fake-cation to florence!

Happy 2021!

I hope you all had restful enjoyable holiday breaks and were able to come into the new year feeling like your phone after a long overnight software update and super-charging session! (Hm… I’m going to keep workshopping that new year greeting…)

We had about the loveliest fake vacation to Florence possible and I want to tell you all about it before I scamper off to filming GMF (season 8!):

  1. We basically just ate a bunch of mozzarella and prosciutto all week that we splurged on from the fancy section of the grocery store (by the bakery, not in the deli section) and it was delicious. We even acquired burrata which I’ve never seen in a grocery in Grand Forks. That was a TREAT! We had it all week long with loads of basil and the focaccia and Tuscan bread from Emiko’s book.

  2. For dinners, we cooked through Emiko’s book and made a great brick chicken, lots and lots of beans, homemade pappardelle, and one of the best homemade pizzas I’ve ever had in my life. It was so simple, just San Marzano tomatoes from the can, fresh mozzarella, and basil… but the thing I loved extra about it was dusting the dough with semolina flour for some good crunchiness.

  3. We celebrated Christmas outside with steamy bowls of ribollita and the weather was perfect. Not that I love talking about the weather but if we’re going to be forced to socially distance on a wintery holiday, we could at least get nice sitting-outside weather and we did!

  4. Our Florentine art exploration included making a “fresco” with Bernie, AKA we taped a big sheet of paper to the wall and drew all over it with crayons and rubber stamps. We made a mountain scene with ducks, so many ducks.

  5. We took a “day trip to ski* in the Italian Alps**” (*sled on a giant inflatable unicorn, **on a hill in town)

  6. We went “wine tasting* all over the hills of Tuscany**” (*swing set testing, **playgrounds of Grand Forks)

  7. Had not one but two blissful spa days, AKA I sat in a coconut tub with a face mask on and read Adam Rippon’s book for the entirety of Bernie’s nap time. Then used a lot of cuticle oil.

  8. Watched some great TV on the “airplane” (couch), including The Flight Attendant, Bobby and Giada in Italy, Bridgerton, Wonder Woman, Big, and Soul. Wow, Soul.

  9. Meditated! I got the Calm app and wow my brain is like “Thank U, self!!” 10/10 recommend.

Where should we fake go to next?? Should we time travel back to the 90s and only eat pizza rolls and dunkaroos all week? Ooh that sounds fun… Alright g2g, figure skating nationals is on!! Bye!!!

-yeh!

bye, 2020!

photos: birthday cakes for nick and grumpa / ugly hanukkah sweater dala cookies / graham cracker village / black sesame halloween cats! / bernie as elmo / one of many recent hotdishes / homemade gelt! / the splatter cake i made on drew barrymore’s show! / making latkes on the today show / latke nachos (lat-chos!) / pumpkin pies packed up for special deliveries / day-after-thanksgiving sandwich / thanksgiving / the donut cake from yossy’s new book, snacking cakes / snow and mitten / a random hummus platter / made pancake cereal lol / s’mores sufganiyot

Hi fronds! 

I just wanted to check in and say hi/happy holidays before we leave for our fake-cation to Florence later this week!! A fake-cation is when you strap yourselves to the couch for seven hours while you “fly” to Italy and then when you “get off the plane” you only eat Italian food and wear fanny packs and have very limited cell phone service for a week. We’re going to pretend that we’re staying at the Four Seasons Florence and only use tiny soap and then when we depart for our day we’ll map out our route based on what’s walkable and then choose our meals according to menus in the area. Is this deranged? On a scale from pancake cereal to breastmilk cheese have we lost it? Ok we’re not actually going to simulate the flight because can you imagine doing that to yourself with a toddler (!) but we ARE stocking up on Nutella and ingredients to cook through Emiko DaviesFlorentine, and we do fully intend to immerse ourselves in Italian art and music and, oh yeah, wine. I should set alarms on my phone to sneak chocolates onto Nick and Bernie’s pillows before bedtime. 

So that’s where we’ll be next week and I don’t plan on bringing my computer (i.e. I’ll do the thing I always do between Christmas and the New Year which is that I tape my computer shut with washi tape). But I wanted to tell you about some highlights of the latter part of our year!  As some of you have noticed on Instagram, we’re in a temporary house right now because we’re adding onto our home! It has been such a fascinating process and I can’t wait to share more details, but it should be ready sometime in the summer. So that means I’ve been writing Home Is Where The Eggs Are in a temporary kitchen which has been a highly informative adventure because I have an entirely different set of appliances to test recipes on. But we also miss our house so much! Being in a temporary house + this pandemic feels like walking in a never-ending ball pit some days but we’re safe and cozy and here are things that make us smile:

  1. I have stumbled on one of the great unexpected bonuses of having a child: Bernie loves brushing my hair!!! I don’t even miss going to spa days anymore, I just sit on the living room floor and Bernie says “comb! comb! comb!” and does this hybrid brush/pet thing on my head, it feels so nice.

  2. Our temporary house is more out there than our farm and yet there is so much life all around. There are three deer, two mamas and a baby, who come by at dusk and eat the apples from our trees. We wave at them from our window. And also a cat! Mitten. She comes on evening strolls with us and puts up with a certain someone who likes to tug her tail. Probably because she knows she gets post-soup chicken carcasses if she sticks around?

  3. We had a tiny but very tasty Thanksgiving. It was one of the few meals I can remember that didn’t revolve around testing for my book and so I didn’t have to sit down and immediately analyze every bite and bring myself on that emotional roller coaster haha… I could just use butter/salt/pepper and enjoy brussels sprouts, Alexandra Stafford’s stuffing, Hayden’s cranberry sauce, Sister Schubert rolls, smoked ham, lefse, Nick’s pumpkin pie, and more stuffing in all of its delicious glory.

  4. Bernie has become such a great help in the kitchen! We got her this thing called a Toddler Tower which is basically a really high step stool with a railing around it and she helps wash potatoes, whisk batters, dump seasonings into things, and just last week I put her on piping bag duty for our little graham cracker gingerbread houses. She ate all of the crackers that she piped frosting onto so none of them made the final houses but her coconut snowstorm did!!!

  5. We had a great Hanukkah in which we lit candles and read new books every night! The best book of all was this board book for Bernie that we made using pictures of her doing all of her favorite things (it is called “Self” because she loves looking at “self”). And we made homemade gelt!!

  6. So much soup. Always soup. I love soup.

  7. And so much Elmo. And then when it’s naptime, I watch that new Disney+ ballet series! It’s so great.

Ok that’s all! Happy holidays, friends!!!!!

-yeh!

valentine's day almond cake

Holy guacamole snowstorm almond paste, where did January and the better part of February go?? It seems like just yesterday that I was rolling around with Bernie under the Chrismukkah bush and staring down my kransekake asking what am I going to do with you? (Oh wait, that definitely was yesterday because a) we still have the bush up and b) nobody ate my kransekake and it’s still in our pantry/prop/piano room looking as handsome as ever.) My point is that wow time flies when you’re belting Sesame Street and braving the snowstorm to go to library story time. I’m so sorry I haven’t written to you in forever!!! Are we still fronds? Are we fronds on Instagram?? I find it’s much more manageable these days to document directly from my phone during nap time and in between readings of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs rather than opening up my computer for a longer form blog post. So for the time being, let’s just hover between Instagram and a less frequent but not totally infrequent blog post correspondence, ok??? Navigating the internet and balancing time with Bernie and other projects is hard! But I love them all so I promise to blog as often as I can!

Let me ketchup on what we’ve been doing this winter!

We’ve been snowshoeing in the yard, finger painting, tasting the finger paint, cheering on Jason Brown’s quad, screaming for Mariah Bell’s nationals moment, testing Girl Meets Farm season 6 enchiladas again and again, avoiding the flu, going to the spa in Winnipeg, and scrubbing oatmeal off of a high chair three times a day every single day. We’ve reached peak coziness on the couch, taken swim lessons, and zipped down to Arizona to see the sun. We’ve eaten plenty of pot pies and kept up our pizza Friday habit, and Bernie’s had her first boureka, hawaij, harissa, and bamba. Next week we’ll get another little dose of sun in South Beach and then before we know it, we’ll be filming again and then after that it’s spring planting! Ugh I love winter so much. How have you been? Are you staying warm? Ready for the spring??

On to the cake. It is time for Bernie’s very first annual Valentine’s Day almond cake and oh my good gosh geez, I’ve been dreaming of this moment for so very long. As you know, I make this same exact cake every single year for Valentine’s Day and have way too much fun thinking of different ways to decorate it. The cake itself is a light spongey almond cake with fluffy whipped cream and it’s so good and not too rich. (See below for links to the cakes I’ve made every year since the start of this blog.) This year I spent a really long time brainstorming ways for Bernie to help decorate, taking into account the fact that most Valentine’s candies are choking hazards and all she wants to do is put everything into her mouth. So inspired by a painting method that Hayley, the art director for Girl Meets Farm, did with Bernie to make paintings for our refrigerator, I taped a bag of melted (and mostly cooled) chocolate to her high chair tray and let her mush it around. She loves squishing things!! When she was done with her masterpiece, we put the bag in the freezer (carefully, to maintain Bernie’s artistic vision) and when the chocolate firmed up, we used it as the decorations on the cake!

This is by far my favorite Valentine’s Day cake of all time. I’m so stinkin excited to eat it. We’re going to have it with heart shaped pizza and it’s gonna be the best!!! Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!!

(And you can see all of my past valentine’s cakes here! 2019 / 2018 / 2017 / 2016 / 2015 / 2014 / 2013 / 2012 / 2011 / 2010)


valentine's day almond cake

serves 10-12

ingredients

cake:

1/2 c (64g) all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking powder

8 oz almond paste

6 large eggs, separated

1/2 tsp kosher salt

1/2 c (100g) sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 tsp almond extract


whipped cream:

1 1/2 c (360g) heavy whipping cream

1/2 c (60g) powdered sugar

1 tsp almond extract

pink food coloring (the food coloring in the photo is americolor’s mauve colored gel), optional


assembly:

chocolate
sprinkles of all sorts

clues

preheat the oven to 350ºf. grease and line the bottom of a 9” springform pan and set aside.

in a small bowl, whisk together the flour and baking powder.

in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, beat the egg whites and salt to soft peaks and then gradually beat in the sugar, about 1 tablespoon at a time. continue beating to stiff peaks and then set aside.

in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment (i usually just scoop the whites out of the bowl and transfer them to a separate bowl and then reuse my stand mixer bowl without having to wash it for this step), combine the almond paste and egg yolks and beat on high for 2 minutes until pale and fluffy (but allow some almond paste chunks to remain in tact), scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. mix in the vanilla and almond extract. gently fold the whites into the yolk mixture and then fold in the flour mixture. pour the batter into the pan and then bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. begin checking for doneness at 30 minutes.

cool in the pan on a rack for 10 minutes and then remove to the rack to cool fully.

to make the whipped cream, in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, beat the heavy cream, powdered sugar, and almond extract to stiff peaks. add a few drops of pink food coloring if desired.

spread the whipped cream on top of the cake. decorate with chocolate and/or sprinkles as desired and enjoy!!

store leftovers in the fridge for up to a few days.


-yeh!

stollen bars

This time last year when I was a million months pregnant, I got the wildest craving for Stollen, the yeasted spiced Christmas cake that has a bunch of tasty mix-ins (most notably, marzipan). This craving came out of nowhere because I don’t think I’d even ever had Stollen before?! I guess I wanted all of the warm spices and a cake with not too much sweetness, and, obviously, marzipan. Because, spoiler alert, I am approximately 75% marzipan during the holiday season. But then when I started looking for recipes, I realized I wanted something with a little more instant gratification because I was too impatient to let stuff rise. I also wanted a softer moister denser texture than a yeasted cake could give me. After searching high and low, I came across Dan Lepard’s Stollen bars!! They are a stroke of genius and delivered everything I was looking for: a buttery soft blondie-like consistency, loads of flavor, hidden surprises like chewy dried fruit and toasty pistachios, not too much required in the way of time or energy, and gigantic chunks of marzipan. GIGANTIC CHUNKS OF MARZIPAN!!! They were SO GOOD!!! I made multiple batches and gifted them all over the place. My only challenge was that the recipe was written in British and required a lot of Googling and trial and error to figure out suitable equivalents to “mixed spice” and strong white flour, as well as the meaning of “sultana.” I also ended up throwing in some dried cherries because I’m in a dried cherry phase, and some orange zest and almond extract because they tie all of these flavors together soo nicely. 

So here is my version of Dan’s bars and, ugh, I am obsessed with these. I love the earthy understated look. They’re sturdy, reliable, low maintenance (make them ahead! they last for a few weeks!), and all around delicious. The cream cheese in the dough adds a sparkle of tang and melted butter brushed on top combines with a storm of powdered sugar for a wintery rustic alternative to glaze. If colorful frosted sugar cookies are the fancy sequined holiday party dress that you’ve been planning on wearing for months, these bars are the very comfortable jeggings and oversized sweater that you decide to wear at the last minute with absolutely no regrets!


Stollen Bars

Makes 25 squares

Ingredients

2 c (260g) all-purpose flour

2/3 c (75g) almond flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp cinnamon

3/4 tsp kosher salt

1/4 tsp ground cardamom

A pinch of ground cloves

A pinch of allspice

3/4 c (168g) unsalted butter, divided, at room temperature

4 oz (112g) cream cheese, room temperature

1 c (200g) sugar

Zest of 1 orange

1 large egg

1/2 tsp almond extract

1/3 c (53g) dried cherries

1/3 c (53g) golden raisins

1 c (112g) roasted pistachios

8 oz (227g) marzipan, chopped into 3/4” pieces

1/3 c (40g) powdered sugar

Clues

Preheat the oven to 350ºf. Grease an 8” square pan and line with parchment paper so that 1” wings come up on two sides. Set it aside.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, almond flour, baking powder, cinnamon, salt, cardamom, cloves, and allspice. In a stand mixer fitted with a paddle, beat together 1/2 cup of the butter, the cream cheese, sugar, and orange zest on medium high until pale and fluffy, 3-4 minutes. Add the egg and almond extract and beat until combined. Reduce the speed to low and then beat in the dry ingredients followed by the cherries, raisins, and pistachios. Fold in the marzipan pieces by hand. Scrape into the pan and spread it out evenly with your hands or a rubber spatula. Bake until golden around the edges and lightly browned on top; begin checking for doneness at 28 minutes. 

Spread the remaining 1/4 cup of butter all over the top while it’s still hot out of the oven so that the butter melts and then sprinkle with powdered sugar. Let cool in the pan and then cut into squares and enjoy! Keep in an airtight container at room temperature or in the fridge for up to two weeks.


-yeh!

photos by chantell and brett quernemoen