A pretzel is what I tied myself into, trying to come up with something original for this month’s Lady Behind the Curtain Dessert Challenge (here), with the theme ingredients of pretzels and caramel. My bacon — which doesn’t appear in this recipe, but could! — was saved by the discovery at the 99 Cents Only of frozen soft pretzels.

A soft pretzel is a bread-like substance. From bread-like substances, it’s a short step to bread pudding.

To get ourselves in the proper festive mood, let’s try the very first live performance of a song from Cassadee Pope’s upcoming album. “Good Times” is the kind of party song I usually avoid, but there’s something about sounding as if Avril Lavigne took up the kind of 1970s rock that was influenced by country’s Bakersfield Sound… it just amuses me. Read the rest of this entry »

Not only is it possible to construct a dessert using peas and carrots, it’s a downright good idea, and the result will go beautifully with a few cucumber sandwiches and petit fours for an elegant afternoon tea.

While peas and carrots actually were random ingredients hanging out in my kitchen, they’re also the March challenge ingredients for Frugal Antics of a Harried Homemaker.
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This is the very first time I’ve tried to make pastry from scratch, for which I can thank — with a rueful, flour-coated smile — the Lady Behind the Curtain Dessert Challenge for March. [Spoiler: despite being fluffy rather than flaky, the results tasted good. So there's hope.]

The key ingredients were almond paste and pastry. For two entire months of planning, I swore I was going to make a sort of tart with prefab pie crust, prefab almond paste, and jelly in a nice jar. Then I found myself standing in the baking aisle of Transitional Neighborhood Kroger with nary a tube of almond paste to be seen… but sliced almonds marked 40% off.

It’s not that I dare mightily: it’s that I’m both lazy and cheap. So this coffee cake is entirely made from scratch, and would probably have still been pretty easy if I were better at it.

For no really clear reason, this coffee cake got me listening to the stream of Megan Hilty’s new album, It Happens All the Time (buy at Amazon, buy at iTunes), so don’t hesitate to check it out, particularly her cover of “Dare You to Move” (which is not quite the same as “dare you to make pastry,” but it’ll do).
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Jessica Fletcher joins the Golden Girls in the Fresh-Baked Mystery series by Livia J. Washburn (official site). In Killer Crab Cakes, retired schoolteacher Phyllis Newsom is housesitting her cousin’s B&B on the Texas Gulf Coast, and she’s managed to haul along her boarders from her hometown: Carolyn (the bitchy one), Eve (the mantrap), and Sam (the boyfriend). Mayhem ensues.

The book moves at a leisurely pace, leaving the reader time to ponder which recipe to try (or to think about booking tickets to the Gulf Coast, as the descriptions are seductive). I should probably make the cookies that Phyllis enters in the baking contest, but I cook so many sweets, and I’ve  often vaguely wondered whether seafood Mexican involves cream cheese or cream or what… so the seafood quesadillas, it is.

As a reminder that today’s grandparents and retirees are children of the 1960s, not the 1930s, here’s a little Donovan cover about a crab. I went with a cover because there doesn’t seem to be a clear live tubie of the original — and also because this Sou’sideLiam is a nice listen. (He has a Youtube channel of covers of music of this era.)

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Black Forest Brownies are so easy to make that, if right now on the morning of Valentine’s Day, you haven’t whipped up a sweet dessert to share, you can get this done and still have plenty of time to sprinkle rose petals, whip through your tax returns, or negotiate peace in the Middle East.

This month’s Lady Behind the Curtain Dessert Challenge ingredients were chocolate and cherry. Play your cards right at the dollar store, and these brownies are also a bargain! Plus, they can be varied in numerous ways that I’ll describe at the end of the recipe.

Valentine’s Day calls for a dopey love song, and handily, Tegan and Sara’s new album Hearthrob (buy at iTunes, buy at Amazon) has that song. It’s called “Love They Say,” and it’s reputedly constructed from every cliché in the love-song biz. Billboard‘s right in saying it cries out to be in the soundtrack to a teen movie.

Preheat your oven to 325, and let’s embrace the chocolate. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, Andy Skib fired me as a fan. He didn’t put on a Donald Trump-style toupé or haul me into the board room. It wasn’t even personal. The reasons were purely economic.

Since his firing me resulted in some new ideas for the painfully slow-going music-industry novel in progress and re-ordered my priorities for 2013 (not to mention leaving me with music to enjoy from the days before I was deemed unworthy, including the aptly titled Lost in America EP reviewed here), I’m not going away mad.

His firing me as a fan was a natural consequence of changes in the music industry, and it’s the implications of those changes that I want to talk about here. The frivolously easy apple desert is the spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down, so you may as well preheat the oven to 375.

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This divine toffee from Candy Apple Dead by Sammi Carter (blog) is the first in a series of trying the recipes recommended by all those mystery novels in which major characters cook up a storm — an idea which was sort of suggested by Joyed_ and named by kyoat.

I found a list of cozies with cooks. I hied myself to the library (hie ho!). I brought home the first four books I found. Themes are, therefore, indicative of the author’s state of mind, but not of mine. (My state of mind involves joining Sweet Sharing Monday, hosted by Say Not Sweet Anne.)

Abby Shaw, back in her picturesque Colorado hometown after a law career and a divorce, has inherited her Aunt Grace’s candy shop, Divinity. Recipes for a few of the many tempting candies Abby makes are provided at the back of the book. So let’s arm ourselves with a stick of butter, an appropriate soundtrack from Paolo Nutini, and the official recipe as provided by Ms. Carter’s publisher — and get cooking. (If you feel impatient, there’s a box score at the end, summarizing my views on both the recipe and the mystery.)

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Quadruple chocolate Nutella cookies are one essential to a well-ordered life.

Another essential is knowing how to determine the best place for a musician to tattoo the name(s) of his or her high-roller fan(s). This question may become pressing in the new music industry of the 21st century. Indeed, you, armed with a spare $1000 and a love of hard rock, could make it a pressing issue for guitarist Neal Tiemann (@nealfingtiemann — no doubt any British ancestors pronounced that middle name “Fotheringay-Haugh”).

The inestimable Mr. Tiemann’s band, Hell or Highwater (a project of Brandon Saller of Atreyu), is about to tour with The Darkness, and the guys have set up a little Kickstarter fund to cover gas and van repairs, as all indie band vans break down somewhere between Barstow and Oklahoma City. Two tattoos are available. The band’s music, I’ve talked about before — here, for debut album Begin Again, and here, for a live show under the group’s former name of Black Cloud Collective — so we can get right down to the important issue of where that tattoo should best go. And we can make Nutella-based cookies, loosely using flower7′s Food.com recipe.

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Pfeffernusse.

It must be whispered in a sort of enticing coo.

Also to be whispered enticingly: band recommendations. I have a mutual follow on Twitter with an account that purports to be former Survivor front man Jimi Jamison (track-by-track of Never Too Late), though I suspect — due to its sudden burst of recommendations for Croatian post-punk bands and the like — that it’s actually a fan account. But anybody who remembers back to my World Cup fusion recipes in summer 2010 will realize that I need the occasional Croatian post-punk band. So I have no serious problem here with being fooled or exploited, as long as the bands keep coming. (And if it’s really Jamison, he has an amazingly diverse network of musical pals.)

The recipe for these cookies bears a vague resemblance to Kitchen Riffs’ pfeffernusse. Don’t rush to preheat the oven. Instead, set a stick of butter out to soften while checking out Australian hard rock band Ragdoll (official site, Youtube or buy Here Today EP from CDBaby, iTunes, Amazon).

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Donald Trump’s life will never be complete because he cannot be a rapper.

He also can’t have these cookies, as his household staff doesn’t know how to make them. But it’s more tragic that he can’t be a rapper.

This revelation came to me while listening to Rameer J’s new mixtape, Full Course (free legal download). His visual for an album cover gives one hint of how this happened. Is this or is this not a man who’s prepared to run a business empire, gold-plated pocket calculator in hand?

These cookies — which are a chocolate-flavored take on the classic Rice Krispy cookie — represent the sweet rewards of success. We are going to make them while listening to Full Course (NSFW), which turns out to be a romp through the conflicting thoughts of an indie musician in pursuit of the dream of fame. This is a story about the tension between art and commerce, and the tension between ambition and realism.

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All together now: “Your candy corn cupcakes do not look like candy corn!”

These cupcakes are an experiment that tastes pleasing enough but doesn’t entirely work as proof-of-concept. So this recipe falls in the vast range of cookery that lies between sunlit photos of domestic perfection (on the one hand) and “help! I can’t boil water!” (on the other).

This level of randomness fits well with a day when I realized two hours into a project that I needed — and couldn’t legally get — samples from a musician’s upcoming album and so would have to save him for later. As a result, it’s time for three contrasting layers of Artists I’ve Discovered on Twitter, in this case, psychedelic folk-pop UnAware (Facebook), hip hop Shoota The Outlaw (Reverbnation), and Clapton-esque acoustic guitarist Bud Buckley (Reverbnation). Preheat the oven to 325 and let’s see what’s what.

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A journey of 50 recipes for 50 states begins with a single pudding… and ends with one, too.

Technically, Alabama was sweet-potato pie, but experience testifies that the difference between a custard, a flan, and a pudding is largely the angle of view. And now I’m going to contradict myself and try to construct a Wyoming apple pudding that doesn’t contain eggs and milk. I’m complicated that way. I also couldn’t face chopping apple with my damaged hand (it’s much better now) and wanted an easier approach.

Since this project — based on the Jiffy corn pudding that snuck into New Mexico — is highly experimental, it’s fitting to accompany it with the highly experimental music of Harriman Exit (Reverbnation). Preheat the oven to 350 and let’s open packages! Read the rest of this entry »

Somehow, I’d envisioned Utah cuisine as hearty pioneer recipes, made from scratch and full of natural goodness.

Turns out that Utah cookery is mostly about the Jell-O, except when it’s about the canned cream-of-mushroom soup. Sour cream and Cool Whip are both used copiously, though presumably not interchangeably.

Among these classics is Pretzel Jell-O Salad (recipe from The Girl Who Ate Everything), which has the merit of mixing sweet and salty flavors. It’s usually made with strawberries, but I wanted to try something a little edgier, since the risk level involved in having never made Jell-O before wasn’t high enough for me. I have a vaguely Middle Eastern feel in mind, with peach Jell-O, nectarines, honey, and coriander.

To accompany this adventure in sugar overload, let’s listen to Baby Ghosts (Bandcamp). As well as being the Boston Phoenix’s 2012 pick for Utah, the band’s hyperkinetic lo-fi sound, with punk and rockabilly undertones, provides an appropriate soundtrack for working off the calories in this dish. Preheat the oven to 350 and let’s go! Read the rest of this entry »

My passion for lemon is equivalent to other people’s passion for chocolate, so inevitably I was bitten by the Pinterest-borne lemon brownie bug (recipe from Baker Girl). My version has a twist.

Lemon brownies — twist and all — felt like the natural match for my overdue rendezvous with a feature on Jesse Thomas (official site), the husky-voiced  acoustic pop-rock guitarist whom I saw open for Green River Ordinance last month (a thundering experience). Thomas had won me from skepticism to fascination in the course of her short set, which I think counts as a win-win. She is (or was) touring to draw attention to her album War Dancer (buy on iTunes), so we’re going to pay some attention to it. Preheat the oven to 350 and let’s get lemony. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pennsylvania Dutch are a people whose first instinct, when making a cake, is to stick it in a pie crust. Our agrarian ancestors must have burned a lot more calories than the typical office-worker.

Shoofly pie presented both an irresistible challenge and several immovable objections. I don’t like pie crust. I can live without molasses. A cakey, gooey, molasses-flavored dessert excited no excitement. And yet… cakey. Gooey. Recklessly, I took epicurious’ recipe for coffee shoofly pie (recipe) and modified it to be a crustless orange-honey flavored pudding. And it worked.

Finding Pennsylvania bands was much easier, thanks to Paste’s dedication to emptying my bank account, which in this case stretched to 11 must-hear bands (hear them here). As always, we’re going to explore three of them. So preheat the oven to 350 and let’s start with the electro-pop sounds of duo City Rain (Bandcamp).

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One retro cupcake deserves another.

The genesis of these cupcakes was Offbeat Home’s Weekend Challenge: Nerdy Cupcakes or Unicorn Heads?, and yes, I realize there are people who wonder how I could pass up a chance to attempt to build papier-mâché taxidermy. Someday, I shall tell about the Heffalump Head Disaster. But not today.

Haley Reinhart’s sultry, retro-19060s soul/pop debut album, Listen Up! (buy at iTunes or Amazon) seems like a good fit for my urge to try a retro-1960s cupcake recipe. I’m going to go track-by-track, so you may want to mosey on over to Spotify to listen along. Or you can preheat the oven to 350 and prepare for surprises. Read the rest of this entry »

Who knew sour could taste so sweet?

My urge to make a pure lemon cookie with a hint of spice coincided with an urge to check in with musicians whose work I haven’t looked at in a while. Let’s also link up with A Little Nosh’s Tastetastic Thursday and see what other cooks are up to, while we’re at it.

Armed with a recipe from Lunches Fit for a Kid, I left my butter to reach room temperature and did some random playing around online. Having cooked my way through New Hampshire, it seems odd to listen without having a state in mind; so perhaps we’ll call this state Curiosity (or Confusion). Being in a state, it makes sense to start with Mates of State, who just released a new video for “Unless I’m Led,” from the 2011 album Mountaintops (buy on iTunes or Amazon).

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It seems I’m one of maybe three women born in the United States who never swooned over a boy band or even a teen idol.

This made the April top 10 workout songs list from Run Hundred (here) especially provocative, as it includes One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful,” and I’m not entirely sure what a One Direction is, other than a sign pointing straight from pre-teens’ pockets to Simon Cowell’s bank account.

In honor of my skewedness from mainstream culture, I decided to make lemon-chocolate-chip cookies, as lemon and chocolate is one of my favorite flavor combinations, and it’s difficult to find in the wild. This involved taking the traditional Toll House recipe (here), cutting it in half, and making some wild-eyed modifications. Read the rest of this entry »

Shyly hiding behind those strawberries is a magical barely-any-fat cheesecake based (admittedly more loosely than I’d originally intended) on the Swedish Ostkaka (recipe), which I’m promised was brought by immigrants to Nebraska.

Nebraska also offers a nifty regional-music blog, Hear Nebraska, that lists bands. In a moment of shallowness, I became deeply smitten with the photo for All Young Girls are Machine Guns, due to the singer’s playing a stringed instrument that’s shaped like a machine gun. Fortunately, I also liked the act’s music (Tumblr, Reverbnation, CDBaby), as it turns out that singer-songwriter Rebecca Lowry is the leader of the mythical Ukelele Resistance that I’ve been nattering about for years now. Read the rest of this entry »

These chocolate-chocolate chip cookies are dark as sin and twice as potent.

The same could be said of the Winchester Rebels (Reverbnation), a band that showed up among my Twitter followers and immediately caught my attention as a sound that some of my online pals would love. If you miss the good ol’ days of hard, heavy rock like Incubus and Alice in Chains, the Winchester Rebels is a band that belongs in your music collection.

If intensity is your thing, these cookies (recipe from Beth Struble) belong in your recipe collection. It’s time to tackle — or be tackled by — both the recipe and the band. Let’s do it! Read the rest of this entry »