use real butter

Recipe: raspberry cream cheese cookies

Happiness is getting another day of skiing when you thought your season might be over. We hit the local hill this morning and played around working on form, balance, technique. Another gorgeous bluebird day!

tele gurl

jeremy working on form

practice practice

A couple of weeks ago I made a bunch of cookies to send to my MIL’s quilting groups to thank them for the awesome ice cream cone quilt they made for me. With memories of those incredible melt-in-your-mouth cookies that Anita had sent to me from Miette, I searched for a cream cheese cookie recipe in an attempt to reproduce that kind of joy. I found a recipe in one of my old cookie books that looked pretty similar.

cream together the butter and cream cheese

The book suggests using full-fat cream cheese to maximize the tenderness of the cookie. Because the dough needs to be refrigerated, this isn’t one of those recipes that lends itself to last-minute rush jobs. EDIT: Dough refrigeration is necessary, but not for as long as the original recipe suggests. I make edits in the recipe below.

i used a 2-inch biscuit cutter

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Recipe: blueberry muffins (cake)

My days have been up and down. When they are down, I lay low and listen to my body and just try to recover. When they are up, I’m brimming with ideas and raring to go. Yesterday was a seriously up day for me. I was able to cook a ton of food and feel as if the kitchen was mine once again. Of course, there were a few changes to work through – like the fact that my taste has been heavily wankered, that my GI tract now rejects about 70% of what I typically love to eat (spicy, sour, salty, fatty, all that good stuff), and that I can’t eat berries. Well, I CAN eat berries, but I’ve been strongly advised to avoid eating raw berries (among other raw foods) for my own well-being.

I had bought some blueberries before my treatment began last week and Jeremy was taking a hell of a long time to finish them off. I really wanted those blueberries. And then I really wanted some… cake. And then I began flipping through my cookbooks and wondering what ingredients I had to make some cake with blueberries. I mean, if they’re cooked then I can eat them, right?

donna to the rescue

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Recipe: lemon meringue pie

Feeling puckery lately? If you’ve been cruising the food blogs, then most likely you’ve run across one or two or four hundred Daring Bakers brandishing their lovely Lemon Meringue Pies.

that’s right kids, we knead to bake

Jen of The Canadian Baker hosted the challenge this month and it was down to the wire for me this time. I started my treatment on Thursday and thought I’d recover with enough time to do the challenge yesterday but… things don’t always go as planned when your body gets pumped full of poison! However, I didn’t want to abandon my fellow DBers, so I managed to make a handful of tartelettes. Forgive me for the lack of detail I usually devote to my DB challenges. She’ll be right next time.

mixing the dough

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