Sunday, April 24, 2011

"Healthy" Desserts



No, I haven't gone completely mad. I still love butter and cream, and you won't see recipes for tofu cheesecakes or fat-free brownies any time soon. It just happened that I made some desserts this weekend that might seem healthy at first glance: banana coconut chocolate chip cookies and plain frozen yogurt.  

I read about these "healthy" cookies on Heidi Swanson's 101 Cookbooks blog and was immediately seized with a morbid curiosity to make some for myself. This is possibly the strangest cookie recipe I've ever seen.

Here are the things this cookie does NOT contain:
- butter
- sugar
- eggs
- flour

Is this possible? Yes. Does it taste good? You bet.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Baking Orgy at Kathy's


I haven't had time to post in a while due to grad school application/decision craziness. Thankfully that's all settled now, and it'll be "Paris Sweets in Boston" come September (note to self, don't include geographical information in the blog title next time).

Last week, I was suddently struck with the desire to make bread. Beautiful, warm, domestic-goddess-style bread, and lots of it. Some people have dreams about wanting lots of babies. I wanted bread. I knew I couldn't possibly handle all this bread-making by myself, so I turned to my friend Kathy.

Kathy's my partner-in-crime when it comes to baking. She's technically my coworker (along with 90,000 other people), but we really bonded over food (I made her wedding cakes last summer). Once in a while, we'd get together and unleash our culinary prowess in furious, multi-hour baking sprees. And Kathy's sugar-loving husband Colin usually ends up with lots of mixing bowls and spatulas to "clean".


Really, we're scary efficient when it comes to churning out baked goods. This time, we whipped up sage garlic bread, blackberry coconut bread, cinnamon bread, and mango tres leches cake in less than three hours.

(At least we had one savory item this time. Last time we made cranberry tart, French apple cake, and Paula Deen's insanely decadent pumpkin pie. My heart still hurts when I think about that one.)