Oh the Cuteness!

Hi everyone! Alexandra and I are very excited to share our new recipe for baked cronuts today! Truth be told, neither of us have had the opportunity to try an actual cronut. They sound amazing but as if a regular fried piece of dough wasn't bad enough, adding a million layers of butter inside sounds like overkill.  But the idea of a tender, flaky piece of baked puff pastry dressed up like a donut sounded just right, especially if it incorporated some seasonal fruit, and so our baked cronuts were born! You can make either of the two flavors, but we found our favorite was stuffing everything into one huge, hard-to-eat monstrosity of awesomeness. There's no photos of that scene, but you get the idea...  First, assemble your ingredients: 1 package Dufour Classic Puff Pastry (one sheet will make about 12 cronuts) 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted 1 roll of marzipan, finely chopped into crumbles A pint of ripe cherries, pitted and cut into eighths...

I think I've mentioned in the past what a peanut butter fiend I am.  Peanut butter and chocolate ,  or bananas ,  or a combination thereof , etc. always gets me swooning. But sometimes you just want a really great peanut butter cookie and that's all you need. I've tried many a peanut butter cookie in my day - if they're on the menu I usually go for it - and all have fallen a little short of what, in my mind anyhow, constitutes the  perfect  cookie. I don't like super crispy cookies, so the classic ones with the fork hash marks in the center are usually out. And I don't like them with chunky peanut butter, or too soft, or too big/thick, or too sweet, or too greasy. Picky, picky, picky.  So the other day when Johnny asked if I would make some peanut butter chocolate chip cookies for him I decided to play around with the recipe. I whipped up the dough, and I made a sheet with no chocolate chips for myself and added chips to what was left for him. When tho...

I had a barbecue to go to recently and wanted to bring something home made but didn't have a lot of time or money and it had to be vegan-friendly. On hand I had infinite canned goods, tomatoes from the garden, and some frozen peas. I had also seen a tip somewhere online that said if you have a small mustard jar with only a couple tablespoons left you can fill the jar up with vinegar and olive oil, add some spices, and shake it up to make a good mustard vinaigrette. So my game plan was to make a bean salad with mustard vinaigrette, but it turned out so delicious I had to share the recipe! Here you go: Easy Summer Bean Salad *It's very important that you empty your canned goods into a strainer and rinse them thoroughly!* 1 can of each of the following, or feel free to mix it up with what you have on hand, fresh or canned: Corn Garbanzo Beans (Chickpeas) Kidney Beans 1/2 can of Black Olives, Sliced 2-3 Roma Tomatoes 1/2 a Small Package of Frozen Peas 1. P...

 Hello everyone! I made this delicious salad last week since there are so many beautiful figs in the market right now and I thought I would share the recipe. (I'm especially proud of the dressing.) Hope you like it! For the Salad: 1 Pint Black Figs 6 Slices Thick-Cut Bacon 3/4 cup Whole Pecans 1 Small Log Chevre (Herbed varieties are great in this too!) 3 Tbsp White Sugar 1/4 Tsp Salt Black Pepper to Taste Pumpkin Pie Spice to Taste 1 Container Mixed Baby Greens  Place the baby greens in a bowl. Use a spoon to break apart the chevre into small chunks on top of the greens and set aside. Cut the stems off the figs and cut them into bite-size pieces and add to greens.   Cook the bacon to your favorite level of crunchiness and drain on paper towels. Drain almost all the bacon fat, but reserve a little to toast the pecans with. Once the bacon is cool, chop it into small pieces and add to greens. Combine the sugar and spice...

The Cottage Law class went swimmingly! Someday in the future I will hopefully be able to put what I learned to good use, which opens up so many exciting possibilities. A few weeks earlier, for our six month anniversary (Yikes, how time flies!), Johnny also signed us up for the foraging class taught by Forage SF. More specifically it was taught by a guy named Kevin, and you can check out his website, Feral Kevin , for more info on the classes he teaches. That's Kevin, talking about sorrel. When Johnny and I arrived and I saw the other people we were taking the class with, I knew I was going to be that annoying kid at the front of the class that new all the answers. Turns out I was right, as I was the only one in the crowd responding when he asked, "Does anyone know what this is?". Luckily the teacher was excited about this rather than annoyed lol.  Wild radish flowers. They also come in pink and purple.  One of my fellow classmates sampling the wild radish ...

A little while ago I spent some time with my parents while they were on vacation, and we ended up going to Petaluma. It's such a wonderful little beach town and if you've never been I highly recommend it. We arrived in the late afternoon, so instead of dinner we headed straight to the Petaluma Pie Company and had the best little pies with the biggest scoops of homemade ice cream ever! Then, as we wandered around the little downtown admiring all the shops and antiques, this yarn bombing out front of the bookstore caught my eye: And finally, we went to a very popular place, the Seed Bank . I didn't have the right kind of camera lens with me to capture this business in all its grandeur, but basically it's a specialty seed and garden shop that is in a big, beautiful old building that used to be a bank. So clever and so wonderfully fun to shop in! That same weekend I went to the last-ever Underground Market in San Francisco, and ate my heart out with s...

There's a new baby quilt in the works in my studio! This will be the first hand-pieced quilt I've completely finished. My other "first" quilt top, seen here , was supposed to be a twin-size throw with a double layer of batting and I'm not sure my machine is big enough to quilt it, so I'm doing this one first. The photo above is the back - a glorious vintage cotton print (which I also used to make some loop scarves from for my shop ) with a little pieced row of scraps from the front. I pieced it together ages ago in a bricklayer pattern and was afraid to start quilting it without a walking foot, but my new machine has one so I spent the day with a good friend teaching her to quilt and simultaneously working on it! The front fabrics are all shirting weight cotton voile, i.e. incredibly soft, and 100% recycled to boot! My dear friend Ivy, who I've mentioned before, is a fabric sales rep and gives me lots of old samples which I love using for quilts...

With Superbowl Sunday coming up this weekend we're constantly being bombarded with ads for all kinds of snack foods, crazy "manly" and "crowd-pleasing" appetizers, and a plethora of different kinds of dips served in vats as big as the Superbowl itself. I'm not a fan of the event, in fact I can't recall the last time I watched one (no, not even for the commercials), but someone turned me on to this glorious monstrosity and, well, one thing led to another and Johnny and I ended up making something similar today. I give you, much to our shame, our 27-layer dip. While not quite as impressive as the original inspiration of a 47-layer culinary Frankenstein, ours has the same spirit and many of the original absurd ingredients. In truth, we tried to make it a healthier version. Whether we really succeeded or not may never be known. Here's the breakdown, in order from bottom to top: Yellow Rice Black Eyed Peas Avocado Sour Cream Chili Con C...