Happy Easter Weekend! I’ve got company this weekend (my mum is visiting!) which makes finding time for posting a little more complicated, but here are some delicious Apricot Chocolate Hot Cross Buns. Every year, I try to do something a little different with them, so this year, they were apricot and mini-chocolate chips, but add in your mix-ins of choice (cranberries, nuts, raisins, etc). I made them yesterday for Good Friday.
As you know, I tend to experiment a bit with flavors (no kidding, really?) and one thing that I have been experimenting with lately with freeze-dried fruit powders… in other words, freeze dry lemon or orange peel, strawberries, cherries, blueberries, or even peaches, and then make a powder out of them. I don’t actually go through all that work — I buy the already made powders. They are often marketed as a way to am up the flavors of smoothies or as an ice cream ingredient. They are very flavor packed and I like them. Stay tuned this summer as I play with some in drinks.
For Easter this year, I decided to try adding powders to white chocolate to make fudge. I also added technicolor sprinkles, which is so not like me, but you know, the strawberry looked a little “Pepto Bismol” flavored (it’s not!) so I had to do something. These are good, not great, but I’ll let you be the judge.
It’s Pie Day here in the US. March 14. 3.14 Of course, the rest of the world dates differently (i.e. dd/mm/yyyy or YYYY/dd/mm) but playing into the game, I decided to make this Pie for Pi day. Delicious and pretty, though be careful with overdoing it on the orange zest.
Pie comes with a hidden message. Doesn’t everyone need an emotional support pie plate?
It’s winter. There isn’t that much fresh fruit around. OK, that’s a fib. There is a lot of fruit around, we don’t live in ancient times where scurvy was an actual concern, but still. Things feel a little dull right now, in the fresh fruit department. Until I made this jam and it is quite likely some of the best jam that I have ever made and I make some pretty yummy jam! I give you, in honor of Valentine’s Day, Pineapple Passion Fruit “Sunshine in a Jar” Jam. It is tart, it is sweet, it is bright and I could eat it by the spoonful. Absolutely perfect cure for the mid-Winter blues.
Let’s talk about this “Cobbler” for a sec. First of all, it’s delicious. It’s modified from an America’s Test Kitchen / Cooks Country recipe, which described it as a “cobbler”. So, in my mind cobblers have the fruit on the bottom, no bottom crust and then a top crust of crumble, biscuit dough or a batter. So, it’s not really a cobbler. It’s also not really a pie, which would have at minimum a bottom crust and this has a bottom batter. I don’t really know what to call it, except yummy.
I also don’t really know when to eat it. It would be a great afternoon tea or coffee thing. It would be a great dessert thing with some ice cream and it would even make a fantastic breakfast casserole with maple syrup. So, I guess that is up to you. It comes together in a flash with mostly pantry ingredients: sweetened condensed milk, milk, butter, flour, baking power, salt and a touch of vanilla for the base. I used mixed berries, but you could also use just one berry type, or cherries or even chopped up peaches. Frozen berries / fruit work great here (bake 10 minutes or so longer) and best of all, it isn’t overly sweet.
Perhaps one of the easiest and quickest recipes I have done in a long time. I had it ready to go before the oven had even preheated.