Summer's Greatest Hits & WRAP UP!

We had a great summer! But we cooked and baked way too much to tell you about everything (plus we repeated lots of stuff that we liked from last summer), so I'm just going to blog about some of our favorites. Maybe you'll get my wrap up joke if you keep reading...

For my dad's birthday, we wanted to make a special breakfast, so we made churros! A churro is a kind of fried dough. We ate it in Spain and in Portugal, where it is very common. Our version was baked though.

First we made a hot dough on the stove.

Then we piped out the churros.

After we baked them, we rolled them in melted butter and then a cinnamon sugar mixture. We keep a container with cinnamon sugar on hand to use whenever we need it.

This is what the finished product looked like.

Our first round of churros turned out under baked. I liked them but the centers were probably a little too soft. The next batch was better. So if you cook this recipe, definitely cook your churros on the longer side!

Keeping with our churros theme, we also made churro french toast. For this recipe you cook french toast, then dip it in cinnamon sugar and add a cream cheese glaze.

This was rich, so small portions go a long way. But it was very good.

A very special breakfast that we had was strawberry spoon cake. This cake could be served as a dessert, but it's actually not too sweet, and so we had it for breakfast! You make a batter and then top it with macerated berries.

This didn't look very promising when it went into the oven...

but it turned out absolutely amazing!

We also tried a new technique and learned to make the coolest strawberry whipped cream in a food processor.

We ground up freeze dried fruit and then added heavy cream.

We had no idea that you could even make whipped cream in the food processor and doing it this way gives it a strong fruit flavor which complements desserts perfectly!

The strawberry whipped cream was perfect on the spoon cake! We also made blueberry whipped cream and peach whipped cream using this method to go with different breakfasts and desserts. The strawberry was our favorite though!

Another good strawberry breakfast was healthy strawberry oat squares. Sometimes when recipes say "healthy," people think it means that the food will taste less good, but these are great. And they kept very well in the fridge. I had one a few days later and it was still perfect.

This recipe has an oatmeal base and topping with a strawberry filling in between.

The crust and topping have apple butter in it, which is like very concentrated apple sauce.

A new kind of baked good that we made was a raspberry custard kuchen. Kuchen (you say it "koo-kin") is the German word for cake. But it seems as if most kuchen recipes are some combination of cake, crust and custard. And a lot of them seem to involve fruit.

First we made a press-in crust right in the pan.

This is what it looked like finished. I really liked the custard part of this.

We also made a cinnamon sugar peach kuchen. I thought that this was too cakey, and I liked how the raspberry version had custard. And I thought that the peaches didn't get soft enough. But my sister really liked this.

Can you see how this looks more like cake than custard?

We went through a peach phase when they were very ripe in August and also made a peach french toast bake. Like a lot of the french toast casseroles, you make this the night before and let it sit in the fridge overnight. The recipe calls for a whole wheat baguette, but we used challah instead. I think that challah makes the best french toast! We didn't peel the peaches for this recipe, which made it a bit quicker to come together. I thought that this casserole was too dry and that we should add more liquid and peel the peaches next time, but nobody else agreed with me!

Rachel doesn't always love peaches, but she liked this recipe a lot. And she loved the churro french toast, but liked that this french toast was lighter.

This year for Yes Day, we requested blueberry waffles, which we had never made before. These were light and fluffy and excellent. I loved how when you cut into these, sometimes you got a big blueberry burst!

The blueberries don't look very pretty in this picture, but trust me, they're marvelous!

Remember how in my Back in Action blog post I talked about how we were going to try a coffee cake recipe made with coffee? Well we did it! This recipe is called Coffee Coffee Cake, which I really liked! This recipe has a brown butter streusel, an espresso swirl and a sour cream cake. You have to be very careful browning butter because it is very easy to burn, but a lot of recipes ask for it. I think that for a future project, I'd like to make the same recipe with browned butter and just plain melted butter to see how they taste different. My dad really loved this coffee cake though! He said that it was one of his favorites.

It was a little bit tricky spreading the cake batter over the espresso swirl, but we did our best.

And it actually turned out beautifully!

Gingerbread cream cheese muffins would have been a good fall recipe, but we actually made these in the summer. For this recipe, you make a gingerbread muffin batter and then you swirl in cream cheese. My brother had a friend over for a sleep over the night before we made these and she loved them!

Our cream cheese swirls probably would have turned out prettier if we had piped the cream cheese.

We also made a lot of more savory breakfasts that we liked. We made an eggs benedict casserole which I loved. This recipe has a casserole made with Canadian bacon and English muffins that you refrigerate overnight. Then you bake it and make a hollandaise sauce to go on top.

This is me whisking while my mom slowly poured in the melted butter to make the hollandaise sauce.

The hollandaise sauce was delicious when we made it, but when I tried to warm it up for leftovers, that did NOT work well. It separated. I think that probably we could have fixed it rewhisking it on the stove, but we didn't want to bother and the casserole was still good plain.

We made zucchini cheddar scones that were very good. The cheddar adds more flavor than the zucchini, but overall these were great. My dad especially likes savory scones. There is another kind of savory scone that we started making last summer and have made many times since then and I just realized that we've never blogged about them. I'll give a prize to anyone who can guess what they are (but you can't guess if we've served them to you!).

These scones browned very nicely because of the cheese.

Another completely new thing that we made was bialys. Bialys are kind of like bagels, but they don't have a hole in the middle. Instead they have caramelized onions and poppy seeds.

We ate these sliced in half with butter or cream cheese, but Uncle TaTa and Aunt ShayShay ate them plain and liked them that way too.

We also made lots of fun lunches. One that I loved was toast skagen (Swedish shrimp toast), which is apparently a very popular dish in Sweden! Basically this is an open-faced shrimp salad sandwich.

One of the reasons that I think I liked this so much is the dill. I LOVE dill!

Another really good lunch was zucchini melts. The filling mixture is delicious, with cheddar and mustard in it. And then it gets all warm and melty on the griddle.

The smell while these are cooking is rich and amazing.

One weekend we were expecting a hurricane. Fortunately it didn't turn out to be too bad (and was even sunny by the afternoon!), but my mom planned a fun lunch project because she thought that we'd be inside all day. So we made homemade cheesy pizza rolls! These were a HUGE hit with everyone!!!! First you make a filling with different kinds of cheese and spices and marinara sauce. There is supposed to be pepperoni in the filling, but we just added pepperoni to half of our rolls, since not all of us like it very much.

Then you scoop the filling onto wonton wrappers.

Folding them up into little packages was fun.

Then we rolled them in breadcrumbs and baked them.

Don't they look crispy and delicious?! We served them with marinara sauce for dipping. These would definitely be fun to serve at a party. They would be perfect for the Superbowl!

Another fun lunch project was called Surprise Hamburgers. My mom actually read an article about making these and thought that it sounded interesting, so we gave it a try. Do you remember how in the very beginning of quarantine we made murder cookies?! Well this recipe comes from the same place. It is another old recipe that got popular on the internet. First you make a dough and while it rises, you make a meat filling. I like recipes where you have something to do while your dough rises so that you're not just sitting around waiting!

Eventually you wrap the dough around the filling to make little packages.

Once they're baked, they just look like regular dinner rolls.

But when you bite into them, you get a surprise inside!

We served mustard on the side for dipping. Rachel and my dad and I loved these! We ended up with a lot, and so my mom froze them. It turns out that you can just heat them up directly from the freezer in the oven and they're still great! We gave them to my Grammy Marcia and Papa Bill that way and they loved them too!

I didn't realize it while we were doing it, but writing this blog post made me notice that we made a lot of food this summer that was wrapped-up like packages - hence our post title! Our next one was cheesy tomato hand pies. These were like a calzone made with puff pastry.

These are kind of messy to eat, but totally worth it!

August is peak tomato season and in the summer we live near a farm that grows lots of different kinds tomatoes, so we did LOTS of tomato cooking. We made so many really good things but our definite favorite was tomato and roasted garlic pie. This was AMAZING. It reminded me of deep dish pizza. The crust was made with wheat thins crackers and garlic butter so it was mildly sweet from the crackers, but also savory and it just tasted incredible.

Then we layered on tomatoes and a cheese mixture. We'd never cooked with taleggio cheese before, but it is delicious. It's sort of like a really really good brie.

Shallots and more tomatoes go on top and then you bake it.

This is what it looked like after baking.

The slices were a little bit sloppy because the cheese got all ooey and gooey but I think that ooey gooey cheese is delightful!

We also made an heirloom tomato tart. This was also really good, but not quite as good as the tomato and roasted garlic pie.

The filling for this had pesto and cheese and tomatoes.

Then you pour a custard on top.

Our crust got a little bit messed up because we forgot that our tart pan had a removable bottom and squished the crust when we were moving the pan. But it still tasted good!

My mom had been really excited to try a tomato cobbler with blue cheese biscuits. We'd never made a savory cobbler before and were curious to try it. We also thought that blue cheese biscuits sounded good. And the biscuits were really good! But we would probably change the filling a little bit if we made this again. Nothing about this was bad; we just think that we could make it better. The filling was too much plain tomatoes. I think that next time I'd double the onions, and maybe add some fennel or another vegetable to add some different textures and flavors.

But I still like the idea of a savory cobbler! And I also think that these biscuits would be good made on their own.

We made some fun new dinners too. One of my favorites was sticky guava barbecue drumsticks. This recipe introduced us to a completely new ingredient - guava paste! For this recipe, you use the guava paste to make a barbecue sauce.

This is what guava paste looks like.

Have you ever had pate de fruit? They're those sticky sugary jellied fruit candies. Sometimes you get them at fancy restaurants. Anyway, guava paste tastes a lot like that. We had some left over and so my mom sliced it and used it on cheese plates and it was great!

This is what the drumsticks looked like cooking.

And this is when they were done.

The drumsticks were very sticky and kind of messy to eat with your hands. But I love drumsticks and the sweet guava barbecue sauce made them even better. We had leftovers and so my mom decided to shred the meat and use them in quesadillas! We added corn and cheese and herbs. Rachel and my dad liked these quesadillas even more than the original drumsticks.

We served the quesadillas with my Grammy Marcia's salsa that she makes with tomatoes from her garden! I'm the only kid in my family so far who likes sour cream and salsa on my quesadillas.

One of my mom's favorite dinners was skillet cod, clams and corn with parsley. My dad doesn't always love cod though, so we made this with flounder. But we all love clams and we all love corn, so otherwise this was a great dish for my family.

I thought that the finished dish looked beautiful on platter!

One of my favorite dinners was a sheet pan shrimp and sausage bake. It also had corn and onions and peppers and potatoes. This recipe calls for creole seasoning, which we couldn't find, so we just made our own. I thought that this dish had really good spice. It was too much for my sister though.

I loved how many components were in this dish. It was fun to mix and match for different bites!

Do you remember how last summer we had a chocolate chip cookie contest? Well we have a new contender! We made Jacques Torres' chocolate chip cookie recipe and put it up against the winner from from last summer, which was a copycat of the Levain bakery chocolate chip cookies. Jacques Torres is a master French pastry chef and we were excited to try his version. This contest was a VERY tight race. I desperately wanted the Levain cookies to win because I really think that they're the best, but unfortunately the Torres cookies won by a single vote. I think that as soon as my baby sister is big enough to eat cookies that it will become a tie though because she'll agree with me! The real reason that I think the Torres cookies won though is because they have salt sprinkled on the top. People love salt (everyone except for my mom at least) and people really love a sweet and salty combination. So I want to make the Levain cookies with salt sprinkled on top and then repeat the contest. I definitely think that Levain will win if we do that!

Even though the other cookies are my favorites, these chocolate chip cookies really are very good!

It turns out that we even wrapped up desserts this summer! We made stuffed fluffernutter cookies and this was another recipe with a hidden surprise in the middle. My mom thought that these could use a little bit more flavor, but my friend Gloria really loved them. Gloria used to think that she didn't like peanut butter, but pretty much anybody who spends a lot of time in our kitchen figures out pretty quick that peanut butter is actually the best!!!!! One cool part about making these is that you freeze teaspoons of peanut butter first.

Then you wrap up the frozen peanut butter and a marshmallow in peanut butter cookie dough.

This is what the cookies looked like before we bake them. My mom thought that they would have been better if we added regular chocolate chips instead of peanut butter ones to introduce a chocolate element.

Then once they're baked, the marshmallow in the middle melts and peaks through!

One of my mom's favorite treats from the summer was cookie dough stuffed brownies. Everyone who ate these thought that they were very very good.

You have to make a block of cookie dough in advance and freeze it, before you make the brownies.

Then you make a brownie batter and pour some of it in the pan before layering on the frozen cookie dough and then covering it with more brownie batter.

This is what they look like after they bake. This recipe was definitely a favorite!

We made lots of brownies this summer - too many to blog about. Peanut butter cup brownies, kitchen sink brownies and cosmic brownies were all really good but we forgot to take pictures. If you want to hear more about any of those though just tell me in the comments and I'll make them again and give a full report! But we did remember to take a picture of these nutella brownies and they're very good. I thought that these didn't have a strong enough nutella flavor, but my mom thought that there was just enough. She doesn't love nutella and liked how there was enough in these brownies to make them a little bit different, but not so much that the hazelnut flavor was overwhelming.

These brownies cut cleanly with very nice sharp edges.

We had a few adventures with pies this summer. One of them was called Mama's buttermilk coconut pie. This was a very easy pie to make. It comes together very quickly and would be a good choice if you need to come up with a dessert last minute. It didn't look very pretty, but it definitely tasted good.

The edges of our crust slid down the sides of the pie pan unfortunately. We need to work on fixing that if we ever make this pie again!

This pie has a very strong coconut flavor though, so if coconut isn't something that you like, then you should skip this one!

We had a different kind of crust issue when we made Atlantic Beach Pie. We had never heard of an Atlantic Beach Pie, which made us want to make it! Basically it has a citrus filling similar to a key lime pie, but it can be made with lime or lemon or both. We chose lemon. This crust was made with saltines and the flavor from that was really good. But it probably needed some more melted butter because it ended up too crumbly.

You can see how the crust looks a bit too crumbly.

Of course we added whipped cream on top and even though the crust was fragile, this pie was also very easy to make and tasted great.

When we went through our peach phase we made a peach upside-down cake. I don't love peaches, so this cake wasn't my favorite, but other people liked it a lot. My mom and Rachel thought that they'd like it more with nectarines because they like tart fruit. But you could probably make this cake with all different kinds of fruit.

I thought that this cake looked beautiful!

One of my favorite cakes that we made all summer was a strawberry shortcake cake. This recipe came from Milk Bar. Remember when we took our class there? Well we didn't make this cake as part of the class, but we made it after and we LOVED it. It has a LOT of components, there is cake, frosting, a strawberry jam, strawberry milk and a shortcake crumb, but making them all is totally worth it.

You soak the cake with strawberry milk and then layer it with frosting, crumb and jam. It is a big project but I highly recommend doing it!!

When we made our eggs benedict casserole, we had to use a lot of egg yolks and so we ended up with leftover egg whites and wanted to do something with them. So we made a strawberry pavlova! A pavlova is a meringue based dessert. I knew that I was going to like it because it is named after a ballerina - Anna Pavlova! She is a legend!

We drew a circle on parchment paper and then shaped the meringue within the circle.

Then you bake it.

And then you layer on strawberry whipped cream and strawberries! This dessert is delicious.

A really fun project that we did is making a version of my parents' wedding cake for their 20th anniversary! They had lots of layers with different kinds of cake and frosting in their wedding cake, but we just picked one. We made their chocolate-coffee cake with coffee buttercream filling and white chocolate buttercream icing. My Grandma Linda made their wedding cake and so we just got the recipe from her, but let me know if you want it and I'll send it to you!

We were rushing to get this done before my dad got home from a trip, so we didn't frost it very nicely or have time to decorate. But my little sister found a bride and man in a suit in her playmobile toys and so we stuck them on top which I thought was perfect!

But the best dessert that we made this summer was definitely fudgy brownie cake. We made it to celebrate my Papa Richard's 80th birthday. You make a chocolate cake, chocolate frosting, a chocolate ganache and garnish it with brownies on top. Do you remember how when we made Rachel's nannyversary cake we messed up the ganache? Well this time our ganache came out perfectly!

Doesn't this cake look special?

And it looked very pretty sliced too.

We've already jumped into fall baking and I'm excited to tell you all about it soon. I'm sure that you can guess what's coming but I'll leave you with one last picture for a clue...