Strawberry Cinnamon Coffee Cake

Cake isn’t the only thing I have on the brain these days.

I’ve been thinking about New York City, too!

Not that I’ve ever been, but, c’mon, I have to go — you’re not a real foodie if you haven’t eaten in NYC (and Daisy has been torturing me with her posts)! That said, I can’t tell you if New York style coffee cake is actually popular in New York or not.

Out here on the west coast it’s not all that common — just because people are too healthy!

They just want oatmeal and egg whites for breakfast before they drive off in their Jetta to go do yoga in their Lululemon and grab a latte from Starbucks.

Not my thing. Cake and an opportunity to sleep in for me, please!

Coffee cake ought to be crazy popular around here, though — I mean, just look at it.

Look at this cake: a sweet, crumby, melt-in-your-mouth topping, with light and fluffy layers of tangy, vanilla-scented cake, sandwiching soft strawberry and cinnamon filling.

Beat that, dry toaster bagels and mass-produced muffins! Ha!

In other news, I just recently finished a class project that tickled my serious cake-on-the-brain itch all over again: having to make a rolled fondant-covered wedding cake.

I gotta admit, at first I was really, really, really not pleased with having to do this project — I mean, there’s no cake inside that cake!

See, I’m what my chefs have been calling a “production” person — as in, I’m more interested in what goes inside the cake/pie/tart/cookie than I am about how it looks on the outside.

But doing a wedding cake was more fun than expected, and by the end I was surprisingly into it.

Babka Muffins

Babka muffins — have you heard of ’em? I hadn’t!

They’re one of the many new tasty recipes I’ve been exposed to while at school.

Unlike “regular” muffins (the kind that Liz says are for “people who don’t have the nads to eat cake for breakfast”) these Babka buddies are leavened only slightly with baking powder and mostly with yeast.

That said, they’re still soft and cakey enough for you people would rather eat actual cake for breakfast. Ha!

Oh, but truly awesome thing about Babka muffins is that they’re seriously customizable, as-you-like-’em type muffins.

Do you wanna fill them with brown sugar, ginger, and diced apple? Do it!

How about melted butter with vanilla sugar and toasted almond slices? Ah-ye-ah.

Pumpkin puree with sweet cinnamon chips? That’s my Babka style!

Also (and this totally slipped my mind til now — I’ve been so busy lately!), the lovely Juanita recently nominated me for the “Versatile Blogger Award” — but, as flattered as I am, I just can’t fill the criteria to accept!

Hibiscus Cordial

I became enamored with the idea of homemade cordial during a road trip up to Penticton a few weeks ago.

If you’re ever passing through the Okanagan during summer, definitely stop by the Elephant Island Winery on the Naramata Bench and bust a buck on the gorgeous cherry cordial that they serve (and get a free fruit wine tasting, too)!

Making cordial isn’t even hard — all you need is a few tools and a little patience.

For those of you unfamiliar, hibiscus is a flower with a flavour akin to cranberry, and makes a perfect summer-to-fall “transition” drink. This cordial is slightly sweet, tart, refreshing, and bought to life with a touch of warm spices and a little bit of lemon.

You can mix it up with plain ol’ water for a juice-like beverage, or you can use soda water to make your own fizzy pop — and, if you’re so inclined, you can always drop in a shot of spiced rum.

Raspberry-Lavender Oat Scones

So, my last post was pretty brief and shallow.

It was just about bread. It had to be just about bread, because I couldn’t really think about anything else.

As I was writing on Sunday, I checked my voice mail and found out that my family’s dog, Twojay, had died. He was old and sick and I knew he was on his way out, but that doesn’t make his passing any easier.

He was a good dog — an adorably dumb, skinny yellow lab that never barked, never bit, would wag his tail so hard that he’d wiggle all over, and loved everyone.

So, I just wrote about bread, scheduled the post, had a good cry, and fell asleep.

It’s still hard to look at old photos of Twojay, but I’m sure that once the pain of losing him passes, I’ll be glad to have pictures to look back on in fondness.

Yeah.

There were things I wanted to write about, too — like, about how Laura over at Cake & Feminism has made an awesomely original blackberry brownie recipe (much less labour-intensive than my pull-apart bread if you need a quick blackberry fix) and how Alpaca-farmin’ Liz over at A Tablespoon of Liz has made vegan lavender shortbread (more lavender)!

Shout-outs make the blogosphere go ’round — not to mention that reading other baking blogs can keep me fairly distracted from real life.

I’m sure we’ve been through times when a little distraction helps in a big way.

Blackberry & Ginger Pull-Apart Bread

Today, I’m going to write about bread. Just bread with berry.

Sweet and tangy blackberry-ginger filling sandwiched between soft, warm-from-the-oven, pillowy, pull-apart squares of bread.

Did you just drool a little?

We’ve all been there.

To those of you who have ever made their own bread, I don’t need to go on. To those of you who have never made their own bread, you just don’t know what you’re missing.

Sometimes a little flicker of happiness is just fresh bread and a pat of salted butter.

Roséy Strawberry Cream Tart

Once upon a time, I only wanted to get drunk on fruity, girly cocktails.

I ate a lot of instant noodles, played a lot of video games, skipped a lot of school, and was content in my adolescent lifestyle.

When I went back to school and got serious, though, everything changed — I started out at Langara College, where I actually began to fit in, feel respected, and succeed (all at the same time!) for the first time in my life.

It was me on my path to becoming a proper adult.

Anyways, because I’d always liked reading and writing, I took a lot of English classes while collecting enough credits to transfer to UBC.

It didn’t take too long to notice that one of the many things my much-admired English profs were always talking about was wine.

Reading and drinking wine. Getting nice bottles of wine. Giving nice bottles of wine. Even the characters in the classic literature I read always seemed to be drinking in luxurious wine.

I knew what I had to do to be a proper adult, an adult like the English profs I aspired to emulate: I had to drink wine, too — even though I hated it!