Dessert By Candy

Birthday Ribs Night

2013-05-21T15:34:59-04:00

Victoria Day long weekend unofficially kicked off summer and my family celebrated accordingly. It was also Little Brother’s birthday so I seized the opportunity to make boys food such as pizza and ribs. It must have been at least three years since I last cooked ribs at home. That is an awfully long wait especially for these succulent sweet and smoky oven spareribs. I may be an advocate for meat-lite diet but that doesn’t mean I should subject the boys to feel the same way especially for birthday celebrations. A man may be able to live on ribs alone but this girl certainly cannot. I completed the menu with a full range of traditional and not-so-traditional side dishes that appeal to my taste. Thanks to my renewed interest in smitten kitchen recipes, I present you: Very Smitten Ribs Night Sweet & Smoky Oven Spareribs Slow Cooker Barbecue Beans Vinegar Slaw...

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My FA-VOU-RITE Things

2013-05-20T16:08:24-04:00

I am still reeling from the high of last night’s ribs dinner. It was part of the multi days birthday celebration for Little Brother and I cannot wait to share with you all the wildly delicious recipes. There are so many dishes that earned a place on my regular cooking rotation! But first, I have a big backlog of completed cooking projects that I never got around to write much about. Today is Victoria Day holiday Monday here in Canada so consider this post to be my long weekend slack off. Or better yet, as the incomparable Julie Andrews would say, these are a few of my fa-vou-rite things! If we’re talking about Favourite Things, brown paper packages tied up with strings are mandatory. Before I made my batch of vegan coconut lime soft caramels, I made these Smoky Maple Salted Caramel using maple sugar, amber maple syrup, and Maldon...

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Vegan Coconut Lime Caramel

2013-05-16T14:55:32-04:00

Lately I rediscovered the joy of homemade candies. The therapeutic quality of bread baking convinced me that I will also find peace in cooking caramel in my concussed state of mind. I only wish. As I found out, hovering my hands inches above a molten pot of lava is anything but calming. My heartbeat galloped away with the rising mercury of my candy thermometer. That’s right, cooking caramel is not the best activity for concussion recovery. Eating homemade caramel, on the other hand, induces joy and satisfaction that few things can compare. So I guess it all evens out. Every piece of these vegan coconut lime soft caramel mellows from chewy to melty with a lingering richness of creamy coconut and lilting lime. If my head is completely right, I would probably go on longer about how much I love my stash of caramels. But since I much rather let...

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Baking Expert

2013-05-13T16:09:16-04:00

Do you see what I see? Visions of Virgin Mary may imprint on your morning toast but my household is decidedly more secular. Look! There’s a panda on my cinnamon raisin swirl bread! Or does it look like a cute little bulldog to you? In either case, cuteness rules at Candy’s kitchen and now you cannot un-see it. I am much better at baking than I thought. I’ve been fiercely craving homemade cinnamon swirl bread for a few weeks. A soft loaf enriched with milk, butter, and eggs and a hypnotising swirl of sugar and cinnamon. Of course raisins are mandatory but not just any dried up chewy specimen. I wanted juicy raisins plumped with dark rum. Obviously this is not a loaf that I can waltz into any bakery to bring home. It was time to take matter into my own hands. What makes swirl bread awesome? The swirls,...

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Less, Or More?

2013-05-08T16:16:32-04:00

I received a request to bake more egg-less dessert. So I went ahead and made one without eggs, sugar, flour, or butter…the four pillars of baking. Of course I had help from other cooks who travelled down this road before. Thanks to Heidi Swanson of 101 Cookbooks and her first cookbook Super Natural Cooking, I made a batch of these vegan Carnival Cookies to share. When you take away eggs, sugar, flour, and butter from a cookie recipe, are you left with a lesser cookie? Seriously, what CAN you use? Apparently, quite a lot of good stuff. How does this list of ingredients sound: oats, ground almond, banana, coconut oil, dark chocolate, cacao nibs, peanuts, popcorn, cinnamon, and vanilla. It is not about what you cannot use but rather all the wonderful things you can add. The recipe from the book is a variation of her previously published Nikki’s Healthy...

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