Quite a ways back, I posted a recipe for homemade sweet cream butter, which I’d whipped up in an emergency to go with some muffins I’d baked for Joe. Like I mentioned before, muffins are one of his favorite breakfast items on the weekend, but I hadn’t made them in forever — they didn’t really mesh well with our beach-ready summer diet! But now that the trips have passed, we’ve been a bit more lenient and have fallen back into our hedonistic, refined-carb ways. So, the muffins made an appearance this past weekend.

This muffin recipe is something I’ve experimented with over the years, and reflects my personal taste in the pastry. They’re pretty rich, definitely cake like, and the raw batter may almost confuse you since it doesn’t take on the usual thick, gloppy consistency one might expect in a muffin mix. What’s great about this recipe is that you could make it with no fruit or other garnishes and have a very basic vanilla-almond muffin that you could load up with your favorite jam. But this time of year, when there is so much good fruit in season, I like to add in different berries or stone fruits.

Bake a batch, settle in with some freshly brewed coffee and a stack of magazines, and you’ve got the perfect start to the weekend.

Blueberry and nectarine muffins

Dry ingredients:

• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour (you can also substitute 1 1/4 cups of whole wheat flour)
• 1/2 tsp kosher salt
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 granulated sugar
• 1/4 c light brown sugar, packed
• –a few shakes of ground cinnamon

Wet ingredients:

• 2 cups milk
• 1 tbsp canola oil
• 1 egg
• 1 1/2 tsp good quality vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp almond extract (if you don’t have this and don’t want to buy it, you can omit it)
• 1/2 pint blackberries, washed and drained
• 1 whole nectarine, diced

Preheat your oven to 400º. Line a muffin tin with paper cups, or brush the tin with melted better, so that the muffins don’t stick.

Mix together all the dry ingredients in a large bowl, and set aside. In a separate medium bowl, mix together the wet ingredients with a small whisk or fork, being careful not to stir too vigorously and smash the fruit.

When you’re ready to bake, pour the wet ingredients into the dry, and use a spatula to gently fold the mixtures together. Don’t stir too hard, or the batter will develop gluten and become tough. You just want to blend these together — in fact, if you see a couple loose pockets of dry flour, that’s okay. The consistency will be like a thick cake batter.

Using a 1/4 cup measure, spoon the batter into the muffin tins. Bake for 15-20 minutes (depending on your oven), until the tops of the muffins are golden brown. Let cool for 5 to 10 minutes, then gently remove from the tin and serve with a pat of butter.

I was curious to learn more about the origins of afternoon tea, so I headed to Wikipedia to see what I could find out. Here’s the scoop:

Afternoon tea, also known as low tea, is a light meal typically eaten between 3pm and 5pm. The custom of drinking tea originated in England when Catherine of Bragança married Charles II in 1661 and brought the practice of drinking tea in the afternoon with her from Portugal. Traditionally, loose tea is brewed in a teapot and served in teacups with milk and sugar. This is accompanied by sandwiches (customarily cucumber, egg and cress, fish paste, ham, and smoked salmon), scones (with clotted cream and jam, see cream tea) and usually cakes and pastries (such as Battenberg, fruit cake or Victoria sponge). Nowadays, a formal afternoon tea is usually taken as a treat in a hotel, café or tea shop. In everyday life, many Britons take a much simpler refreshment consisting of tea and biscuits at teatime.

High tea (also known as meat tea) is an early evening meal, typically eaten between 5pm and 6pm. It is now largely followed by a later lighter evening meal. High tea would usually consist of cold meats, eggs or fish, cakes and sandwiches. In its origin, the term “high tea” was used as a way to distinguish it from “low tea” or afternoon tea. The words ‘low’ and ‘high’ refer to the tables from which either tea meal was eaten. Low tea was served in a sitting room where low tables (like a coffee table) were placed near sofas or chairs generally. The word high referred to a table, this one on a dining room table, and it would be loaded with substantial dinner dishes – meats, cheese, breads, perhaps the classic shepherd’s pie or steak and kidney pie.

Who knew that high tea originally referred to the table height??? I love learning about the history behind cultural customs!

Are you going to be having tea while you watch the Royal Wedding? If so, you simply must try this recipe for delicious currant scones, written by my friend Lesley Elliott, from Five o’Clock Food.

Based in Orange County, Lesley is a fabulous cook and even picks up catering jobs on the side when she can (so if you’re in OC and need someone to cater your next shindig, she’s your girl!). According to Lesley, “these scones are perfectly light, not too sweet, and the flavor of the currants balances very well with all of the other flavors. You can use this “base” scone recipe and add a myriad of ingredients: chocolate chips, cinnamon and apples, lemon zest…the sky’s the limit.”

Currant Scones (recipe posted with permission from Five o’Clock Food)

4 C All Purpose flour
4 tbsp sugar, plus a little extra for garnish
1 tsp kosher or sea salt
5 tsp baking powder
8 oz butter, cold, and cubed into pea-size pieces
1 C currants
1 1/2 C (plus extra for brushing) heavy cream

Preheat oven to 375°F.

Using a standing mixer with the paddle attachment, add the flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder to the mixing bowl; turn on mixer and thoroughly combine dry ingredients. [Editor's Note: If you don't have a stand mixer, you could make these scones using a food processor, a pastry cutter, or even a wooden spoon and your fingers if you work quickly. I don't have a stand mixer, so these are the techniques I use when making pastries.]

Next, add chilled butter to the dry ingredients. Make sure to try to separate each of the cubes into the flour.

Turn the mixer on, starting slow and working up to medium speed, allowing the butter to “break up” or “cut” into the flour mixture, creating what sort of looks like crumbly sand. This will take about 8 minutes if not longer.

Next, add the currants to the butter-flour mixture. Turn mixer on to low to combine all of the ingredients thoroughly.

Add the cream to the mixer, and starting on low mix the ingredients together until the dough just comes together. Then turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface; lightly knead the dough until it comes together in one cohesive mass.

Roll out the dough to about 1″ thick, and cut as you desire. Lesley prefers cutting the dough into triangular shaped wedges. Brush each scone with a little cream and sprinkle with a little sugar.

Bake at 375°F for about 10-15 minutes or until the scones are light brown on top and appear cooked through on the sides. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for about 8-10 minutes before serving.

{Image Credits: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7. If you would like to see more pictures of the scone recipe, please visit Lesley’s blog here}

It’s pretty rare that I want anything sweet for breakfast. French toast, pancakes, sugary cereals — forget it. I’m much happier with eggs, some bacon, maybe a bagel with lox. But occasionally, when I get a hankering for something sweet in the morning, there’s no stopping me.

Saturday morning arrived and I woke up craving a sweet, indulgent breakfast. It wasn’t looking promising though. We hadn’t been grocery shopping in about a week and a half, leaving only a couple eggs and some old strawberries as candidates for breakfast makings. But though the strawberries were a little smushy, a little dehydrated, and completely inedible as fresh fruit, they were perfect for strawberry sauce. Making a fruit sauce is a great thing to do if you have fruit on its last leg. Who cares how it looks or what the texture is like? Once you cook it down into a simple sauce, it won’t matter anyway.

Strawberry sauce is pretty quick to make, especially if the berries are a little old. Simply chop up the strawberries, and simmer them with water, sugar, a little lemon juice and a pinch of salt. Though strawberries are low in pectin (that natural stuff in fruit that helps gel jams and jellies), there’s just enough that the sauce won’t be overly runny. I used our strawberry sauce to douse a big batch of homemade pancakes. Try this recipe — it’s way better than anything you’ll get out of a box (and just as easy).

Strawberry Sauce

• Strawberries, hulled and quartered or halved, depending on how chunky you want your sauce (the bigger the pieces raw, the bigger they’ll be in the sauce)
• Water, enough to almost cover the top of the fruit when everything is placed in a sauce pan
• ~1 tbsp granulated sugar for every cup of water (you can adjust this based on how sweet you want your sauce)
• pinch of kosher salt
• squeeze of lemon juice

Combine all the ingredients in a saucepan and simmer over medium heat. The sauce will begin reducing and will create a light foam. This should be skimmed off the top if you want your sauce to look perfectly clear (if you don’t care or are pressed for time, don’t worry about it — these solids will re-distribute back into the sauce and won’t hurt anything). Once the fruit starts breaking down, taste the sauce. If you want it sweeter, add in a bit more sugar. Continue simmering until the sauce reduces and is at the desired consistency. Pour over ice cream, pancakes, French toast, or oatmeal.

If you want your sauce to be very smooth, you can blend the chunky version in a blender or food processor, then strain it.

Also, tip: If you want to extend the life of your berries so that they won’t mold as quickly, you must check out this article on rinsing the fruit in hot water before storing. I’ve used this technique all summer with amazing results. In fact, the strawberries I used for this sauce were, embarrassingly enough, 10 days old but with no mold on them.

Step 0 – Get a microwave safe bowl out. Glass is fine. Make sure it’s completely dry, with no little droplets of water in it (as can happen when something is fresh out of the dishwasher). Why? If you add a little bit of water to chocolate, it causes it to seize up. This is not delicious.

Step 1 – Pour some chocolate chips in the bowl. I like Ghiradelli semi sweet for this, but whatever you have is fine. If you don’t have chips but have a bar of chocolate, chop that up and throw it in the bowl.

Step 2 – Microwave this on 80% power for 15 seconds. Take it out and give it a stir. Then stir it some more. Hey, stir it gently! If you stir too vigorously, little bubbles will form.

Step 3 - Pour in some whole milk, heavy cream or half and half. Any dairy product with a slightly higher fat content. How much should you pour in? I dunno. A tablespoon or two? You can always add more later, and if you add too much and the sauce is too thin, just drop in a few more chocolate chips. If you don’t have any high fat dairy product on hand, don’t worry about it. Your sauce will be fine, just a little less pourable. But if it’s going over ice cream, then who cares, really?

Step 4 – Microwave the whole she-bang again for another 15 seconds on 80% power (or if you’re really lazy, you can do it on full blast, just keep an eye on it). Take it out again and stir. The residual heat from the microwave session should be enough to melt all the chocolate chips. If your microwave is weird, just keep heating the chocolate in 5-10 second increments. Don’t try to melt all the chocolate in the microwave, but instead, aim to give the mixture just enough heat so that when you stir it, the heat distributes and melts all the chocolate. Make sense? If you take the mixture out of the microwave and it looks lumpy and semi-melted, this is good! Stir it, and you’ll notice it gets smoother.

Thin out the chocolate as much as you want with the dairy. Then you can pour it over ice cream, or angel food cake, or cheesecake, or just eat it with a spoon (i.e., my dessert tonight). Put a tablespoon or two into milk for chocolate milk (not my thing, but some of you seem to like this beverage). You could also use it as a dip for strawberries. Mmmm.

And it stores well. Throw any leftovers in the fridge with some plastic wrap on it, then heat it up the next day using the same interval heating method in the ‘wave.

I sincerely hope you never buy Hershey’s syrup again.

Though I don’t have too big of a sweet tooth, there are two desserts I simply can’t refuse: ice cream (of any kind, really), and a well done cookie. Put the two together? Oh me, oh my.

Joe’s absolute favorite type of cookie is oatmeal chocolate chip. I won’t be surprised if you tell me you’ve never had one.

Even though it’s a simple, almost obvious combination, it’s rare to see these at bakeries or in stores. Most places stock oatmeal chocolate chip’s two cousins, the more famous oatmeal raisin and the good ‘ol chocolate chip; beyond these two, stores (unwisely) don’t generally combine the best parts of the two.

At last year’s Thanksgiving, I created this recipe for oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, and thankfully, I held on to the instructions (See? Already something to be thankful for!). I baked a big batch for my sweetie pie, with the intention of using a few to make some delicious ice cream sandwiches for our official Turkey Day dessert.

One unique ingredient in this recipe is flax seed meal. Last year, as I pulled the recipe together, I threw in a few shakes of  flax seed meal, which we keep around to add to healthy morning oatmeal. Adding in the flax meal is an easy way to sneak in a little extra fiber and Omega-3 fatty acids, and also a GREAT way to convince yourself that you’re somehow negating the two sticks of butter the recipe calls for. Right.

Here we go:

• 1 cup (usually 2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 1 cup packed light brown sugar
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp almond extract
• 1 1/4 cups AP flour
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp kosher salt
• 3 cups quick cooking oats (I use the Whole Foods Quick Rolled Oats found in the bulk section)
• 1 cup good quality semisweet chocolate chips (Guittard, Scharffen Berger, Ghiradelli)
• 1/4 – 1/2 cup flax seed meal (optional)

Preheat your oven to 325° F.

In a large bowl, cream together the butter, brown sugar and granulated sugar. You can do this with a spoon, but it’s best done with either a hand mixer or a stand mixer. Creaming sugar and fat together heavily influences the final texture of the cookie, as the beating of the sugar granules and fat together creates air in the cookie.

Once the butter and sugar have been creamed and the mixture looks smooth, beat in the eggs one at a time. With the beaters running, add in the vanilla and almond extracts.

In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking soda and salt. Add these dry ingredients to the creamed mixture and mix together with a spatula or wooden spoon until blended. Add in the oats, chocolate chips, and flax seed meal (if using). Continue mixing together until the oats and chocolate are well incorporated throughout the dough.

For rustic looking cookies, drop the dough onto a parchment lined baking sheet by the heaping spoonful. For perfectly round cookies with a more even height (better for ice cream sandwiches), roll the dough into similar sized balls in the palm of your hands, and place on a parchment lined baking sheet. Based on the size of your cookie ball, you’ll want to space them accordingly. Remember that as the butter melts in the oven, the cookies will spread out a lot.

Bake until the cookies are golden. You’ll know when they’re done without even looking — you’ll be able to smell the wonderful aroma of cooked sugar and vanilla. But if I had to make a guess, I’d say they’ll be done in around 10-15 minutes, depending on how big you’re making your cookies.

Transfer the cookies to a rack to cool, then enjoy.

To make ice cream sandwiches

Select two cookies that are similar in diameter. Pull your ice cream out of the freezer and let it sit for a few minutes to soften slightly. Scoop some ice cream onto a cookie, until you have enough that when you press the top cookie on, the ice cream will spread out evenly and hit the edges without spilling over.

If you’d like, use a small offset spatula or spreader to smooth out the edges of your ice cream, so that the ice cream edge looks continuous. If your ice cream gets too soft, you can also set the sandwiches on a sheet pan and re-freeze them.

As you can tell, I didn’t have the patience to smooth out the edges and make it look magazine perfect. Besides, after pressing down on the top cookie slightly, the best tool for smoothing out the edge became obvious: I gave the sandwich a big lick around its circumference, and voilà! Instantly smooth edges.