Cinnamon

The Monarch: A Brown-Sugar Bourbon Cocktail with Thyme and Lemon

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Pouring a cocktail through a strainer into a coupe glass

Inspired by the sweet nectar of summer flowers, we created a cocktail in partnership with Heritage Distilling’s Brown Sugar Bourbon, which has notes of cinnamon and nutmeg, to which we added fresh thyme, lemon and elderflower liqueur. It’s tart, herbal, and beautifully smooth and luscious and very drinkable. After all, don’t we all deserve a little sweetness in our lives?

Unbelievably Delicious Chocolate Babka

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Unbelievably Delicious Chocolate Babka

Chocolate babka: a sweet bread treat made with enriched dough and layered with chocolate – a weekend project you’ll be glad you made.

Greetings, Easter (and Passover***) bunnies!

***This babka is leavened and therefore not suitable for Passover, if your family, unlike ours, cares about such things. Read Matt’s full, sincere and amusing apology at the bottom of the post.

It may have slipped out in the course of this blog that one of us is Jewish, and the other of us is English. These are not, frankly, genres that strike awe into the hearts of home chefs (although Nigella Lawson does pretty well for herself) . When our best friends in town got married, they catered the reception with dishes from Italy (his family heritage), and soul food from New Orleans (hers). It was awesome. A Jewish-British catered wedding? Maybe not so much.

An Easter/(not)Passover*** dessert option, though? Now you’re talking.

Unbelievably Delicious Chocolate Babka
This Babka is filled with rich, dark chocolate with just a hint of cinnamon.

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Easy Candied Pecans

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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

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

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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

Carrot Cupcakes with Vanilla Cream Cheese Frosting

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Carrot Cupcakes with Vanilla Cream Cheese Frosting

What’s better than Carrot Cake? Moist and tender Carrot Cupcakes with vanilla-flecked cream cheese frosting (just because you get one all to yourself). 

Carrot cupcakes are perfect for the Venn diagram of people who like carrot cake and people who like cupcakes … let’s face it, that’s basically everyone, right?

Yesterday, like two slightly terrified mole-rats unused to sunlight and open space, Matt and I ventured out onto our deck and… stood there.

“That’s, um,  great,” says a normal person, “but are you sure it’s a story worth typing up and putting on the internet?”

Yes. Yes it is.

We turned our faces towards the warm sun, each with a steaming cup of coffee clasped in our pale, trembling hands. Our huge pink eyes had grown unused to the light and we blinked, almost afraid to believe it, half convinced that the heat was a practical joke and nature was going to dump a foot of snow on us the moment we let our guard down. So we waited, nervous and twitchy, but nothing happened.

“I think it’s going to be okay,” Matt said quietly. I looked out at the brown, battered garden and noticed tiny little green shoots poking up out of the dirt. The first stems of garlic. Yes, I thought, it will be.

Yup, this winter is Ramsay Bolton and we, my friends, we are Reek. (For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about and who clicked on that first link and think I’ve gone insane, I apologize and assure you that I have not. It’s just that Game of Thrones has started again and I’m a little… distracted). Full disclosure; I spent an entire hour looking for the perfect Ramsay Bolton gif, and boy did it pay off. Click it. Go on. Do it.

Carrot Cupcakes with Vanilla Cream Cheese Frosting

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Easy Baked French Toast

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Hello gang! Ready for some delicious baked French toast? I do like to think of us as a gang, by the way: we, the writers of this madcap screed, and you, our wonderful readers. Not a particularly effectual gang, I have to admit. It’s not a gang to strike fear in the hearts of our … Read more