This easy, make-ahead Spumoni Ice Cream Cake turns the classic Italian-American trio of cherry, pistachio, and chocolate into a striking frozen dessert with a crisp chocolate cookie base and stabilized whipped cream frosting. It was inspired by a sudden memory of the first time I tasted spumoni in college, at a student dinner hosted by […]
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Mixed Berry Clafoutis reimagines a French classic … combination of strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries beautifully captures the brief berry season…with straitforward ingredients and technique…
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This King Cake with Tangzhong is the result of a culinary challenge. Several days ago, our daughter Sophia, who lives in New Orleans (NOLA) and is visiting Chicago while Weldon is recovering from knee surgery, said she missed New Orleans, where in February she would be eating king cake and partying at Mardi Gras events.
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This elegant Poppy Seed Coconut Cherry Cake is a perfect holiday dessert for a large gathering. Poppy seed and coconut layers filled with cherry-flavored pastry cream and cherries, topped with chocolate glaze, are worthy of celebration. This creation is based on plyatsok, a sweet pastry beloved in Western Ukraine. What is a plyatsok? Plyatsok (plyatsky,
Poppy Seed Coconut Cherry Cake –A five-layer plyatsok from Ukraine Read More »
This Plum Mascarpone Tart continues a family dessert tradition, incorporating spectacular dark plums from the farmers’ market and pairing them with luscious mascarpone cheese. Each year, as a child at summer’s end, my Aunt Hanna made the best plum tart. She prepared it from memory, recalling happier times when she baked plum tarts as a
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Easter is cheesecake time at our house. I prepare Ukrainian cheese desserts for the holiday each year and experiment with cheesecake recipes from other cuisines. This year, I am adding melopita to my dessert repertoire. Its Greek name, comprised of two words – mela, which means honey, and pita, which means pie, implies that it
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This Chocolate Mocha Karpatka is my adaptation of a Polish cake that became popular in western Ukraine during the final decades of the 20th century. The original Karpatka is made from choux pastry with a vanilla crème pâtissière filling. My version flavors the cream puff dough with chocolate and the filling with coffee, a delightful
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This Pumpkin Noodle Babka is my recreation of a fall dish Babunia, my Ukrainian maternal grandmother Julianna Bulawka, improvised for Didunio, my grandfather Vasyl Bulawka. It unites sweet cheese, sour cream custard with egg noodles and pumpkin, Ukraine’s favorite fall ingredient, in a noodle bake (she called harbuzova babka* or kugel (гарбузова бабка or куґель)
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At the end of a recent seafood dinner in Washington, my dining companions and I were presented with a splendid arrangement of Greek desserts. The assortment was familiar: baklava —caramelized phyllo pastry, filled with chopped nuts, and sweetened with syrup or honey, ekmek kataifi –crispy, golden shredded phyllo with creamy custard, soaked in lemon scented
Portokalopita – Greek Orange Cake Read More »
When I was a kid, rhubarb dishes appeared on our family menu each May, confirming unequivocally that spring had finally arrived. Seeing a basket of bright red rhubarb at the local market enticed me to try this Rhubarb Tart with Crème Anglaise recipe that I’ve saved just for this occasion. Rhubarb is a perennial plant
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