Traveling Desserts: Vanilla Pudding and Fifteens

What do you do when you're living at an AirBnB and having super foodies over for dinner? I was faced with this predicament when I was in Scotland for the summer (more on that later!), trying to make new friends by impressing them with my foodie skillz. :) It turns out, without an oven, or many of the conventional tools and ingredients of the trade, one can still turn out a simple but fun dinner party!

The main star of dinner was chicken soup, which sounds like a funny main! But, I had promised a good expat friend of mine (of easiest chocolate chip cookies fame) who pined for American-style chicken soup that I would make him some when I visited, so soup it was. The rest of the menu was cobbled together by whatever looked good in the local markets:

Chicken noodle soup

chicken (from a local butchery), celery, carrots, fresh tagliatelle

Pan-roasted butternut squash salad

ras el hanout-spiced pan-roasted butternut squash and red onion, sliced D'anjou pear, bee pollen, rocket, honey dijon red wine vinaigrette

Bread & cheese bruschetta

pan-roasted cherry tomato and garlic, mature Scottish white cheddar, sourdough toast

For dessert, my friend was going to make brownies to bring over, so to complement the chocolatey squidgy-ness of the brownies, I put together vanilla pudding pots (for which you really just need a whisk, pot, and jars!), with kiwi coulis and fruit. These were also a joy to make in a country in which vanilla paste is actually a standard and easy ingredient to come by! Yum. :)

Finally, I also made some fifteens, which are an Irish cookie! that another one of my Scottish-based expat friends made for me during my visit. Fifteens are a no-bake cookie that is made out of crushing other cookies (ahem, "biscuits") and mixing them with more ingredients. It's like cookie cannibalism! Traditional fifteens have candied cherries and coconut, but my friend, Jefferson, made them with candied citrus peel and almond, which I thought helps cut the ultra-sweetness of the cookie well. So here is Jefferson's version of fifteens!

Hope everyone is having a super fun summer. If you find yourself traveling but in need of a few super simple but totally yummy dessert recipes, here you go!

Happy ☀️!

read on for recipes...

Pumpkin S'mores Cake, and a Blogrthday!

Well!  This little slice of the internets is turning two!  Two!  That's two years since the first recipe, vegan chocolate pumpkin cupcakes, went live on the air.  That's roughly 170+ recipes--one a week--since then.  That's roughly 200+ posts, and countless pounds of butter, chocolate, sugar, cream, and flour.

To me, this is amazing.  I can hardly believe it.  I've never been able to keep any consistent journals before in my life.  In grade school, I was always the first to slack off when teachers gave "journal" assignments over the summer or holidays.  Currently, in my old room at my parents' house sit stacks upon stacks of partially-used journals (much to my mom's great frustration), in which I wrote a page or two before giving up and starting anew.  Sure, I have a personal blog that's been on the web since the start of college, but often long months and stretches of time go by without me even logging in at all (and I only really ever log in to have a place to complain and vent).  So really, the fact that desserts for breakfast has been here, week after week, for two long years... I have no idea how this has happened!

[click on photo for larger image]

But really, it's amazing, and exciting, and I honestly think that you all, readers and blogging community friends, are to thank for whatever has kept this blog going all this time.  Two years ago, I was extremely lonely, having (relatively) recently moved to a new town and situation.  I so clearly remember standing in my kitchen, woefully longing for a group of friends who were like-minded and understood my baking obsessions and not knowing where in the world I could find such people, though I knew such people must exist!  And by some sheer luck, two years later, here I am now, with so many of you.  :-D  Wonderful!

To celebrate this two-year blogrthday (aka: "blogiversary"), I decided to make a play on the blog's first recipe and remix it with one of the darling desserts of the food blogosphere for a pumpkin s'mores cake.  The cake layers are super moist and airy spiced pumpkin-graham cracker chiffon (made with homemade graham crackers, of course!), alternating with generous mounds of sweet, fluffy toasted marshmallow frosting and a thick glaze of deep, dark chocolate ganache.  This is one of those sticky, melty, and ever so slightly gooey constructions that you end up licking clean off the plate!

These past two years have been absolutely wonderful for me, packed with tons of new experiences and friends and things to learn and foods to eat/bake on the blogosphere.  So, thank you! for making it so wonderful and fantastic, and here's wishing us plenty more butter, flour, chocolate, cream, and sugar to come.



Read on for recipe....