Gourmet Food on a Budget
Everything from candy, cupcakes, cake, and pies. We love sweets!
Christmas gifts from the kitchen are wonderful to give to your friends, neighbors, family, and co-workers. Yes, it takes a little of your time, but the recipients will love it because it shows that you spent time and effort making the gift. It’s also great to have on hand if unexpected guests arrive, they can always go home with one of your homemade gifts.
This coconut pineapple upside-down cake is a real show-stopper. This one has pineapple juice in the batter so it is nice and moist with great flavor.
This cake is a breeze to make. The batter is really thick, and you might think it’s not ever going to be a cake. The great thing is as the apples cook, they let go of their moisture that combines with the batter infusing it with all its wonderful apple goodness and making an impressive cake. The cake is rich and is perfect with tea, or espresso, or my favorite Armenian coffee.
If you don’t want to heat up your kitchen but make a spectacular looking cake, look no further than a wafer cake with fresh fruit.
Round pistachio baklava makes a light dessert that is fun to make and fun to eat. If you have leftovers, unlikely, they also make a nice gift.
This Strawberry Balsamic pie is a celebration of summer. It’s easy to make and you don’t even have to turn on your oven. What’s not to love?
I don’t usually do things that are complicated, and when I started making this bread, I thought it would be complicated, but in truth, it wasn’t. If this is your first time making bread, you might be intimidated by this, but trust me, it’s going to be okay.
Recipes in this PostSome many things happened in 2016 that just absolutely floored people. The person who won the popular vote, Hilary Clinton, lost the electoral vote, and much to many people’s chagrin, Donald Trump is our new President-Elect. There were many technological breakthroughs, including the Amazon Echo, an AI which is so useful, it almost becomes part of your family. Many of our favorites in the entertainment industry are no longer with us, including David Bowie, Prince, Carrie Fisher, a list that is too long and sad.
These shortening peanut butter cookies are a great way to use up extra peanut butter or extra shortening. They are nice and light, not heavy or greasy. Use your favorite peanut butter, creamy or even extra crunchy, it’s up to you.
I found this recipe on the back of the Zulka brown sugar bag. The cake looked great on the package, I happened to have apples in the refrigerator, and I wanted to try something new.
The instructions on how to make the cake on the bag make no sense, therefore, I changed it to the traditional method of creaming the butter and then creaming the butter and sugar together. Okay, so you don’t know what creaming is? It’s very simple. Put room temperature butter into a large bowl, and then beat it with an electric beater until it is nice and smooth. If you don’t have room temperature butter, you can cut the butter up into small pieces and then cream it. The best way to beat is with a stand mixer, but a hand mixer will do just fine. Don’t try this with a whisk, it’s too difficult.
This is a very moist cake, and may take quite a while to bake. The original instructions said 40-55 minutes, mine was in over 80 minutes, your mileage may vary.