Novel Eats

Did you know that making an apple tart is easy and doesn’t really take that much time? All you need is some pre-packaged phyllo dough and you’re on your way to a delicious dessert.

These apple turnovers made with pie crust taste just like apple pie, and are flaky, delicious and perfect!

It hasn’t been until the last few years that I have gotten into scones (I think that I used to confuse them with biscotti and assumed that they would be dry and hard), and even then I haven’t made them with much frequency. I was pleasantly surprised when I bit into my first scone – [...]

I love it when I see a new Daring Bakers challenge that allows for easy veganizing and gives me a chance to try something truly new. This month’s challenge was all about the phyllo dough – you know, that paper-thin (or thinner than paper-thin) stuff you buy in boxes in the frozen foods aisle at your local grocery store. As with pretty much most challenges, we had to make the dough. The other stuff, the filling, was a piece of cake.

It’s that time again – when hundreds of Daring Bakers bloggers are challenged to create a recipe and hope that the results are somewhat different yet unique at the same time. For vegan and other dietary lifestyles that don’t include the standard ingredients that most of the bakers have no problem using, it’s that much more of a challenge. If only you could read some of the conversations going on behind the scenes during each month. People feverishly trying to figure out good replacements for eggs or flour, or lamenting about their second or third try in the month because the first miserably failed.

But I come to you here on my first try, and I lament that these chocolate eclairs are not really eclairs, but rather miniature cookies (I say this not because I tried to make them cookies, but more or less to comfort myself and live in denial.). In the words of my husband, who after his first bite made a face and exclaimed with irritation, “These aren’t eclairs!” (Yet he managed to eat at least half or two-thirds of them.)