Honey-Salted Peanut Mooncakes

As you may recall, I try out new mooncake recipes every year for Mid-Autumn Festival– it’s always fun to try new twists on classic recipes! This year I was trying to brainstorm ideas and was thinking about peanut butter cookies, when I came across a recipe for a peanut-and-honey based mooncake— kind of a riff on a traditional “nuts and seeds” filling. It seemed pretty simple– only a few ingredients and steps– so I decided to give it a try!

I enjoyed these– the food processor brought together the filling in a snap, and the resulting filling had a nice texture without being hard to press into a ball or likely to tear through the delicate mooncake skin while assembling. I doubled the original filling recipe to use up exactly one bag of Trader Joe’s roasted unsalted peanuts, and ended up making exactly 24 mooncakes (39g of filling, 19g of skin). I used my standard mooncake skin recipe, with the exception of using half peanut oil, rather than all vegetable oil– I think it added extra peanut flavor to the finished mooncakes, which were excellent. The insides are nice and chewy, without sticking in your teeth too much, and the salt cuts through the sweetness perfectly.

If you’re interested in making non-traditional mooncakes, I’d say these are a great start. Next time I may try adding some toasted sesame seeds to mimic the flavor profile of a classic Vietnamese peanut-sesame candy!

Rolled Honey Florentines

Originally this post was going to be about honey macarons filled with honey buttercream, but once I made them I realized that while the buttercream was incredible, the macaron recipe needed more tweaking, so stay tuned for that later. In the meantime, I had leftover honey buttercream (so good!) and had to figure out what to do with it– I knew I wanted something else with honey, and nuts of some kind– and it had to be crispy to give some good texture contrast. Florentines seemed to fit the bill perfectly, so away I went!

Florentines are basically made of caramel with some nuts and maybe a bit of flour folded in for better texture– you cook the butter and sugar together (in this case, adding honey), add the dry ingredients, then bake teeny-tiny spoonfuls of batter until they spread, bubble, and get all nice and lacy. The finished cookies, when warm, can be molded into shapes that crisp up as they cool. I used walnuts in my cookies, but you could use almonds, pecans, hazelnuts, sesame seeds, or even nothing at all– the lacy cookies will still be delicious.

There are only two tough parts, and both have to do with timing: first, you need to watch the cookies in the oven like a hawk, because they can go from toasty gold brown to burned in seconds. And second, if you’re shaping the cookies you need to get them off the sheet at just the right moment and mold them for just long enough that they hold their shape– I’m pretty good, but at six cookies per baking sheet, two sheets at a time it’s tough to mold them all before they start to get too stiff. I’ve found that both of these problems can be addressed by staggering the batches– total bake time is 8-10 minutes per sheet, so you put in one sheet, wait five minutes, then put in the other. While you’re cooling and molding the cookies on the first sheet, the second sheet is still baking, and ought to come out just as you finish the first set.

The crispy rolled cookies are then piped full of a creamy honey filling, which I made by taking my caramelized honey buttercream from my macaron attempt, and whipping in some heavy cream to lighten it up a bit. The contrast between the crunchy outside and light and creamy inside is heavenly, and the flavor divine.

Berry-Yogurt Breakfast Popsicles

I’ve been in a popsicle mood lately (no surprise given the summer weather), so I’ve been turning to some old favorites for desserts. They’re perfect on a warm summer evening– but what about the rest of the day? Especially when the weather is this nice, there’s no reason one should have to wait until after dinner for a popsicle, right?

Enter the breakfast popsicle. You heard me– a breakfast popsicle! I often have fruit and yogurt for breakfast, so what could possibly be wrong with eating it in a slightly more fun form? A frozen form. On a stick.

Honey-Cardamom Pear Tartlets

Recently, I was trying to figure out what dessert to bring to a Lunar New Year party. More specifically, I was trying to figure out what dessert to bring that was not red bean cream puffs, because I didn’t want to go to the trouble of making the craquelin topping and I still needed something bite-sized and tasty. I was going through my old recipes when I came across my post about honey-cornflake crunchies and it occurred to me that they might make a neat base for a different kind of dessert combining honey with some other flavor components.

I decided to flavor my filling with cardamom, since it’s often paired with honey. I’d originally planned to make a simple stabilized whipped cream filling, but concluded that it would be too light in comparison to the crunchy base and opted instead to give it a richer mouthfeel by combining two concepts– stabilized whipped cream and cooked-flour frosting. Both involve beating a thickened pudding-like mixture into the dairy– it’s just that the frosting uses butter instead of liquid cream. My experimental recipe worked beautifully, and I’ll definitely be using it in the future.

Of course, once I’d settled on cream-filled tartlets, I felt that they needed something more, for texture, and flavor. After a false start (persimmons apparently just went out of season, boo!) I settled on pears and pistachios, both classic pairings with cardamom.

Nectarine Swirl Ice Cream

Another contribution to the annual ice cream social– nectarine ice cream!

I admit, I’d intended to make peach ice cream, but in browsing the internet I was informed that nectarines can be pureed into the cream without bothering to remove the skins, which I was all in favor of, since peeling peaches is a pain. Since the flavor is very similar, I decided to go with nectarines and also reap the benefit of the rosy hue imparted to the ice cream by the red-orange skins.

This recipe is pretty straightforward– fruit, cream, some honey to round things out and some sour cream for tang. What’s not to like? The finished ice cream is smooth and creamy, and I’ve been told that it tastes like summer. What more could you ask for as a recommendation?

I also decided at the last minute to add an extra swirl of a really basic nectarine (or in this case peach because I didn’t have any more nectarines) sauce to amp up the flavor even more. It’s optional, though, so you decide!

Honey-Roasted Apricots with Streusel Topping

Summer’s here! And that means there’s an abundance of fabulous summer fruit everywhere… in the grocery stores, at the farmer’s markets, and (my favorite) in the “on sale now, must get rid of these!” section of my local store. At 99 cents/lb., I snapped up a bunch to bring home, figuring that even if they were mediocre they’d be worth a try.

After tasting them, I ended up coming back to the store and buying all of their remaining apricots… amounting to about 12 pounds. And while my daughter can eat half a dozen in a day (seriously, she just did, along with a pound of strawberries), I knew I wasn’t going to be able to eat them all just straight out of hand, so I tried to think of other, more creative ways to use them up.

Roasted apricots seemed like a good idea– many recipes called for a drizzle of honey and butter to enrich things, and others used crumbled amaretti and/or nuts to top things off. I decided to throw some things together to see what would happen– and what happened? Magic. The streusel wasn’t even necessary (though it was a nice touch). Just the deep, tangy flavor of the roasted apricots was enough.

Cold Asian Noodle Salad

Now that the weather is finally warming up, I thought I’d share one of our family’s staple summer dinners– cold Asian noodle salad. It’s tangy, refreshing, a little bit spicy, and the perfect dinner for eating outside in the evenings– perhaps with a cold beer or glass of white wine. Best of all, it comes together in a snap, with ingredients straight out of the pantry. (or if they’re not in your pantry, they should be!)

Honey Cornflake Crunchies

Taking a break from sewing for a while, here’s something sweet!

After I made my Faux Fried Ice Cream Cake I had a decent amount of extra cornflake topping, which I regularly used to make “fried ice cream” on its own by topping vanilla ice cream with the cornflakes and a drizzle of honey. I kept the extra topping in a ziploc bag in the freezer, and when I ran out of vanilla ice cream I just started crunching it by the handful for a treat. Something about the crunchy, buttery, sweet mouthful made it supremely snackable, and I wanted to figure out a format I could use to make an easier-to-eat version.

Imagine my joy when I came across multiple recipes for honey cornflake cookies, which basically sounded like the perfect way to interpret this flavor/texture combination. They couldn’t be easier– only a few ingredients and minimal preparation. I even let my preschooler do the majority of the work, and she loved it! (now, if only I can teach her how to temper chocolate)

These turned out cute, crunchy, and reasonably good. Not “oh my god make these right now” good, but if you’re looking for something simple to make with your kids that won’t overload them with sugar or fat, these would work. Bonus– nut free, egg-free, and they’re made of cereal so you can bill them as “healthy treats” if you bring them to school for a party or something.

Faux Fried Ice Cream Cake

At the outset, I feel compelled to note that everything but the cake in this Faux Fried Ice Cream Cake is “faux”– there’s no real frying (sauteeing at the most), and there’s no ice cream. But there is cake, and it’s a decadent, delicious cake at that, I promise. It’s inspired by an actual ice cream cake from Sprinkle Bakes, one of my favorite baking blogs.

I was first introduced to fried ice cream as a teenager when I went to a Mexican restaurant with my high school Spanish Club. It was, of course, ice cream that had been rolled in a crumb coating and deep-fried just until the outside got crunchy, leaving the inside frozen. Really tasty (what’s not to like?), but a lot of trouble to make without a deep-freezer and a fryer.

However, if you take crushed cornflakes and sauté them in a little butter and brown sugar, they take on an amazing caramelly-buttery flavor that’s reminiscent of the fried ice cream coating from days of yore. It’s incredible served over actual ice cream, but since ice cream desserts don’t travel well I decided to incorporate it into a 9×13″ cake, perfect for those end-of-summer barbecues where you won’t necessarily have a freezer handy.

Baklava

After using two cups of walnuts in my hedgehog cookies, I still had a lot left. I could’ve made more cookies, I suppose, but I was out of chocolate sprinkles and plain cookies didn’t seem nearly as interesting. I was trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my walnuts when I saw the half-package of phyllo in my freezer (left over from a strudel adventure) and knew immediately that I had to make baklava.

Baklava is apparently a dessert that you either love (because of the delicious honey-soaked crispy layers and toothsome nuts and general awesomeness) or hate (because you’re a heathen). Can you tell which side I’m on?