Apple butter is a rich, sweet spread created by rendering apples (and a few key spices) down through long, slow cooking in a crockpot or over the stove until they lose much of their water and intensify in flavour. The name “apple butter” is a bit of a misnomer, as it doesn’t actually contain any real…
Category: Dessert
Recipe Post: Quick and Easy Berry Swirl Cupcakes
There’s nothing like the flavour of market-fresh, in-season fruit in cupcakes and muffins. This recipe is not that. Let’s be honest; many of us in the Northern hemisphere are in the cold, dark days of winter, and fresh fruit is expensive and of a lower quality than during harvest season. But hey, when we want…
Recipe Post: Berry Lemon Coffee Cake
I came up with this recipe to use up some fresh blueberries that were going past their freshness date, but I didn’t want just another “blueberry lemon loaf” like I saw in recipes everywhere. I decided to get a bit creative and do a mash-up of a coffee cake and a lemon loaf, where instead…
Recipe Post: Double Chocolate Muffins
These muffins are not exactly “healthy”, and in reality are closer to cupcakes than muffins. However, they’re so delicious, it may be worth your while to double this recipe. You will definitely find you’re making new friends every time you pull these out of the oven! There’s a small amount of instant espresso powder in…
Recipe Review: Orange Sesame Biscotti
Confession: I baked up these little gems some time ago, but I came across an old photo of the finished product recently, and was transported back into the heady days of culinary school, when my roommate and I decided it would be a great idea to take a baking cookbook and work our way through…
Recipe Post: Scottish Shortbread
Shortbread, especially Scottish Shortbread, is one of those “simple to learn, but a lifetime to master” recipes. There are modern shortbread recipes (and in fact I posted one just the other day, for my Meyer Lemon-Cardamom Shortbread Bars), and there is whipped shortbread, which is light and airy and melts in your mouth; it’s a…
BirdHouse Diaries 