SMiLes by Meg

Tag: spring

Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble Cake

This week we went to Cate and Jonathan’s house for the first time since moving to DC! It’s wild that the pandemic has meant that I’ve been here for 9 months without getting to just have dinner inside with friends, but now that we’re all vaccinated, we’re making up for lost time. When Cate tasked me with dessert, I wanted to make something a bit more elaborate than I’ve been making recently, and I wanted that thing to be out of an Ottolenghi book, since Cate is the one who introduced me to his restaurants/recipes. I picked three options and …

Rainbow Snickerdoodles

This is going to be a quick post because Erik and I are about to sit down to some much needed Schitt’s Creek time, but this weekend I made some very big cookies that are kind of adjacent to a snickerdoodle. When I think of snickerdoodles, I think of cinnamon. But Hummingbird High’s cookbook had a couple of variations to snickerdoodles that piqued my interest. I mostly want to make her matcha snickerdoodle variety. Unfortunately, the Giant supermarket around the corner most certainly does not have matcha powder as a standard item. They do, though, have rainbow non pareils, so …

Small Batch Olive Oil Lemon Bars

Happy Valentine’s Day! Erik and I just finished a feast and I’m writing this as I’m about to slip into a food coma powered by Schitt’s Creek on the couch. We ordered cook at home hot pot and it was perfect – lots of delicious food, a fun thing to do. Highly recommend. If you’re in the DC area check it out – Fat Choi Hot Pot. Also in the Valentine’s Day trend, Erik has been talking about how much he loves lemon bars for weeks now, and I thought it was probably a good time to make him some. …

Lavender Honey Shortbread

I don’t know why I one day saw dried culinary lavender in the grocery store and thought “THAT is something I need in my life,” but I did, and here we are, about a year later, finally using it. I move in a month, and can’t really bring all of my food with me, so am trying to make recipes that use up as much of it as possible in an effort not to waste it. When I was in the pantry yesterday, I came across the lavender, and remembered a fun cookie book I had that I could have …

Classic Blueberry Pie

Today’s recipe was both the first thing my mom wanted me to make and the last thing. She started with “please make me something with these blueberries.” Then we went down the rabbit hole of “should we make a braided bread instead?” And then we decided yes, we should definitely make a braided bread. The grocery store disagreed – no yeast to be found anywhere, except the local French bakery, which only had fresh yeast, and that seems like way more work than I wanted. So we came back to blueberry pie, and I got to play with pie stamps! …

Blueberry Rhubarb Galette

When I tried to explain to my brother what a galette was, I told him it was kind of like a deconstructed pie. You use pie dough, it’s filled with fruit, but instead of a pie plate you just kind of fold the edges over themselves and leave it a little open in the middle. He responded, “so hipster pie?” That’s kind of right. But I’d never made one before, so I decided to go for it. And i’m glad I did! Because I then had my friends over for dinner (hi, Josh and Sungho!), and served it for dessert, …

Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

There really isn’t a whole lot better than baking a pie with fresh ingredients from a farmer’s market. You’re supporting local businesses. Everything is super ripe and perfect. You get to buy the ingredients outdoors. Even someone who doesn’t like pies or fruit-based desserts (that would be me) can appreciate how good it feels to do this. So when we were walking through the farmer’s market at Harvard and a vendor had both strawberries and rhubarb, I couldn’t just not buy them. And, as luck would have it, strawberry rhubarb is Erik’s favorite pie!

Blackberry Brown Sugar Bars

When I’m baking in my mom’s kitchen, I usually take a break from my normal cookbooks and use one of hers that I like: The Farmhouse Cookbook.  What I found out this week is that as cute as the cookbook is, it doesn’t actually have that many dessert recipes. I was flipping through it, trying to decide on something, and thought lemon blueberry bread pudding sounded like a great dessert for the meal my mom was cooking. Almost 5 years into this blog, I decided it would be a good idea to check before starting it. Turned out I had …

Speculaas Biscuits

Finals is for procrastibaking. In the last 24 hours, I’ve made 3 different Ottolenghi recipes: banana bread, cauliflower cake, and these cookies. It’s important to take some (read: most) time to destress when you’ve got your last final exams ever coming up. I also am determined to get on Ottolenghi’s Instagram account, where he occasionally posts things people have made of his, but I haven’t had any luck so far. My only chance is to keep baking my way through Sweet!

Lemon Berry Stripe Cake

This weekend I decided to bake something exciting. I had the time. I had a book club (which meant it would disappear quickly). I hadn’t made a cake in far too long. Also, Cate made it a couple weeks ago and I got jealous. So I pulled out Ottolenghi’s Sweet cookbook and found the most colorful, interesting looking cake I could: Lemon Berry Stripe Cake.