Archive for the ‘tarts’ Category

Cranberry oat cereal bars with raspberry marshmallows

08/09/2011 by Lara • 6 Comments

Recipe: Martha Stewart's Cranberry Oat Cereal Bars
Total time: 15 min prep + 1.5 hours cool
Ease: easy
Unusual ingredients: cereal, raspberry marshmallows, dried cranberries

I’m a big advocate of using local ingredients to bake. My #1 favorite local ingredient is Sweet Lydia’s marshmallows. Not only are they made from scratch, but the fruit ones use REAL fruit (no artificial stuff) and Lydia is just about the nicest person you’ll ever meet.

This recipe is a really nice spin on the “rice cereal treat” – it uses toasted oat cereal and adds a layer of tartness with dried cranberries. Super easy, and used ingredients that I had in the house. I was eager to take this to the next level with my favorite flavor: raspberry marshmallows. This is a five-ingredient recipe! (more…)

Hamantaschen (my failed attempt)

03/21/2011 by Lara • 2 Comments

Recipe:
Total time: 1.5 hours
Ease: Difficult
Unusual ingredients: orange zest, jam

Let me start with a nice, pretty picture of oranges, to help counterbalance the total train wreck that comes after. We ate the orange after I used the zest in the dough below!

My friend Ed suggested I try to make Hamantaschen, typically made on the joyous holiday of Purim. As he said, “Few baked goods are done in memory of a vanquished foe’s hat.” True enough, Ed.

I was excited to make them and yes, they did come out quite tasty. But not at all pretty. We’ll get to that in a minute.

Everything was going very well for a while. The dough was beautiful:

The cookies were easy to roll and cut, which gave me much more hope than my last shortbread attempt: (more…)

Pecan Linzer Cookies

03/13/2011 by Lara • 1 Comment

Recipe: Martha Stewart's Pecan Linzer Cookies with Cherry Filling
Total time: 3.5 hours
Ease: Intermediate
Unusual ingredients: Pecan halves, jam of your choice

Brad and I were heading to meet up with his parents yesterday and I wanted to bake them something special – not just the average cookie!

I’d saved this Martha Stewart recipe for a while, and realized we had all the ingredients in our cupboards, including a guava jam that Brad had been saving (yum!). Instead of using more traditional cookie cutter shapes, we opted for hearts, with a smaller heart cutout in the center.

I won’t kid you: rolling and cutting those cookies was stressful. Too much flour on the rolling pin and the dough would break or flake; too little and it’d tear apart as it stuck to the pin or the board. It was quite a workout, and thankfully I had lots of moral support from Brad as we went!


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