My friend Maile asked me to make peach muffins like the ones she discovered at her local grocery store’s bakery years ago and hasn’t seen since. That’s all I had to go on. “Can you make me some peach muffins like those? They were sooooo good!” Um, okay? I’ll try?

I have no idea if these muffins are exactly what Maile wanted me to replicate, but I do know that these have passed the “everyone loves them” test. I took them to a party and they vanished. It was like a Harry Potter trick, but in real life and without wands. I made them again today to share the perfected version with Maile. I sent her the above picture and her response was “YES!” so I think maybe we’re onto something.

Here’s to you, Maile. May it be the peach muffin of your dreams!

It’s been a long while since I’ve posted a new recipe! I’ve been vacationing in Hawaii celebrating one last big hurrah before baby comes!

One of my favorite local restaurants is Lettuce because I can order a HUGE salad heaped with fruits, veggies, cheese, and nuts and still leave feeling healthy with money in the bank. I love a great salad, but when it comes to chopping ingredients, I am super lazy. I tend to serve “greens with dressing” more often than not because the idea of pulling out a cutting board and chop, chop, chopping for the next 15 or 20 minutes just to make something that will be a side dish is incomprehensible.

The last time I went to Lettuce a girlfriend suggested that I try the half salad, half sandwich combo. She assured me I’d still get plenty of salad along with a hearty sandwich. I just had to be willing to take a leap of faith and try it. And so I did! I was served my usual salad with a side sandwich comprised of layers of prosciutto, fresh mozzarella, roasted peppers and fresh basil all on a thick, fluffy cloud of focaccia bread. Oh. My. Gosh. It was heaven. The sandwich/salad combo is now a new favorite and I decided to replicate the sandwich at home. This of course meant that I needed a decent focaccia recipe. I have a few favorite blogs that I use to find fail-proof recipes and one of those is Annie’s Eats. Her promise that this focaccia would bowl me over was not in vain. It really is amazing, even if you should get a doctor’s note before you can eat it.

I don’t often make fancy sandwiches for lunch but this was a special occasion. My dear friend Michelle spent 7 hours with me one Saturday painting the nursery and helping me register at Buy Buy Baby. I value time more than almost any other resource, so I wanted to make Michelle a lunch she wouldn’t soon forget. I re-created the salad/sandwich combo from Lettuce (yes! all that chopping!) and we feasted like kings… or, in my case, like a pregnant lady.

This focaccia is out of this world. It is absolutely worth the effort to make it. It is moist, delicious, and stunning both as a sandwich bread and as a bread for serving alongside a hearty soup. You won’t be disappointed.

Continue reading: herbed focaccia bread

When my husband decided at the last minute to go out for Vietnamese food for dinner, I decided to treat myself to a special meal including recipes that I knew that Brant might snub. Brant is skeptical of most biscuit recipes except this one, so I took advantage of his absence to make these white cheddar biscuits. Oh, and how delicious they were! My dad stopped by the next evening and I toasted one for him and covered it with slabs of butter. He devoured it it in no time… and then asked for a second one!

These aren’t your traditional biscuits. They’re more like a cheese bread shaped like a biscuit, and that makes them all the more delicious to me! I loved the subtle rosemary and cheesy tastes and thought that the biscuits were delicious both plain and smeared with salted butter. Try them alongside a hearty stew and let me know how you like them!

First off, I see a new trend. First, there were mufcakes. Now there’s muffin cake. I promise. I’ll make something that doesn’t include “muf” in it at some point.

Secondly, I don’t want you to make this. Nope. No sirree. Because then you’ll buy more blueberries, which will mean fewer for me. The last time I checked, my Costco had PLENTY of frozen organic blueberries in stock. If I go tomorrow, I will buy some before you catch onto this craze. At the worst, I did plant 9 blueberry plants a couple of years ago. Come June, there is no stopping the blueberry madness in my house!

Third, if you do make this, you’ll want to hide it from yourself. Probably in a high place behind a heavy box. It’s delicious, but with a stick of butter in the ingredients list, it really can’t be considered a health food (although, I think that with two cups of blueberries, I could be convinced otherwise).

Eat this warm out of the oven or reheat it a bit. Either way, slather some salted butter along the middle or the sides (not the top! don’t ruin the perfectly crunchy top!). And enjoy!

Continue reading: blueberry muffin cake

Happy New Year! I’m a bit late for this. My husband’s last days of Christmas vacation were Sunday and Monday and we spent as much time as possible frolicking and playing and very little time on the computer. It was a fabulous vacation full of games, parties, friends, food, and afternoons reading books in front of a roaring fire. Going back to work is a rough transition after 12 days off! We are adjusting… slowly…

The New Year is a time for making healthy food choices (even if we are only fooling ourselves for a few weeks!) and this bread is one of those. A third of the flour in this bread is whole wheat, providing a nutty healthiness. Yogurt is high in protein and calcium and here it makes a soft, pillowy bread that’s perfect for sandwiches or toast. I especially love it with butter and homemade jam. (I will talk more about homemade jam in the spring when strawberries are making their debut and again this summer when all the rest of my favorite fruits come into season. )

The first time that I made these and shared them with my foodie friend Jeremy, the first words out of his mouth after taking a bite were…well, unrepeatable here. But let’s just say that he thought these were amazing. I went to France last year and I can attest that these rivaled those decadent Parisian pastries. Perfectly flaky with a center strip of delicious dark chocolate…. oh, wow. The thought of them makes me want to sign off here and go whip up another batch.

Continue reading: chocolate croissants

My mom is the bread baker in my family, so I usually leave all my bread requests up to her. It’s not that I can’t make bread. It’s just that she makes bread daily anyways, so why bother making my own when I can easily pop over to her house and grab a loaf that’s fresh from the oven? If I don’t eat it, her chickens will! That said, sometimes the aroma of warm, yeasty bread filling my home is too enticing to pass up, so I have a host of go-to recipes for those occasions. When I’m in the mood for an artisan bread that takes no time at all, I always go for the no knead bread. When I want something a little fancier, I bake some ciabatta. And when I want a sandwich bread, I have several loaves to pick from, including mom’s whole wheat bread and this delicious oatmeal honey sandwich bread.

I have a confession to make: I did not make this bread. I had to commission my mom to do it for me. When I was assigned to Kate’s blog I was *super* excited. Kate has tons of amazing looking recipes with beautiful pictures and I immediately selected a few that I wanted to try. My intention was to prepare these recipes for a baby shower that I was hosting this weekend. Then I got *super* sick on Friday morning and ended up in the ER on Saturday for extreme dehydration. The doctors loaded me up on fluids and meds and told me to go home and rest. No baby shower. No cooking. No Food Babbles blog recipe. I was bummed. Not wanting to leave Kate orphaned, I texted my mom and asked her to do the baking honors for me. She agreed and then came over today to drop off this gorgeous Lemon Blueberry Loaf for me to taste and share with you! Three cheers to mom for helping me ensure that my Secret Recipe Club post came together just in time for the big reveal on Monday!

You might think that pita bread is difficult to make, but really, it’s super simple! Do you want to know how I know? I made the dough and left one of my high school students in charge of shaping the dough during an afternoon of baking. I figured that if a high school student who lives on Taco Bell and Gatorade can form delicious pita pockets, anyone can! And look at those big, pillowy puffs of bread! Perfect!

You can use this pita bread to make a pita-pocket sandwiches or simply tear off pieces of the pita bread and dip them in homemade hummus.

Continue reading: pita bread

There’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is that these biscuits are amazing. The bad news is that there’s a stick of butter in them, so your cardiologist isn’t likely going to recommend that you serve them with every meal. The good news is that they taste so good that you’ll *want* to serve them with every meal. Or is that bad news? Gosh, I’m confused.

These are so fluffy with their layers and layers of delicious pockets just screaming for you to fill them with a pat of cold butter. I love serving these biscuits along with my all-time-favorite minestrone. In that way, I feel like the healthiness of all those vegetables more than balances out a little bit of butter.

Worried about your waistline? If you are looking for a low-fat buttermilk biscuit, I have one for you here. You simply have to try to see beyond the absolutely awful photos. God bless 2009. It was a great year for everything except my photography skills. I love the lower fat biscuits as much as I love the high fat ones. That’s saying a lot because we all know how much I like my full-fat-junk-food. My friends rave about both recipes, so I recommend trying both and then deciding which you prefer!