use real butter

Recipe: cream cheese brownies

[A huge thank you to Fine Cooking for highlighting use real butter in their newsletter as one of their favorite food blogs. I find myself in truly stellar company. It’s no secret to my readers that Fine Cooking is my favorite cooking magazine and a source of inspiration for urb.]

The excitement never ends over here at urb headquarters, but first… some proof that I am keeping off the streets this summer:

we are back to sunny weather here – great for a ride

or a romp in the high country

the snow is melting fast

kaweah wanted to go for a swim in the icy water

and she did!

See all of that blue sky in the pictures? That’s right. Blue Colorado sky, bright green aspens, dark green pine forests, white snow, and in a few weeks – multitudes of brilliant and colorful wildflowers. This is the place to be and if you sign up for the Food and Light photography workshop, you’ll be here to enjoy Colorado, a fantastic group of fellow food photographers, and all of the great things our sponsors have lined up for us. Speaking of sponsors, I am *really* excited to have the following companies (many of them local) supporting our workshop: Pro Photo Rental, Atlas Purveyors, Culinary School of the Rockies, Izze, Savory Spice Shop Boulder, Chocolove, Stonyfield Farm, New West KnifeWorks, Earthy Delights, and Nations Photo Lab.



And before we dive into the recipe, I’m psyched to be a judge for the Threadcakes Contest which is now live through Monday, August 16, 2010.

What’s Threadcakes? I’m glad you asked! It’s a competition where entrants bake and decorate a cake based on a Threadless t-shirt design. Some of the designs are absolutely stunning – as are the cakes! Here are the rules and you can follow Threadcakes on Twitter @threadcakes. You should go to the Threadcakes website to see last year’s winners. I was totally impressed and I know some of my readers and blogging pals have the talent to bring the smackdown this year. Check it out!

Last week when the weather was decidedly cooler and rainier than it is now, I baked four batches of these brownies for friends, neighbors, visitors, and Jeremy. Ever forget about a recipe for a while and then rediscover it? I actually got this recipe from Jeremy. Okay, I got this recipe from Jeremy’s mom. Jeremy told me these are his grandmother’s cream cheese brownies and he *loves* them. I never knew his maternal grandmother as she had passed away before Jeremy and I met, but I hear many loving and hilarious stories about this wonderful woman.

cream cheese and butter

making the cream cheese batter

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: passion fruit ice cream

I was commenting (read: whining) about the heat to my girlfriend the other day when she replied, “I want to kick the sun in the nuts.” That about sums it up. It was the hottest day of the year thus far. But then a lovely cool-down (literally) blew into town and we woke up to misty mountains and that chill on the morning air. Sunny days are beautiful and plentiful in Colorado, which is why I cherish those cool and cloudy moments when we can get them. Perfect hiking weather for a black dog.

clouds descend on the valley

happy dog

high runoff means parts of the trail were flooded

what is normally a lovely cascade is currently a torrent

June is the month of major upgrades here at urb. Oh wait, you thought I meant the blog? Ha! I’ll get around to editing that code in about 6 months. No, I’ve been making upgrades for my work (this blog is not my work, people). Upgrades like:

my second shooting body

and my desktop

There are more upgrades, but these are the biggest offenders. And by offenders I really mean these are my babies… my workhorses. So expect the next 3000 recipes to be some variation on how to eat dirt.

I’m kidding.

I have a really fabulous recipe for you today. It’s fabulous because I have been obsessing over it for a few years now. I’ve been obsessing over passion fruit which is prohibitively expensive here in Colorado. I was on a mission to find them in order to flavor buttercreams for passion fruit macarons. I started with a passion fruit syrup/nectar/concentrate from an Asian grocer in California’s bay area. It was decent. Then last year I received a package of goodies from my dear friends, Todd and Diane.

remember these beauties?

the passion fruits were more precious than gold

I scooped the guts of the passion fruits into a little container and popped it into the freezer. On my most recent trip to California, Jeremy and I were returning from Yosemite to the bay area when I sent my pal Lisa a text asking where she found the passion fruit concentrate for her passion fruit macarons (I had one of those macs, by the way, and they were out of this world). Whenever you ask Lisa for information, you are going to get ALL of it. That’s one of the reasons I love her. We’re both just a little OCD. Just a little.

i managed to snag the last container (and i defrosted the pulp i had in the freezer)

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: cherry-almond clafoutis

[Thanks to 5280 Magazine for the shout out! I’m honored, even if you called my tone irreverent – which it is. When I first moved to Colorado, I thought 5280 was a truncated zipcode and it really puzzled the hell out of me. Congratulations to fellow blogger Rebecca Caro for making the list too.]

Strawberry who? I’m just joshin’ around. This house is still loving the strawberries, but now those shiny, luscious cherries are making their appearance in the markets. Consider me enamored. I associate summer with small fruits that stain your hands deep reds and purples. Messy and sweet. Summer equals berries. But wait – cherries are drupes.

a bowl of cherries sounds better than a bowl of drupes

We buy a lot of fruit on a regular basis – a rainbow of fruits. From our groceries, you’d think we are healthy eaters. That’s only a half-truth. Half of the fruit is for Jeremy because he’s fruitist. He discriminates against drupes… doesn’t like drupes. I married a guy who won’t eat plums, peaches, nectarines, mangoes (seriously?!), or cherries. I know I’m not the only food blogger who married a picky-picky. What is up with that? Okay, this was going somewhere… We don’t own a cherry pitter because I’m the only one who eats cherries. I recently made a Fine Cooking recipe that called for pitted cherries. In the back of the issue, they had some nice tips on how to pit them without a pitter, including one method which uses a straw.

i happen to have a nice metal straw

pierce the bottom with the straw, then push from the top

**Jump for more butter**