Until my adulthood, I always just thought of rum as something fictional pirates sang about in cartoons. Looking into it now, I know how nuanced the flavor profiles can be for the spirit, which is distilled from sugar cane syrup or juice or from molasses, which is what is leftover when you process sugar cane. …
Continue reading “Prepare for a fine ‘rum’ance with this banana cake”
I have to confess that I never heard of a whoopie pie until I was nearly in college. A dear friend of mine from Pennsylvania introduced me to the classic chocolate version, and I was immediately hooked. Her recipe still has a place of honor in my recipe box. According to the Cape Whoopies company …
Continue reading “Whoop it up in the kitchen this week with a lemon blueberry confection”
This week’s recipe is a redemption story. Well, it’s as much of a redemption story as a cake can have. It had to have been at least eight years ago that I first attempted to make a whole orange cake. I saw it online somewhere and thought the idea of dropping whole oranges into a …
Continue reading “I have lots of strong ‘peelings’ about this week’s orange cake”
Often, when I try a recipe I’ve never heard of, I love to jump into its history. I was especially interested in marlow, an ice-cream-like dessert that was wildly popular for decades but fell out of favor sometime during the 1960s, when people had access to electric ice cream makers at home and no longer …
In one of our first shopping trips together over 20 years ago, I remember Joey grabbing a bottle of ketchup off the end cap at the grocery store. “Whoa,” I said. “Why are you buying the expensive ketchup?” He looked perplexed. And that was the day I probably made my then-boyfriend reconsider his relationship choices …
Continue reading “Don’t have the right fruit? Your ingredients may ‘berry’”
There’s a phrase we often hear when we travel north: Minnesota Nice. It refers to how friendly the folks in Minnesota are, and that’s especially true when you visit in the summer months. After being snowed in and freezing in sub-zero temperatures all winter, they are ready to go out and about and are happy …
Continue reading “‘Chew’se a chocolate-free bar cookie for your summer treat”
When I graduated from college and rented my own home for the very first time, I decided that I would do my darnedest to cook meals for myself as much as possible and avoid premade stuff from the freezer section. I remember one of the first times I fired up the stove, heating some oil …
Continue reading “Oven mistake? Just keep calm and ‘berry’ on”
When I was a kid, Hershey’s sold powder for chocolate milk in brown, kind of rectangular containers. I loved (well, love) chocolate milk, and I remember a specific day where I was snooping through the cabinets, seeing what I could find, and there I spotted it: a brown, rectangular-ish container, emblazoned with “Hershey’s” in big, …
Continue reading “‘Espresso’ yourself with some great chocolate cookies”
If you didn’t know, we recently celebrated the first-ever “Local News Day” on April 9. The effort to observe local journalists around the country came from a push in Montana. In Newton, we had a small, but mighty, group of community members who stood outside our office with signs, touting the importance of having a …
Continue reading “There’s no doubt you should cobble together dessert this week”
In past years, January and February have felt like reset months for us. Things slow down, activities are fewer, and it’s time to catch our breaths. Not so this year. Last week, Joey and I were honored to be invited to speak at the Kentucky Press Association’s annual conference, and we ended up spending an …
Continue reading “Don’t be ‘choco’late to the party if you want a chance at these brownies”
