Apple Cupcakes with Honey Mascarpone Icing

Happy (Jewish) New Year!! For those of you who don't celebrate, one of the key culinary features of the Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) meal is the dipping of apples in honey. We do this to bring sweetness to the year to come.  So, you know, you could take the reasonably healthy route of just dipping apples in honey-- or, you could be me and add a zillion calories to the process by making apple cupcakes with honey mascarpone icing.

Dude-- can we say Worth.The.Calories???????

I'm really quite pleased with myself on this little invention. I have been building this one in my head since last Thanksgiving, when I made this caramel-apple cake. A few months later I got the idea for a mascarpone icing when I saw this recipe on pinterset. From there, I Frankensteined together my creation. So, without further ado.....

Honey Cake

Hellooooooooo! I took a little break, but I. AM. BACK! Summer is on the way out the door, the heat has *finally* broken here in Chicago and I'm back in my kitchen. I don't know when fall officially starts, but here in Julie Vision world, it's up and running. I love fall. I the weather; the flavors; bonfires; hoodie sweatshirts; Thanksgiving; everything short of raking leaves, I love.  For me, the start of fall eating is signaled by Rosh Hashanah. For those of you who do not celebrate Rosh Hashana, it is the Jewish New Year. The Rosh Hashanah meal consists of sweet fall flavors to celebrate the season and project sweetness into the year to come. These flavors include apples, honey, and pomegranate. One traditional desert to serve at your meal is honey cake.

Going back to my love of all things fall-- I love honey cake! Though this is a lesser known fall desert, I find it to be a fantastic fall-food-starter. It has great warm, fall flavor, without being pumpkin or apple. I love pumpkin and apple, but, in a season where you can get pumpkin flavored everything--from your coffee to your car air freshener--this sweet, fall-spiced cake is a good one to work into your fall baking rotation. Plus, this recipe is super easy. Double plus, I love to eat it for breakfast. (Cake is *totally* an acceptable breakfast......right? If you aren't sure if that's true, tell yourself it's acceptable to eat holiday foods for breakfast in celebration of your own culture or someone else's culture.....that just makes you worldly.) :-)

Carrot Cupcakes with Vanilla Bean Cream Cheese Icing

Hello! Sorry for the week of no posts, it's be HOT here in Chicago! It's not much cooler this week, but tonight is my book club and, dammit, book club cannot happen without treats! I love carrot cake, but am not the biggest fan of cream cheese icing (I know, I know, I'm a weirdo). But what goes with carrot cake other than cream cheese icing? Nothing. That's correct. So I've developed a super-vanillay version of the classic that I find to be delicious. Also, carrot cake is made of carrots, which are a vegetable, so I declare this a vegetable, and, therefor, healthy. Comments noting the fact that the butter and sugar content outweigh the carrot content, or any other sort of science refuting my vegetable theory will be deleted, ummmkay????

Deep Dish Peach Cobbler

Some things in life are not with the time, effort, or calories. Unbalanced cobbler is one of them. Unbalanced as in either too-much-fruit-not-enough-biscuit or too-much-biscuit-not-enough-fruit. I often find that, due to fruit shrinkage when the fruit cooks, the latter occurs by accident. NOT ON MY WATCH, do you hear me?? NOT ON MY WATCH!!! Plus, when there is a lot of fruit you can pretend it cancels out the calories by being healthy and you can eat it for breakfast. :-) Thus, I make a 'deep dish' peach cobbler.

Cobblers are one of my favorite summer desserts. I love them when fruits/berries are fresh and you don't have to use frozen. (You can make very delicious cobbler with frozen fruit, but fresh fruit, in my opinion, always tastes better. That being said-- if you need to save time or the fruit is out of season, frozen is a fantastic alternative.) I've never been big on pie-- possibly the too-much-crust-not-enough-fruit problem that often occurs-- so crisps and cobblers are my favorite fruit based deserts. My recipe started as the one in the Betty Crocker 1969 cookbook featured in my sidebar, but has morphed pretty far from there over the last few years.

Biscoff Chocolate Chip Cookies

Anyone who's been trolling recipes on Pinterest in the past few months has seen the Biscoff Spread that is being used in all kinds of baked goods. I've had my eye out for it for a while, and have not been able to put my hands on a jar. I recently learned that Trader Joe's has their over version called Cookie Butter. Seeing as I have Trader Joe's in close proximity, you must know how excited I was by this. I quickly sped out and bought a jar. See???

Note: Product is delicious & addictive.

After I ate nearly half the jar with a spoon responsibly sampled the Cookie Butter, I was then left with conundrum of what to make with it. I'd seen it made into all kinds of things on other blogs, but the more I thought, the more I figured I'd start with the basics: a chewy, moist, chocolate chip cookie. They take a classic and spice it up a bit with a hint of ginger.

This recipe is based off my peanut butter cookie recipe. Since the Cookie Butter is about the same texture as peanut butter, the recipe converted over nicely.

Triple Chocolate Cupcakes

Remember that time I admitted to being obsessed with this dark chocolate cake recipe? Yes. Obsession still happening. I'm the birthday fairy at work, and we had another birthday a few weeks ago. When I asked said birthday girl what she wanted and she said, 'chocolate,' so I came up with these. In short, this is a dark chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting, dipped in chocolate. They are just as delicious as they sound. :-)


On a side note-- due to the heatwave hitting Chicago right now and my lack of a/c, I will be a bit quiet through the month of July. I hope the heat breaks so I can be back to baking ASAP!

Three Layer Irish Cream Cake + Decorating Tutorial (Subtitled: How to narrowly avoid Cake Wrecks)

I made the fantastic Layla a birthday cake. Layla has long been an aficionado of the Irish Cream Cupcakes I made for Leslie's Birthday, so I was quite certain that Layla needed an Irish cream cake for her birthday. The recipe I used is the same as the one for the cupcakes, but with the amounts adjusted to make three, nine inch layers, each about 1.5ish inches thick.

I've also included a decorating tutorial for my standard birthday cake design, which you can all thank me for because now that everyone knows it's easy, they are going to expect better cakes. ;-) I will warn you that the Baileys in the icing made the icing colors appear slightly different than if you were putting them in a white, less boozy icing. This is important in this case only because the cake I envisioned was a lovely dark teal with pastel pick letters and some very elegant pink and white sprinkles, but it became the creation you see here when the colors took differently than I'd hoped and I switched to a standard confetti sprinkle. At any rate, I figure I have narrowly avoided cake-wrecks this time, even if it be only by a small margin.