Spicy Pumpkin Butter Gingerbread Beignets

Pumpkin Butter Gingerbread Beignets

This concept should have been a cinch. After all, I developed White Chocolate, Cardamom & Coconut Beignet and they’re wonderful—ethereally light, tender, moist, and beautifully flavored.

But I made a classic mistake at the onset. I tried to pattern the new beignets after the earlier success. And that, my friends, was a disaster. I threw batch after batch of beignets in the trash after just one taste.

Something different went wrong with each batch: too dry, too wet, not sweet enough, not pumpkin enough, not spicy enough, and finally, just okay but nothing special. I almost gave up. Where was I going wrong?

Caramelized Apple, Onion, Cheddar & Blue Cheese Tart

Caramelized Apple, Onion, Cheddar & Blue Cheese Tart

There is something magically transforming about this particular combination of flavors. Wow is the only word I can think of to describe it. The buttery richness of flaky pastry, sweet tartness of apple, mellow bite of onion, deep savoriness of cheddar, and intense sharpness of blue cheese create a wondrous effect on the palate.

Lime & Vanilla Scented Rhubarb Clafouti

Lime & Vanilla Scented Rhubarb Clafouti

Clafouti (pronounced klah-foo-tee), a simple French custard-cake, is the perfect foil for the fresh fruit and berries of summer. Formulas vary wildly from one end of the spectrum (custard) to the other (cake). I love trying them all, and I’ve shared two of them with you already. What I am sharing with you today is a chewy, cake-style clafouti with a sweet-tart topping of lime and vanilla-scented fresh rhubarb.

Spiced Green Apple Lemon Clafouti

Spiced Green Apple Lemon Clafouti, Serving on Plate

I ran into an interesting clafouti (pronounced klah-foo-tee) formula in an old magazine in a box in the garage recently and almost dismissed it because there can be no better clafouti than Fresh Apricot Ginger Peasant Cake.

As you may recall from that post, clafouti, an earthy cake from the region of Limousin in France, is comprised of a layer of cake-custard, topped with a layer of juicy fruit. The result can be rather more like cake or rather more like custard, depending on the proportions in the batter.

Bittersweet Chocolate Orange French Toast for Lovers

Bittersweet Chocolate French Toast for Lovers

With this post, we kick off the second annual Love Rules! All Chocolate! All Month! celebration at LunaCafe OtherWorldly Kitchen. To check out the wonderful chocolate creations we debuted last February, be sure to visit the All Chocolate! recipe archive.

Beginning now, every post until the end of February will feature, you guessed it, CHOCOLATE. In fact, I’ve been covered in unsweetened and bittersweet chocolate, as well as cocoa, for many weeks now, trying to come up with the world’s best, truly CHEWY (not fudgy, not cakey) brownie. And finally, after many attempts, I succeeded. In all the testing, I also serendipitously hit upon a wonderfully silky, light, and luscious fudgy brownie that turned me, the swamp boogie queen of chewy brownie lovers, into a fudgy brownie convert.

Baby Leek, Cheddar & Rosemary Tart

Baby Leek, Cheddar & Rosemary Tart, Hot from the Oven

OK, let me break this to you gently. You may want to sit down. This is not actually a TART. It’s a QUICHE. You remember what a quiche is, right?

Quiche is one of those unfortunate foods that while enjoying its heyday in the 1970′s, riding the French culinary wave that swept America, finally flagged under the weight of overexposure bordering on hysteria, to become the antithesis of the nouvelle cuisine that hit the country near the end of that decade.

Fresh Apricot Ginger Peasant Cake

Bowl of Goldbar Apricots

There is a simple, earthy cake in the French culinary repertoire, from the region of Limousin, called clafouti (pronounced klah-foo-tee), which is an especially delicious way to treat fresh fruit and berries in summer. My version is more cake-like than custard-like. In fact, it contains no eggs and yet has a decidedly chewy texture, which everyone who tastes it loves. I don’t recall where I stumbled on the unusual formula here, but I have not encountered it anywhere since.

Raspberry Cream Cheese Coffee Cake

Raspberry Cream Cheese Coffee Cake

This coffeecake drifts through my very crowded mind whenever brunch is mentioned. That’s because it’s so delicious and so easy. It may also have something to do with the fact that people go gaga over it and beg me for the recipe.

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