Beautiful Bliss with Butter - and a Gay Lea Giveaway!

With Christmas season fast approaching (eek!) I know my mom and I are scouring the grocery stores each week looking for the best deals on butter. I'm pretty sure that, in baking alone (mostly shortbreads too!), we are probably responsible for using up the dairy output of an entire cow during the month of December. Last year - not a word of a lie - we burned through seven pounds of butter in our shortbread marathons and our two loaves of intensely rich (but oh so freaking good) Holiday Brioche. That is a lot of butter. Considering that as a whole our family uses maybe one pound of the stuff throughout the rest of the year, it's almost gluttonous to think of the exponential upswing in our fat intake in just 31 days!

But you have to admit, butter has that undeniable feel-good factor inside. As healthy as it may be, you don't get a comforting feeling from toast drizzled with olive oil and cinnamon! Any baker knows that there is a world of difference too between a cake with a bland shortening base and one made from rich, creamy butter. The one recipe I will never ever swap out the real stuff in are my mom's shortbreads - and for good reason. They work. They taste great. And they're cookies - if you want health food at Christmas, you'll have better luck chewing on some organic pine tree bark as a Christmas snack!

Usually the shortbreads we make around this time of year are just that - plain, vanilla, no-fuss butter and icing sugar concoctions. No chocolate, nuts or fruit to mess with the velvety texture. Then the folks at Gay Lea - a great butter producer in Ontario - sent me a few rather unusual recipes for the treat: a savoury Chipotle & White Cheddar Shortbread Cracker, and some ooey-gooey-delicious Banana Coconut Cream Shortbread Stacks. While I dont think I can ever convince mom to use these in place of her coveted prize-winners, I can't wait to give them a whirl myself!

Cookies with a Kick

These cookies were almost a case of a good idea gone horribly, horribly bad. Why, you ask? Well, it began with a recipe for oatmeal raisin cookies and a jar of jelly.

Emptying the Bag

It's a toss up for me as to how I feel about the holiday food scene. I mean, though I despise pumpkin pie and think mincemeat is something best buried deep underground, I make several versions of both, and given their reception by both family and the foodie community I would say they're recipes worth keeping around for a while. Even though my grandma's famous mashed potatoes with their lashings of cream cheese and butter are off the menu for me now, I still adore mashers with the simple additions of salt, pepper and garlic. Oddly enough, I reserve my cranberry sauce use for mixing into those potatoes when they're day-old, and when I was a meat-eater it paired with cold turkey, Miracle Whip and whole-grain toast. It's not overly gourmet, but I love the way the cranberries pair with the other, drier ingredients, and my lower-sugar, stevia-sweetened sauce that I made last year is still one of my favourites.

But not everyone adores cranberry sauce as much as I do - except possibly my mom, who uses it almost as much as me! So every year we make a half-batch, which then leads to the random half-bags of the fruit sitting in the freezer. Of course something like that can't stay stashed for long around here... not with my "boredom baking" tendency! I had bought some organic almond butter and whole almonds a while ago for what I think was a batch of cookies, and I had seen a recipe somewhere for an almond and poppyseed cake. So what better than an almond-cranberry-poppyseed loaf?

So I chopped up those tart little morsels and chucked them into a decadent quickbread batter, topping the raw mix with some of the whole almonds just to be pretty. Because who doesn't want some pretty, glittering gems in their day?

Almond - Poppyseed Loaf with Cranberries
Serves 10
1 1/2 cups flour

1 cup whole wheat pastry flour

1/2 cup granulated sugar

2 tbsp poppy seeds

1/4 tsp nutmeg

1 tbsp baking powder

1 cup 1% milk

1/4 cup melted butter

2 tbsp almond butter

1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp almond extract
1/3 cup slivered almonds
1 cup fresh or frozen cranberries, roughly chopped

1. Preheat oven to 350F, grease a loaf pan.
2. In a bowl, whisk flours, sugar, poppy seeds, nutmeg and baking powder. Set aside.
3. In a large bowl, beat milk, butter, almond butter, egg, vanilla and almond extract.
4. Add flour mixture and stir just to combine.
5. Fold in almonds and cranberries.
6. Bake 1 hour 10 minutes.
7. Cool in pan 30 minutes, then turn out and cool on a wire rack

Amount Per Serving

Calories: 268.2

Total Fat: 10.4 g

Cholesterol: 34.7 mg

Sodium: 51.7 mg
Total Carbs: 38.0 g
Dietary Fiber: 3.2 g

Protein: 7.2 g

You Can Never Have Too Many Brownies

Are you one of those people in the die-hard "chocolate or bust" camp? Or are you more attracted to the rich, smooth velvetyness of the custards, the flans... the cheesecakes! I can never decide for myself. I mean, I adore chocolate - what girl doesn't after all? - but like my dad, I have a penchant for rich, creamy rice pudding. I picked up a love for Boston Cream Pie from grandpa. And cheesecake? Well, that's all mom's doing, for sure.

But finding good combinations for the two is tricky. The texture thing, for one - brownies are fudgy to cakey, easily eaten out-of-hand, slightly gooey and just brownie-ish. Rice pudding is thick but spoonable, requiring a bowl. Boston Cream Pie and cheesecake (for the most part) require forks. Then there's the whole taste factor: both the creaminess of the non-chocolate desserts and the fudgy qualities of the brownies are rich, and easily overpower a dessert. I've tried recipe after recipe over the years that combined the two - brownie batter-swirled rice pudding, brownie crusted cheesecake, and yes, even the common cheesecake swirled brownie, but there was always some sort of sway one way or another that meant one side won out over the other.

Baby, it's a Brand-New Day

I'm a huge fan of breakfast. I know it doesn't really show on the blog (okay, heck, not much in general has shown up on this blog recently), but to me a day simply cannot get started without some sort of nosh. Whether it's hot or cold, sit-down or on-the-go, as long as that food gets into my belly I'm happy.

Of course, I do prefer the hot (or at least warm) breakfast when I get the chance. Be it a bowl of nuked leftover rice from the night before (I stir in jam... nummy!) or a couple toasted corn flatbreads with cinnamon-sugar, the heat seems to keep me a bit more "up" the rest of the morning than a plain bowl of cereal. I know that a lot of people both my age, younger and older than me hate the whole concept of breakfast, though. My dad and sister, for example, could basically eat one meal at "lunch" and another around "dinner" and be done for the day. A couple of my friends who take transit into class in the early morning or work weird shifts simply say they have no time for breakfast. And then you have some of my clients with allergies - one girl who I've mentioned before, a celiac allergic to fungi, corn, strawberries, dairy and brassicae, is both run-off-her-feet busy with school, 4 jobs and army cadets is simply overwhelmed by the prospect of fnding anything convenient and safe to grab in the morning rush.