blueberry short cake

blueberries. i love blueberries. here is a delicious blueberry upside down cake. one of our family favorites. it's great for breakfast. or basically anytime.

• 2 cups fresh blueberries
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons grated lemon zest
• 
  
• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 1 cup white sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1 teaspoon almond extract
• 1 tablespoon grated lemon zest
• 3/4 cup milk
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 cup slivered almonds, toasted

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour a 9 inch springform pan. In a medium bowl, combine blueberries, 1/2 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons flour and 2 tablespoons grated lemon zest. Toss to coat berries, then pour into the prepared pan.
2. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and 1 cup sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then stir in the almond extract and 1 tablespoon grated lemon zest. Stir together 2 cups flour and the baking powder. Beat into butter mixture alternately with the milk, mixing just until incorporated. Pour batter over the berries in the pan.
3. Bake in the preheated oven for 60 to 70 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean. Place serving plate over the top of the pan and carefully invert cake and plate together, so that the berries end up on top. Carefully unlock the buckle on the side of the pan and remove. Sprinkle toasted almonds on top of cake and serve warm.

won't you be my neighbor

i made amish friendship bread last week and let's just say, i think it helped me make a lot more friends. mmmmm, so yummy! thanks to big pimpin kim for the starter and the recipe. here it is:

this is after someone gives you a start. you can make your own and there are tons of recipes online telling you how to do so. you can freeze the start once it's made if you are not ready to use it.

****do not use any metal! do not use any type of metal spoons or bowls for mixing. do not refrigerate. when air builds up in the bag, let it out. it is normal for batter to raise bubbles and ferment.*****

day 1: do nothing. this is the day you receive the batter. make sure the bag is dated.
day 2: mush the bag
day 3: mush the bag
day 4: mush the bag
day 5: add to the bag: 1 cup of flour, 1 cup of milk, then mush the bag.
day 6: mush the bag
day 7: mush the bag
day 8: mush the bag
day 9: mush the bag
day 10: mix and divide the starter

pour entire contents of the bag into a non-metal bowl, add 1 1/2 cups of flour, 1 1/2 cups of milk, and 1 1/2 cups sugar. mix together. separate mixture into 4 separate gallon ziplock bags and one non-metal mixing bowl (about 1 1/4 cups per portion). keep one ziplock for yourself and give away the other three to friends with a copy of the recipe.

preheat oven to 325 degrees. add to the remaining batter in the mixing bowl.

3 eggs
1 cup oil or 1/2 cup applesauce
2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 3/4 - 2 cups flour
1/2 cup milk
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 large box of instant pudding mix (any flavor -- i used chocolate)

**optional: 1 cup of nuts and/or raisins and/or chocolate chips -- i used chocolate chips

grease 2 large loaf pans or you can use pam cooking spray. mix in a small bowl: 1/2 cup sugar and 2 tsp. cinnamon. dust the greased loaf pans with the cinnamon mixture. pour the batter evenly into the 2 greased pans and sprinkle the remaining cinnamon mixture over the batter. bake 55-60 minutes. cool until the bread loosens from the pan (about 10 minutes). Turn out onto serving dish.

**note: if you have time restraint problems with any of the days, just put bag of starter in freezer and resume the day count where you left off when you take it out again.

at the end you get this! so good. however, i did have a hard time taking it out of the pan without all the cinnamon topping coming off, so we just served it straight out of the pan. if anyone has any suggestions for this sort of thing... let me know.

word of mouth

are there any bakery sites or blogs that you guys love? i am trying to bookmark some ideas/inspiration and i'd love to see anything you guys find yummy/dreamy/lovely, etc.

any input would be highly appreciated!

stand by me

how dreamy is this??



i covet it. you can find this adorable cupcake stand here.

i will be posting about banana bread, amish friendship bread and something else i might have forgotten. please don't be mad, it's been a crazy few weeks.

ps- happy birthday, whoolia!!

i love rhubarb

so, if you are a member of my family, you have to like rhubarb (sorry, courtney) and it's a good season for that now. so, i've made rhubarb pie and rhubarb bread lately. for the rhubarb pie, this is the right size of rhubarb chunk. it's about a quarter inch thick. for the rhubarb bread, it's about 1/16th inch thick.

now, i can't give you the actual pie recipe, cause that is forbidden by my mother. but, this one is pretty close.


so, for this bread, i basically added rhubarb to a coffee cake recipe and split it between two bread pans. the crumb topping from that bread i showed in the last post inspired the idea for turning this coffee cake into a rhubarb bread. this recipe is almost exactly like my mom's recipe. although, i don't use nuts at all. but if i did, i'd use pecans instead of walnuts. i hope you guys love rhubarb as much as i do and make some treats. if you have any other rhubarb recipes, please share them!

bake shop blueprint

so, when i was home for julia's wedding, i met up with my good friend tim, for lunch in oakland.

we had lunch and i told him about my bakery master plan so he told me about a bakery around the corner that was cool and of course, i wanted to check it out. you guys, it's my dream bakery! it's called bakesale betty.

it's in a great location, on telegraph, right by macarthur bart. it's close to some cool shops and it was pretty packed the whole time we were there. not to mention the super cute tables outside that are old re-painted ironing boards. my friend tonya said that they can be snooty sometimes, which is a downer, but other than that, it seems pretty much perfect.

we got some ginger cookies so i could compare them to the ones that i love and have made. we went outside and sat at one of the cute tables and the next thing i know, they bring us out this amazing lemon slush drink, for free.

then shortly after that, they bring us out what i thought was coffee cake, but turned out to be amazing banana bread. soooooo good! i am going to try to combine a few recipes to come up with something similar.

so, this is what i want my bakery to be like. just as yummy, just as fun. and, i might be trying out some banana bread recipes on willing taste testers.

c is for cookie

these are the cookies i made for julia and jan's wedding. a double batch of snickerdoodles and a single batch of lime melt-aways.



my advice for the snickerdoodles is that you keep them in small balls like this and only cook them for 8 minutes. they will not go flat, if you do that. also, the best ratio for cinnamon/sugar is 2 tablespoons sugar and 2 teaspoons cinnamon. i think it's just right that way.

and for these lime cookies, only cook them for 10 minutes, and i've made these three times and have never gotten close to getting more than about 50ish cookies out of the recipe. although it claims to make 10 dozen. i liked putting them in these paper cups, two at a time. cuts down the mess and it looks cuter. i couldn't find really small paper cups, but muffin sized ones worked well.

pioneer breakfast

so, to celebrate our pioneer heritage and the day off that utahns get, we decided to have a pot-luck breakfast. i made blueberry muffins with a lemon glaze/sugar topping, nicole made super good crepes, chris made yummy potatoes, michelle made delicious eggs, and alish brought juice to round it all out. this is a plate kyle put together to showcase/partake of the goods.


here's to our pioneer ancestors who came to utah and in turn, unwittingly gave us a day of from work so we could eat wonderful carbs.

ginger + chocolate = even better?

so, i didn't have time to make the gingerbread, but with that on the brain i made these delicious little guys. always a hit.


the recipe is posted here. i used chips instead of chunks, cause i'm lazy. and if you bake them longer than 10 minutes, they are not soft enough. which my old roommate, julia and i both learned on different occasions when we first made them. so, 10 minutes, and they are perfect.

ginger + bread = love

ok, so my weekend plans to go away aren't going to work out, so while working on websites for some of my lovely friends, i will try to get back on the baking wagon. i've been wanting to make this for a while.



it's this gingerbread recipe from the tartine bakery in SF. juliann and kathryn gave me this recipe book and i've been dying to make so many recipes from it. that place is heaven. i can't wait to visit home again in two weeks!

if the recipe turns out, i'll post the recipe and give you my results. if not, i never posted this.