Easy Candied Pecans

We made these candied pecans to top our Bourbon-Pumpkin Mousse Pie but luckily I made double the recipe because they are delicious. They’d be great in a fall salad, or sprinkled over Butterscotch Pudding, or just as a snack. They’d be delicious served with blue cheese along with sliced apples and pears. You could flavor these candied … Read more

Bourbon Pumpkin Mousse Tart with Candied Pecans

A pumpkin tart covered in meringue cones

Light and airy pumpkin mousse, with a good splash of bourbon, in a rich chocolate cookie shell topped with whipped cream swirls and crunchy candied pecans. Yeah, you need to make this. 

Apple Tarts with Rosemary-Lime Sugar

Apple Tarts with Rosemary-Lime Sugar
Apple Tarts with Rosemary-Lime Sugar

These crisp and tasty apple tarts are a great way to use up your fall bounty; using frozen puff pastry makes the whole process a lot easier, and they’re finished with rosemary-lime sugar.

It happens every year in the Hudson Valley, where we live. As soon as the leaves on the maple trees turn a ridiculous shade of red, we, residents and tourists alike, don our coziest sweaters and follow the scent of hot cider doughnuts to the nearest orchard. Once there we wander the grounds, hopped up on cinnamon sugar and crisp autumn air, filling baskets and gunny sacks with more Empires, Cortlands and Jonagold apples than anyone who doesn’t work in a pie factory would ever need.

Only once when we’re home and realize we need to put an addition on the house in order to store our haul, do we admit that maybe we’ve bought just a few too many. And just when I thought we’d succeeded in using our bounty, one of Matt’s local clients sent him home with a massive box of Golden Delicious apples from the tree in her yard. Oh well, we’ll just have to start working on that Salted Caramel Apple Pie idea I’ve been thinking about. #HudsonValleyProblems #AppleHumbleBrag

Rosemary-Lime Sugar
Rosemary-Lime Sugar

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Toffee-Apple Sour Cream Cake (with a Salted Caramel Drizzle)

It’s a shame about toffee apples, it really is. In theory, I ought to love them. There’s the toffee, which, as our Ultimate English Toffee recipe proves, we’re all about. I have no problem with the toffee. There are the apples – and who doesn’t like apples? Your basic apple is basically the perfect snack – you … Read more

Five-Layer Magic Bars

Five-Layer Magic Bars

Five-layer magic bars made with coconut, chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, and toasted pecans held together by condensed milk on a graham cracker crust.

I sometimes have a tricky time starting these posts, and true to form, for this recipe I got stuck on the very first word of the post title. FIVE-layer magic bars. Is it really five layers? Or is it three? Or four? Honesty in cooking is pretty important, right? There are certainly more than (but not MUCH more than) five ingredients, and you do assemble the bars in neat layers, so really, it can be as many layers as YOU think it is. Or you can just make them and not worry too much about it.

We made these to take to a local bake sale last weekend called For Goodness Bake. This is the third year that it has been organized, and each year the proceeds go to a different worthy local cause. This year it was the Green Teens, an offshoot of the Cornell Cooperative Extension which teaches farming, gardening and other food-related skills to local teenagers.

Five-Layer Magic Bars

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