Leftovers keep well for several days, wrapped and chilled.

When I first brought home a library copy of David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop (shortly before we bought our own copy – it didn’t take long), one of the very first recipes we opened it to was this one: a custard-based ice cream with orange zest and crushed Sichuan peppercorns, wow! Jon’s been wanting to make it ever since, and we finally got our chance. We had friends over (fresh ice cream wants an audience) and made Chinese pork ribs and scallion breads, followed by this ice cream for dessert.

It was amazing: rich and creamy, with a deep aroma of fresh oranges, with each bite finishing on a tingle of Sichuan pepper. I can only imagine what it would be like with really fresh, numbing peppercorns.

Also, since it called for the zest of four whole oranges, we had a lovely excuse to have fresh squeezed orange juice the next morning.

Orange-Sichuan Pepper Ice Cream

adapted from Perfect Scoop: Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, and Sweet Accompanimentsby David Lebovitz

• 3 Tbsp Sichuan peppercorns
• 1 1/2 cups whole milk
• 1 1/2 cups heavy cream
• 1 cup sugar
• 4 oranges
• 6 large egg yolks

Coarsely crush the peppercorns in a mortar. Put them in a saucepan with the milk, ½ cup of the cream, and the sugar, and heat until warm. Zest the oranges directly into the pan. Once warm, cover, remove from the heat and let steep for one hour. After steeping, warm it back up.

Pour the rest of the cream into a bowl. Set a strainer over it.

In a bowl, whisk the egg yolks. Slowly pour the warm milk mixture in, whisking all the time, then pour it all back into the saucepan. Stir over medium heat until it thickens and coats your spatula. Pour through the strainer into the cream and stir. Cool over an ice bath and refrigerate until ready to run the ice cream maker. Freeze as directed.

David recommends serving this with a red wine-poached rhubarb compote - I think we shall have to try this when our rhubarb comes up. But we ate it straight and it was sublime.

We were well and truly snowed in last weekend (still are, pretty much), and we did what most people do when stuck at home with a full refrigerator – we threw a dinner party and baked a cake. To be more accurate, my husband baked, and I took pictures and fussed around on the computer and made milk-braised pork and buttermilk mashed potatoes. The pork was good, but it was the tiramisu cake that really got the eye-rolling and moaning reactions from our dinner guests.

The cake is really just a showier presentation of tiramisu. It consisted of two layers of relatively plain sweet vanilla cake, soaked with espresso syrup, sandwiched around a layer of chopped dark chocolate and a swirl of sweetened mascarpone, then frosted with more mascarpone mixed with more of the espresso syrup. It was good. Really, really good. Sweet boozy coffee creamy goodness.

The original recipe is from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking From My Home to Yours, but you can get more pictures and the full set of instructions here. The only things we did differently were to bake the cake in two 8 inch cake pans instead of 9 inch, so the layers were a bit thicker, and to make a bit of extra syrup (although the cake turned out so moist, we didn’t need all of it).

And we still have two slices in the fridge. Happy Christmas Eve to us!

I used to really hate figs, but I thought I was overcoming the problem: I’ve had several restaurant salads with fresh figs and goat cheese that I really liked, so I figured my tastes were finally maturing. However, it does not appear to be a complete cure as yet. This is one of the only things we’ve made from The Perfect Scoop that hasn’t been a complete success – ah, well. I don’t know if it was just us or if the figs weren’t quite ripe yet – the ice cream just tasted like a cold fig newton, kind of vegetal and strange.

The fresh Brown Turkey figs were awful pretty, though.

Having a certain hankering for chocolate cupcakes, combined with a need to take dessert in to work, resulted in a flurry of baking at our house. I had fully intended to do the baking myself, but due to bad planning and needing to go to work (drat it), J ended up doing it all himself. Fortunately, he’s a better baker than I am (that attention to detail thing, you know).

I lifted two recipes off the internet: one for black bottom cupcakes (possibly my favorite type of cupcake EVER), that turned out to be from a David Lebovitz cookbook, and one for vegan coconut cupcakes, courtesy of Everybody Likes Sandwiches. Both were, I thought, wildly successful. The black bottoms were just as they should be, with a light chocolatey crumb below and a dense, sweet-tart, chocolate-flecked top. The coconut cakes were very light and moist with a delightfully delicate crust on top – they would be fantastic with fresh berries or a chocolate icing, but are lovely eaten plain, with a cup of coffee.

I’m going to print both recipes below, mostly so I can get to them when I need them. You never know when the need for a cupcake will strike.

Vegan Coconut Cupcakes

from Everybody Likes Sandwiches

Preheat oven to 350°. In a large bowl, mix together the flour, sugar, coconut, baking soda, and salt. Add in the rest of the ingredients, adding the vinegar last. Stir until well combined.

Pour into cupcake liners and bake 30 minutes or until centers come clean. Remove from oven and allow to cool.

Frost (if desired). Decorate with freshly toasted coconut.

Black-Bottom Cupcakes
from The Great Book of Chocolate by David Lebovitz, by way of Smitten Kitchen

Yield: 12 full-size or approximately 30 mini cupcakes

For the filling:

For the cupcakes:

Beat together the cream cheese, granulated sugar, and egg until smooth. Stir in the chopped chocolate pieces. Set aside.

Preheat the oven to 350°, and line a muffin tin with muffin liners, preferably foil.

In a medium bowl sift together the flour, brown sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt. In a separate bowl, mix together the water, oil, vinegar, and vanilla. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and stir in the wet ingredients, stirring until just smooth.

Divide the batter among the muffin cups. Spoon a few tablespoons of the filling into the center of each cupcake.

Bake for 25 minutes, or until the tops are slightly golden brown and the cupcakes feel springy when gently pressed. They will keep well unrefrigerated for 2 to 3 days if stored in an airtight container.

I used to be a fanatical cake baker. If we went to a party, I made a cake – the bigger and fancier or more chocolatey, the better. My college friends and I stayed up late, baking things that would then disappear within seconds. It was my cooking signature.

Somehow, though, once I started cooking all my own meals, and discovering the huge world of savory flavors, I sort of lost interest in cake. These days when I bake it needs to be relatively simple, preferably producing something that isn’t too sweet. French yogurt cake (gâteau au yaourt) fits the bill. I first found this on Clotilde’s blog, and have made it many times since. It’s just sweet enough, with a nice tart edge from the yogurt, has a lovely golden crust and a soft crumb. It is the easiest cake in the entire world to make, and it is dreamy with fresh fruit.

This particular cake was made in honor of my grandfather’s 95th birthday, on a blazingly hot Seattle day, with lots of fresh Skagit strawberries. We had leftovers for breakfast!

Gâteau au Yaourt

from the blog Chocolate and Zucchini by Clotilde Dusoulier (there’s a slightly different version in her book of the same name)

• 2 eggs
• 1 cup whole-milk yogurt
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 Tbsp rum
• 2 cups white flour
• 1 Tbsp baking powder
• pinch of salt

Oil a 10-inch springform pan and preheat the oven to 350°. Mix the eggs, yogurt, sugar, oil, vanilla and rum in one bowl, and the flour, baking powder and salt in another. Add the dry ingredients to the wet, stir until just blended, then scrape into the pan and bake 35-40 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool ten minutes before removing the springform. Eat plain or with lots of sliced strawberries or mangoes.