I know this doesn’t LOOK like an apple cobbler. And it doesn’t really taste like what I usually associate with the words “apple cobbler.” What this is, is an apple-pie type filling with a delicious top crust. But it’s not like a regular pie crust. It’s a kind of shortbread or cookie type top. And believe it or not, it’s also really low on sugar. That makes it a winner in my book.

With a bunch of apples in my refrigerator and a dessert I needed to make for dinner guests, I went searching for a recipe that suited me. This was it – a recipe I found at Simply Recipes a few years ago. I read what Elise had to say about this and knew I needed to try it. First you cook the peeled, cored and sliced apples with just a little bit of sugar, lemon juice, cinnamon, flour and butter. You don’t cook this long, just enough to take the edge off raw apples. It takes more apples than you might think – I think I used 6 and it could have used more. Elise’s recipe calls for 3 pounds. I didn’t weigh mine, so I really don’t know how many I had – surely it was more than 2 pounds, but it might not have been a full 3 pounds. It filled up the pie plate, but once it baked, the apples kind of slumped. Mostly it’s because I used some Gala apples – not just Granny Smiths that totally hold their shape during baking/cooking.

The crust is a bit different – it has the usual kind of ingredients, but then it has orange zest and a bunch of chopped up crystallized ginger. You can vaguely make out the little bumpy things all over the raw crust, shown at left. That photo was before I baked it, obviously.

This crust also contained a little bit of butter (just 2 tablespoons) and a cup of heavy cream. That’s what provided the necessary fat to give the crust a delicious crunchy texture.

What I really liked about it was the minimal sugar necessary to make this. As I mentioned, Elise’s recipe calls for just Granny Smiths, but I had just 2 of them, and I had a bunch of Galas. Since Galas are sweeter than Granny Smiths, I cut down even more on the sugar. Elise’s recipe called for 1/4 cup in the filling. I used 2 T. of Splenda instead, so halved it. You’ll need to decide, based on what kind of apples you use, as to how much sugar to add. In the crust, it calls for 1/4 cup also – I used a scant measure of real sugar (not Splenda) as I think real sugar is more necessary in pastry. I could have put in half sugar and half Splenda, though, and it probably would have been just fine.

There’s a photo of the cut. It sure looks like apple pie, doesn’t it. Nope! One little tip I should add to the instructions – I used a pizza peel to slide the crust onto the top of the pie. The crust was fragile. It was thick and weighty, actually, but it was a bit on the dry side, so I knew if I tried to pick it up or roll it onto the rolling pin it would fall apart completely. The pizza peel worked perfectly and I was able to slide it gently into place over the apple filling. (I’ll also tell you that the crust was delicious raw – our son-in-law’s mother Ann was visiting and she and I polished off the scraps in short order!)

What I liked: everything about it – the taste, the texture, the apples, the ginger in it, the fact that there was a lot less sugar than usual. Loved the crust. We served it with whipped cream on top. Loverly, it ‘twas.

What I didn’t like: absolutely nothing. Definitely a make again recipe. Thank you, Elise!

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Have you made lemon curd before? I’ve made it oodles of times, but not since last March. I wrote it up here on my blog then. I read a description of lemon curd in the America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook – they called some versions teeth-achingly sweet. Gosh, yes. That’s what mine was in 2011. The folks at ATK decided to fix it, and yes, they did. This is my new go-to lemon curd recipe. I didn’t enhance the photo at all – it’s all the egg yolks that give it that deep golden color.

I’d offered to take lemon curd to a friend’s home for a St. Patrick’s Day book group meeting. Each year the hostess and her wonderful husband make an Irish repast for our group. And mid-way through our book meeting they also serve multiple desserts. They make raisin scones too, and it’s for the scones that I usually offer to make lemon curd.

Remembering that last year’s version was too sweet, I pulled out cookbook after cookbook and compared the recipes. Some had nearly double the amount of sugar per lemon juice quantity of others. Whoa! No wonder I was overwhelmed with the sweetness! I should have just gone to my well-used The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. Every recipe turns out superbly from that cookbook. With copious lemons on our Meyer trees, it came together in a hurry. I really liked the addition of a few tablespoons of heavy cream at the end. It just smooths it out, somehow. I chose not to strain it (to remove the bits of lemon zest and any eggy things). I chilled it in a bowl over ice and gave it to the hostess. But not without a couple of teaspoons to taste, of course! It’ll be my forever favorite, I suspect.

What I liked: it’s easy. Delicious. Just the right amount of sugar to lemon ratio. It will keep for several weeks too, if it were to last that long. I gave all of it to my friend, so there isn’t any left over here at my house! Guess I’ll just have to make it again. I scaled down the recipe to use 4 egg yolks and 1 whole egg, FYI.

What I didn’t like: nothing at all. Perfection.

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If you’re the kind of person who likes the TASTE and TEXTURE of boxed-mix brownies, but really want to make them from scratch, to give them more chocolaty flavor, this will hit all your buttons.

Surely I’ve mentioned before that when I go to sleep at night I usually plug into my iTouch, using my earbuds, to podcasts that I’ve subscribed to through iTunes. About every 2 weeks or so I need to re-charge it and download all the oodles of new podcasts that are in my queue. Recently I heard or read that Cook’s Illustrated, well actually the folks at America’s Test Kitchen decided to start doing a radio show and podcast with Chris Kimball and Bridget Lancaster. I immediately signed up through iTunes. Each episode is about an hour (no commercials on podcasts, either). When I’m ready to drift off to sleep I generally set my iTouch to play for about 15 minutes and 99% of the time I’m asleep by then. The next night I may go back and replay it if I have no recollection of what I listened to.

Anyway, this new podcast is really interesting. I’m liking it a LOT, actually, and it was on a recent show that they talked about brownies. Through some survey they did, it was discovered that many people like the texture – the chewiness – of box-mix brownies. But the chocolate flavor is muted. Certainly not enough chocolate is contained in those mixes. So the C.I. people began a search for the perfect chewy brownie (you do have to have a free membership with C.I. in order to get to the recipe, but that’s the link) with that wonderful crackly top that is so reminiscent of those box mix types. But one that contained some really good, true flavor of chocolate. I enjoyed listening to all the steps they went through to finally discern that they were completely on the wrong track about the fats – they needed to use more oil than butter. They used a combination of Dutch-process cocoa and unsweetened chocolate in the batter and a few ounces of chocolate bits folded in at the end. They also tried baking the brownies on a pizza stone (somewhere they read that increasing the heat on the bottom of the brownie pan helped make a chewy texture). Their tests said no. Another recommendation was to add caramel sauce to the batter, to add chewiness. Nope, that didn’t work either. And lastly, they were advised to put the cooked pan in an ice bath; they didn’t find that was successful in making a chewy brownie either. It took a visit to their science editor to learn more about ratios of fat and they finally got on the right track.

These LOOK like box mix brownies. And they definitely DO have the texture like box mix brownies. And chocolate – that’s in there too. Plus some espresso powder – I just LOVE the King Arthur espresso powder – it’s a fine grind dried espresso – never clumps or spoils (as I write this, their website says they’re out of it . . . check back). What it does is enhance the flavor of chocolate – they just go together like Jamocha Almond Fudge! I watched the interior temp carefully – the directions said to use a toothpick halfway between the edges and middle. I actually took the internal temp there. At 30 minutes it was 208°. I baked another 5 minutes and removed them without taking the temp again. Maybe I should have. I preferred the brownies from the outer edges – they had just a bit of drying edges, which I liked. The interior pieces were on the wet/moist side. Dense, although they weren’t under done by any means. Kind of like in between brownies and fudge almost.

What I liked: all of the things I was supposed to like about this type of chewy brownie – texture, chocolate flavor, crumb and appearance! Will it become my new favorite – probably not (and that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it, it’s just that I think I prefer a little less sweet brownie and one with a slightly drier texture). I do like those box-mix brownies, although I’ve only made one of them once in many years, so I’m glad I tried these.

What I didn’t like: nothing, really, if you prefer this type of brownie. That almost sounds like it’s a negative comment – it’s not meant to be. I might possibly bake them to 212° next time just to see what happens since at 210° the interior pieces were still very moist for my taste.

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You remember the ubiquitous pineapple upside down cake from the 1950’s. With canned pineapple rings and a maraschino cherry in the center of each? With a bland-tasting yellow cake? Well, this isn’t THAT recipe, but it’s similar – using fresh pineapple and a light textured “cake flour” batter.

You know all about Thomas Keller, right? Probably the most well-known chef in the U.S. – because of his restaurant The French Laundry (in Yountville, California, in the middle of wine country). I’ve never been there – it’s still, all these years hence – almost impossible to get into. It takes reservations, but a long way in advance. And, it’s very dear to eat there – upwards of $200+ per person. A few years ago Keller opened a second restaurant nearby, called Ad Hoc. I haven’t been there, either. But Keller has published a couple of cookbooks, namely The French Laundry Cookbook, Ad Hoc at Home, and a boxed set of both: The Essential Thomas Keller: The French Laundry Cookbook & Ad Hoc at Home [Box Set] [Hardcover].

One day some years ago I read a recipe online for an appetizer soup that was in one of his cookbooks (the first one, I think). It was an almond soup (or maybe it was hazelnut), as I recall. Not finding the actual recipe anywhere, I visited my local bookstore and surreptitiously took the cookbook to a convenient chair and copied it off in cryptic notes. It was an intensely long, loooong recipe. And I’ve never made it. It looks like it would take hours to prepare. More work, likely, than I’m interested in, although the person who had made it just raved about it. So, based on that recipe, I’d decided I didn’t need to buy the cookbook – as I glanced in it, the recipes were mostly pages and pages long. Then, when he published his Ad Hoc cookbook, I thought it might be more approachable. And indeed, it is. One of my favorite chocolate chip cookies came from that cookbook. Chocolate Chip Cookies from Ad Hoc, in case you’re interested. I make them every now and then, although my favorite, I think, are Chocolate Chip Cookies from Silver Moon Bakery. But, I still haven’t purchased either cookbook. I should check my local library. Sorry, I got sidetracked there.

So, I decided to make this Pineapple Upside Down Cake that came from Keller’s Ad Hoc cookbook. I’d read about it online at Foodgal’s blog. I figured that Keller would have discovered the real secret to such a cake – probably a better and different topping (actually, remember, it starts out on the bottom, but then it is turned over and becomes the top after baking). And more importantly, I figured he would have found a much better (and lighter textured) cake to pair with it.

The cake as a whole isn’t hard to make, although it does have a few steps – a few more than usual. First you make a schmear. What’s a schmear? Well, in this case it’s a mixture of brown sugar, butter, honey and dark rum. That softened stuff is spread all over the bottom of the 9-inch (high sided) cake pan. You can see the schmear in the top photo above. It took a bit of doing to get it to spread out in the pan. And there’s another little aside: the recipe has you make enough for 3 pans worth of schmear. In the headnotes it does indicate that you make more than needed – I didn’t read that when I actually started making this. He said the quantity is too small to mix up well in a stand mixer.  I’ve adjusted the recipe below accordingly, hoping you can make it work – if you do it with a hand mixer I think it’ll be fine.

Anyway, once the schmear is in place you cut up a fresh, very ripe, pineapple. That took awhile – at least half and hour, I’d say to cut it properly and layer it in the pan – on top of the schmear. The pieces are overlapped slightly so it covers the entire schmear. I think I’d perhaps layer a bit more pineapple – I used about 2/3 of the pineapple, I’d guess. Just a bit more would have been good. I think I should have cut the pineapple is thicker pieces by just a little bit. I’d have liked more of that flavor as I was eating it.

Then you make the cake batter – nothing out of the ordinary here except that it uses cake flour and you need to be gentle with it to keep the batter inflated, so to speak. You don’t whip egg whites separately or anything – it’s a pretty straight-forward yellow cake. Anyway, that is poured in over the pineapple, leveled off and baked. The cake rests for 20-30 minutes before you run a knife around the outside edge and invert. The center of the cake was a little indented when it came out of the oven, so I was concerned, but it was fine once I inverted it. I served it with whipped cream and a little bit of crystallized ginger on top.

What I liked: Well, that it’s an updated version of that old-fashioned favorite. I liked the fresh pineapple, although once it bakes, it’s hard to tell it’s from a fresh pineapple. The cake has a lighter consistency (texture) than my mother’s old recipe. Maybe it needed a little caramel sauce drizzle over it too. Just a thought.

What I didn’t like: I think I expected more from it – that it would be somehow exceptional. It wasn’t. It was good, but nothing to write home about. I think my pineapple slices were just a tad too thin, too. Use most of the pineapple if you decide to make this. It certainly was pretty, though. Would I make it again? Probably not. Maybe pineapple upside down cake isn’t one of my favorites?

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If you ever need a truly EASY dessert, the clafouti qualifies. You need some fresh fruit and the custardy-cakey mixture is whizzed up in the blender and poured over. And baked. That’s it.

If you haven’t been watching Aarti Sequiera on the Food Network . . . well, you’re just missing out, that’s all. I just love her – her cute, vivacious, bubbly personality. Her quirky recipes that take standards we mostly know and love already and she makes them her own. Sometimes with the simple addition of some Indian spices. That was the case here, when she made a Blackberry-Ginger Clafouti. I’ve made a pear clafouti before (delicious, especially with fall fruit coming in season now). But this one, with the fresh blackberries just sounded so good. And it was.

A clafouti (a French word for custard, I believe, pronounced clah-foo-tee) is a regular staple on French dinner tables. And truly – you butter the dish, sugar it, toss in some fresh fruit into the pie plate, whiz up the egg-milk-cream mixture (with the addition of some ginger and garam masala in this case) and you pour that over the fruit and bake it. That’s truly it. Making it ahead (that day) is fine. You serve it at room temp, or even still slightly warm from the oven. With some whipped cream, or a drizzle of cream on top. That’s what I did. Oh, delicious. In my recipe, I decided to use up the rest of the fresh figs I had on hand (cut in half first) and mixed it with blackberries. Wonderful. The base of a clafouti is kind of a cross between a cake and a custard. It’s very moist like custard, but has some flour in it, so it’s got some cake-like texture too. The photo at top was right out of the oven and it was puffed up high. Once it sits, it settles down (see slice photo above). That’s normal.

What I liked: the fresh fruit; the moist custardy filling; how easy it is to make; a great use for fruit that is just past its prime. It’s also a low-calorie and low-fat dessert. We all need more of those!
What I didn’t like: nothing. It’s really delicious, even the next day or two later too.

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Oh my. Chocolate. Decadent. Smooth. Luscious. Lick the plate clean! Yes, indeed! Make again? Absolutely. The sooner the better if I have anything to say about it. And since I’m the #1 cook around here, that means it’ll be on my menu again soon. Maybe I’ll try making it with at least half Splenda, so my DH can have more of it. He ate very little of it since the regular version is loaded with sugar. Is it overly sweet? No, not at all, and I liked that part particularly.

We were having a group of friends over for dinner and most of the menu items were dishes I’ve prepared before. But I tried something new for dessert, and chocolate just sounded right. But as I read the recipe (a Jamie Oliver recipe – no longer available on his website or Food Network) that I had printed out a few years ago, I had some questions. For instance, the recipe said “pour the mixture into a greased baking tin.” Well, what, exactly is a “baking tin?” Is it a round cake pan? Or a rectangular baking dish? Or what?

So I went online and did a search for the recipe title, assuming I’d find other bloggers who had tried this recipe and elaborated in the directions. There were about 20 results for the pudding. But with every single website I checked the recipe had been duplicated verbatim. Most of them didn’t even have any narrative and not a single website mentioned how it was making it, or any directions. I think one said “delicious.” Well, yea! But nothing about the baking dish. They all said the very same thing – “a greased baking tin.” I checked Jamie’s website – and as I mentioned above – the recipe’s not there anymore. Not online at the Food Network either, which is where I originally found the recipe, I believe.

The other bit of research I had to do was figure out what “cooking chocolate” was. That was an easy search – it’s unsweetened chocolate. The Brits do use a few different words than we do. But I still wasn’t done with my research. The recipe called for self-raising flour. We call it self-rising, but either way, I didn’t have any. Our grocery stores don’t carry it, so I needed to find a solution to that. Answers were forthcoming as soon as I put in the Google searchbox: “how to make self rising flour.” Got several results. Answer: Add 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of salt to each cup of flour. That was easy – 7 ounces of flour is close to a cup, so I used those measurements. This recipe has additional baking powder, though, so I lumped the two into one measurement.

So, time to make cake. Or pudding. Or pudding cake, as it is. I’m such a fan of “pudding cakes.” My very favorite is lemon. In case you’ve never made a pudding cake, it’s the kind that you make in one batter, but as it bakes, it separates with a sauce-type layer on the bottom, and a light cake-type layer on top. When you dip a big spoon into the dish you come out with a self-pouring kind of cake and pudding. I have a whopping 5 of them on my website now: Chocolate Upside Down Baked Nut Pudding Cake, Cranberry Pudding Cake, Gingerbread Pudding Cake, Lemon Sponge Pudding (my favorite of the bunch), and Peach Pudding Cake. With this new recipe that’ll make 6 and this one will also be highlighted in red, meaning it’s a favorite.

Okay, I got distracted there. Back to making the sponge cake. I’ve left the recipe below using weight measurements rather than trying to convert them to cups. Especially with baking, it’s so important to weigh rather than measure by cups because it’s all about chemistry. You mix up sugar and butter until it’s light and fluffy, then add eggs and the flour. Meanwhile you stir 3 rounded tablespoons of cocoa into 8 tablespoons of warm water. It makes a thick slurry. That gets added to the cake batter along with some sliced almonds and about 4 ounces of unsweetened chocolate (that you chop up finely on a chopping board). See how easy that was? That’s poured into a 9-inch round cake pan (that’s what I finally decided to use – and mine is a little higher sided than the traditional 8-inch round cake pans). If you don’t have a 9-inch round cake pan I think a round or rectangular ceramic dish would be just fine – just grease it first. Don’t use a 9×13 size – that would be too big, for sure. Something smaller would work. If you use the larger size, do adjust down the baking time, though!

Here are the photos of the cake. Top photo is the cake just out of the oven. The bottom photo shows the sauce just after I spread it all over the cake. The cake was still hot. Next time I make this I’m going to sprinkle more sliced almonds on top of the sauce. That will look pretty!

As for the baking . . . Jamie’s recipe said 18-20 minutes. Well, maybe he used a larger pan and 18-20 minutes was sufficient to bake the cake. With the 9-inch pan it took me about 32 minutes. But do watch the cake carefully. At 18 minutes the middle of the cake was still liquid. At 22 minutes it was slightly liquid. That’s when I added another 10 minutes and it was perfect.

The cake is an infinitely soft – sponge – cake. All that whipping up of the butter and sugar (until the mixture was a very light color) helps makes this a light texture. The additional baking powder helped too.

So, while the cake was baking I made the “sauce.” I didn’t have enough unsweetened chocolate to make this, so I substituted some semisweet instead and eliminated the powdered sugar that was in Jamie’s original recipe. So it was just the chocolate, a cube of butter and 4 T. of milk. When the cake came out of the oven I poured this “sauce” all over the top of the cake and spread it out to cover. It just barely covers the cake. Then I let it cool, and about an hour later I scooped out a serving, poured a little bit of heavy cream on top. The “sauce” is kind of like a frosting in a way, except that it is soft. It didn’t pool or puddle when I served it, so it isn’t exactly a pudding cake. But whatever it is, it’s great. I was in chocolate heaven. You will be too, I promise!

What I liked: absolutely every single solitary thing about it. If you’re a chocolate nut, you’ll love this recipe. Easy to make, too.

What I didn’t like: well, nothing. What could be better than an ooey-gooey chocolate cake?

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Tis the season for apples. And when I can be torn away from my family favorite, Crisp Apple Pudding (it’s really an apple crisp, but that’s it’s name!), I have a few other apple desserts that I will make. Grandgirl’s Fresh Apple Cake for one. And I’m very enamored with Teddie’s Apple Cake too. But I decided to make something new this time. We had some of our family for dinner on January 2nd, and this was the dessert I made, with major help from daughter Dana.

I found the recipe over at Food Gal’s blog a couple of years ago. The original article came from the New York Times, back in 2008. David Rose (owner/chef of Spring, in Paris) was interviewed about his story – his career – which has rocketed since he opened the restaurant. Included in the article was his grandmother’s apple cake. Not something, he said, that he could or would serve in his restaurant, but he wanted to share something of his Jewish heritage.

I’d intended to use the (above) as my main photo for this post, but when I opened the whole-cake photo at top, I decided it needed to have star billing. When I say that this is a “variation” on the original, it’s only because I used one more apple than the recipe called for. I love that one big chunk of apple that’s about to fall off the slice.

The batter is a butter and egg rich one, but doesn’t contain anything unusual. You do fold into the batter about a third of the apples, then the remaining apples are arranged decoratively on top of the batter in a springform pan. It’s baked for about an hour and allowed to cool. The darker colored edges are from the cinnamon sprinkled all over the apples. Gives it a lovely golden hue. The cake was wonderful. We had 9 people partaking, and I think I heard raves from about 7 of them, me included.

What I liked: everything about it. The flavor – the cake part is really tasty too. At least half of each serving is apple, so you might think it’s healthier for you. Well, probably not so since there is a lot of butter in it. I’ll definitely make it again.

What I didn’t like: now that I know more about it, I’d cut the apples that go into the batter in smaller pieces, like 1-inch chunks. It’s hard to level the batter when it contains the rather monstrous apple slices. That’s it, though.

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There’s a rather long and complicated story about how the recipe for these bars came to be. First, some weeks ago my friend Cherrie and Jackie came to my house and we baked cookies. We made 4 kinds, two from years past, and 2 new ones. My new one was something called Ginger Crunch Bars. If you do a search for it online you’ll find several versions. We made them, and they were less than successful as far as the texture was concerned. Once cooled, for me  the cookie base stuck to the pan, and the icing/topping shattered into funny, jagged pieces when cut. A dismal failure all around. But, all 3 of us agreed, the flavors were great.

The next day I really thought about it and decided to try something altogether different. But with similar flavors – particularly the ground ginger in the cookies and crystallized ginger in it as well. Because my cousin Gary is visiting from Northern California, as he does nearly every year at Christmastime, I knew I needed to think about some GF (gluten-free) treats. Some years he tells me not to make anything special for him (sweets) because he’d rather not have them to tempt him. This year he said yes, he’d like to help me make/bake some GF things.

I decided I wanted to make a ginger riff on my old recipe for New York Special Slices. These are bars that resemble Nanaimo Bars (which contain mint).  They’re a 3-layered cookie/bar and ginger generally plays no part in it. And the base contains graham crackers, which my cousin can’t have.To make those for him would be useless – as the recipe reads.

So, I’d read about a GF ginger cookie over at Christie’s Corner some weeks ago. I emailed Gary and asked him if he had some of the unusual flours required (sweet white sorghum, bean flour and brown rice flour). He said he did and brought them with him. Christie wrote in her blog post that she was following the new GF flour combination from a cookbook she’d discovered  and she dubbed it GEMS Flour (from the cookbook Gems of Gluten-Free Baking: Breads and Irresistible Treats Everyone Can Enjoy). All the other ingredients were normal pantry items, so the other day Gary and I made the cookies. They were definitely a find. Delicious. Even for me who doesn’t need to eat GF. Gary thought they were wonderful. Not exactly crispy crunchy like a flour-based ginger snap, but the cookie definitely met all requirements in the taste department. They are crispy on the outside, but soft on the inside – just so you know.

Now, back to the dessert bars. Can you see where this is going? I replaced the graham crackers with crumbs from these GF ginger cookies and made the base (the cookie crumbs, ground ginger, an egg, butter, chopped walnuts and some melted semisweet chocolate). I also didn’t include coconut, because it didn’t sound like a right combination. I did add in about 1/2 cup of finely chopped crystallized ginger, though. Next, I made the custard layer (using Bird’s custard powder dry mix for the custard layer) which is mixed with powdered sugar (and here’s where I added ground ginger and some finely minced crystallized ginger for that over-the-top ginger flavor) and a bit of milk to thin it to spreading consistency. These layers are refrigerated until they set, then you melt some unsweetened chocolate and butter to spread thinly on top.

My cousin was wow-ed by these. Both the cookies and the ginger bars. As a celiac, he doesn’t very often get to have dessert because so often desserts are flour-laden. The bars became the GF dessert taken to our family Christmas Eve and Christmas Day celebrations. So Gary was able to partake of some delicious desserts too. He made the cookies himself – he bakes some when he’s at home – but I gave him plenty of good instruction along the way. The GF ginger bars I made for him – he was out with my DH on an errand. My DH’s 15-year old BMW convertible appears to be in its death throes, and the repair shop was performing CPR on the car. I think he’ll be doing some car shopping in the next week or so.

What I liked: the ginger flavor, and the chocolate didn’t overwhelm. It could have, but didn’t seem to. Do understand there’s raw egg in these. The cookie base is not baked or cooked, yet it contains an egg. Use pasteurized or just egg whites, if you have any concerns. The GF ginger cookies are delicious. Worth making even if you’re not wheat intolerant.

What I didn’t like: well, it was a fairly laborious process to first bake GF cookies and then use part of them to whiz up into crumbs to make this dessert. But if you’d seen the smile on my cousin Gary’s face, you’d have done it too.

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If your taste buds are tuned into anything pumpkin 365 days a year, like mine, savor the pumpkin flavors at Christmas with this delicious dessert.

When this recipe says bars, it’s not like a cookie. Not by a long shot. This is kind of like pumpkin pie, but in a bar shape, with a decidedly ginger flavor. There’s ginger in the base (gingersnaps – the cookie layer on the bottom) and ginger in the filling too (both powdered and crystallized).

It’s not difficult to make, although there are two layers to it. If you buy the gingersnaps (or the ginger biscotti at Trader Joe’s) the base comes together very quickly. The filling, as I mentioned above, is a lot like pumpkin pie, but with cream cheese in it, and canned pumpkin puree, as well as the spices. It is baked, then cooled and served with whipped cream and either a nice big walnut half on top, or some additional crystallized ginger. That would make it really gingery. Either one. Or maybe both.

This recipe came from Tarla Fallgatter. I attend a private cooking class (with about 10-12 people in it) about 4x a year with her. This session was about an appetizer Christmas party, and these bars were the dessert item. Everybody attending loved it, me included.

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Sorry this photo isn’t just a little bit better able to show you what this is – it’s hard to tell that it’s bread, chocolate, frozen raspberries, cream cheese, whipped cream on top with raspberries drizzled over. And it doesn’t tell you how good it was because you can’t quite see the layers. Well, not really layers actually. It’s one layer – you pile the bread cubes in a 9×13 pan, add the little chunks of cream cheese, sprinkle chocolate and almonds all over, then pour on a custard mixture. Your 9×13 pan will be very full (that’s okay). At this point it needs to sit for 4 hours, or overnight, before it’s baked. In other words, this is a great dessert for making the day before.

When you’re ready to bake, add the still-frozen raspberries (you don’t want to use fresh as they’d completely disintegrate in the baking) and the toasted almonds. Then it’s baked for about an hour. It’s supposed to be served warm, or even on the hot side. Meanwhile you mix up some whipped cream, flavored with almond extract, plop some of that on each serving, then spoon some defrosted raspberries on top. Done. This recipe came from a Phillis Carey cooking class some years ago. In all this time I’d never made it. Actually, I didn’t make it this time – our daughter Sara did – because I told her it was so good. She made some modifications to the recipe (low fat milk, low-fat cream cheese, dark chocolate). We all agreed the dark chocolate was too bitter/heavy for this dish. Just use regular chocolate chips. And I think if you’re going to indulge with this, you might as well go whole hog with regular milk and regular cream cheese. My recollection is that Phillis told us in the class not to make those kinds of substitutions, but my daughter wanted to make it a bit more healthful. Can’t fault her for that!

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