If there’s one word that doesn’t come up much on this site, it’s GORGEOUS. That’s because I’m all about flavour and convenience. If something tastes great, it’s not too much potchke to make, and it comes out reliably every single time, then it’ll go on my list of favourites. If it’s a hassle and never quite succeeds – well, it’s not one I’ll try more than a couple of times, let alone share with you here. You might think these Florentine cookies are the exception. They certainly LOOK potchke-dik, especially if you garnish them up with drizzled chocolate, sprinkled icing sugar (confectioner’s sugar), or whatever frou-frou touches you care to add. But that’s the thing – they’re not . These are startlingly delicious and easy to make! And DEFINITELY fall into that magical category of “I can’t believe they’re really pareve.” (Or vegan, or whatever your food choices are…) Why Florentine cookies? I grew up eating Florentine cookies, which we’d buy at Yitz’s (not-kosher) del...

Vegan guests coming for Shabbos dinner?  No problem!  Forget trying to make or buy some kind of special vegan dessert.  Try this adaptation of a classic favourite – your family will probably never notice the difference!  If you’ve got these SIX magic ingredients (not counting water; you do have water, right?), you’ve got what it takes to make these awesomely delicious peanut-butter cookies.  They’re butter-free, margarine-free, and you can control the amount of sugar by choosing a healthier brand than the fancy name-brand sugar-added peanut butter than I have used here.  Because this recipe is so incredibly simple, it would also be a good one to play around with.  Try adding chocolate chips, if that's your thing (and whose isn't it???), or little jammy thumbprints.  If it comes out great, let me know! Ready? Here are these SIX magic ingredients… Kosher Vegan Peanut-Butter Cookies (Adapted from Spoon University ) (makes 20 generously-...

I did it – I couldn’t resist even a second longer:  I made the hot viral muffins ! Don’t you love the way eye-catching food has gone viral lately?  If you’re like me, you’ve got videos all over your Facebook feed of recipes assembled in seconds using healthy, colourful ingredients.  Just drizzle stuff in olive oil, into the oven it goes, and thirty seconds later, you’ve got the World’s Best Popsicles – or something. (I’m sure this is a product of my demographic – if I was a teenage boy, no doubt I wouldn’t get quite so many recipes, and quite a few more brightly animated game images or whatever.) From starters to entrees, from soups and salads to stews and desserts, I’m sure seen these videos and sat there drooling like me, wondering if it could possibly be THAT easy and taste as good as they say.  Today’s gorgeous post, the one which caught my eye, at least, came from a site called Averie Cooks, promised Flourless Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Mini Blender ...

It may not be summer yet, but we’ve had a few days so far that have really hinted that it’s on its way.  And for summer Shabboses, what’s really nice is an easy no-bake dessert that isn’t tremendously patchkedik (involved, preparation-wise). These truffles capture the “cookie dough” vibe perfectly – they’re soft inside and not too sweet for a grown-up palate, but not too peanut-buttery and healthy-tasting (okay, they’re not healthy at all!) that kids will turn up their noses.  In other words, they’re just right.  And you can make them with just FIVE things you probably have sitting around your kitchen the week after Pesach – at least, I did.

  If you’ve ever heard the “Lime in the Coconut” song – don’t worry.  There’s no “bellyaching” here, just a whole fluffy heap of summer-Shabbos deliciousness. On a hot day, it feels like there is no taste more perfect than lime and coconut mixed together. Happily, I discovered a couple of years ago that you can WHIP the cream that rises to the top of coconut milk.  Is there anything more perfect, you ask?  No, there is not. Well, okay... it does get a little more perfect, when you stir in just a small handful of tiny chocolate chips.  Mini chocolate chips work best, because they're awesomely subtle, but really, who's going to complain that their chocolate chips are too big? Here is the basic premise of this, the easiest and perhaps most perfect of all whipped desserts: This isn't exactly a recipe, more like a method.  You'll need well-chilled coconut milk or coconut cream, so stick it in the fridge overnight before you open the tin.  ...

My fellow Israelis are ridiculously huge fans of desserts involving what are basically soggy cookies.  This may have something to do with the fact that the horrendously misnamed “petit beurre” cookies are absolutely everywhere. These cookies are analagous to the Social Tea biscuits we used to buy back in Canada.  They’re misnamed (in Hebrew, “פתיבר” – all one word) because, being pareve, they don’t contain a single drop of butter.  I’m sure they’d be a great base for desserts of all kinds, but actually, the pareve ones aren’t a bad substitute. Perhaps the best-known and most-loved of these treats is Kadurei Shokolad (כדורי שוקולד), literally Chocolate Balls.  When I told my kids we were having them, they literally jumped and shouted “yay!”  GZ (age 7) was not too thrilled when I told him he’d be making them himself , but he got into it quickly. These are super-easy to make, and tons of fun to do with kids.  I recommend having a variety of spri...

The theme of Purim is “venahafoch hu” – it was overturned.  Everything is flipped around at this busy, zany, fun time of year… including the tedium of using the same traditional recipes, year in and year out.  There’s a time for “ moon and prune ” (the traditional poppy and prune fillings), of course.  But why not turn to one of these jaw-dropping new creations to discover a brand-new favourite you can proudly share with family and friends?  There’s certainly plenty here to choose from… 1. Gingerbread / chocolate hamentaschen 2. Rainbow hamentaschen 3. Nutella hamentaschen 4. Black sesame hamentaschen 5. Yeasty hamentaschen 6. Candy-cane cheesecake hamentaschen

If only I had taken a picture.  But Shabbos was early, one of the earliest of the year.  And now, they’re all gone.  I hope that tells you how yummy these are.  Like, “I can’t-believe-these-are-pareve” yummy. Imagine hunks of gooey caramel, topped with lightly toasted pecans and just the right amount of dark chocolate.  You know, sort of like Turtles?  Except these guys are easy to make at home, out of regular coconut milk.  And no, they really truly do NOT taste like coconut.  (Not that I mind the taste of coconut; it’s the texture I can’t stand.) Special tools? I usually hate nonstick, but I happen to have this heavy-duty nonstick muffin top pan .  This also comes in handy before Rosh Hashanah to make honey cake tops , which are absolutely divine.  You could also use a whoopie pie pan, or make these in silicone baking cups .

Many social media people have been worried over the last few days:  apparently, if you Google “Israel,” you get all kinds of dire, terrible images. This post is my attempt to fix that. So why is the word “rogelach” in quotes up at the top?  Because if you just google rogelach (or, as I did, rugelach), most of the recipes you’ll find involve cream cheese, and possibly milk and butter.  It seems that us pareve people are in the minority when it comes to rogelach. And because dairy does such incredible, delicious things when it lives inside a dough, these can never be truly “real” rogelach.  But they can be a tasty, rogelach-shaped puffy cookie on your Shabbos table (or any other day of the week’s table), and some weeks, it just doesn’t get better than that. I started with regular leftover challah dough.  If you need a recipe, you can try my Reliable Challah recipe . If you happen to have leftover dough sitting around, you may find these so easy you’ll ...

Quit kvetching.  At least, that’s what everybody says when I blog about the problems I’ve had baking here in Israel.  Which, just to recap, range from teeny tiny oven in small, hellishly-hot kitchen, to weird fake ingredients (tzimkao, vanillin sugar), to things that are missing altogether or wildly expensive (maple anything, corn syrup). Fair enough; you’re more likely to be successful in your aliyah if you adapt quickly and learn to savour the wonderful foods that can be found here, rather than moping about what you miss from “back home.”  In truth, I don’t even say the words “back home” because this IS home. But one thing I’ve found myself missing – heaven help me! - is the taste of s’mores.  Particularly the delectable S’mores Bars in this pareve recipe .  Cleverly, these bars recreate the gooey goodness of s’mores in a versatile dessert-bar form.  After searching for a perfect “s’mores dessert” for a whle, I finally discovered this recipe and h...

Decorating challahs with kids makes me feel "normal," like we're at home, no matter where we happen to be living... We are starting to get into a bit of a routine, but things are still difficult.  I don’t know; the ingredients are all the same, for the most part, but a lot of what I bake just doesn’t turn out “normal.”  I had a few weeks of making lemon bars that were just awful, like practically inedible.  Part of the problem is the pan size – you can’t get 8 x 8 or pie pans here, so you have to adapt recipes or they will turn out wrong.  The lemon bars, for instance – I was making them in a bigger pan and it just didn’t work.  They were too thin and overbaked.  Last week, I hauled out my one 8x8 pan, which is dairy, and made the whole lemon bars dairy just so I could use the pan.  (Well, they were pareve, but used dairy things for cutting and squeezing and grating and mixing the lemons.) Other things just taste weird, or disappointi...

If your family is sick of Pesach brownies, or never liked them in the first place, or you’re looking for something a little shmancier, why not turn regular brownies into… well, this little compact-brownie terrine-thing that I don’t have a name for?  (If after reading this post you know what it’s called, please leave a comment letting me know!) It reminds me of those 5-layer Pesach bar cakes that you can buy for ridiculous prices in stores… only much, much cheaper. I use two cast-iron loaf pans, which is nice because they’re heavy, thick and sturdy, but I imagine any two pans the same size will work.  (cast iron is also nice because it kashers for Pesach nice n’ easy when I self-clean the oven…). This is not so much a recipe as a technique I hope will inspire you to great heights of deliciousness. You may want to line your loaf pan with plastic wrap before you begin for ease of removal.  I forgot – doh! Bake two square pans of Pesach brownies (recipe below...

Coming back from Israel just yesterday, I wanted hamentaschen that reflected all that we’d enjoyed there, culinarily.  I didn’t quite hit the mark, but I did come up with two cute variations… I used my usual dough recipe from Second Helpings, Please (image below), though I don’t love it because it tends to misbehave in unpredictable ways.  It has never come out the same way twice in twenty years (sigh, I feel so old saying that, but it’s true – the cookbook was a wedding present at my first wedding, and the children of that marriage are now far closer to 20 than to zero). This time, I did it in the food processor, where, of course, it totally jammed and made a sticky mess.  Ultimately, I added a lot more flour than usual and they came out okay.  It doesn’t taste like it usually does, but it worked. I always do one batch with a classic prune filling – or, as my baker sister likes to say, dried plums.  It just sounds so much swankier that way. For th...

Blogging while my challah bakes in a stolen moment on a busy school-day work-day Friday… There are 2 schools of thought when it comes to rogelach (well, besides the totally OTHER school of thought that pronounces them “rugelach” thus causing both mirth and confusion when discussing the vegetable called arugula )… where was I? Oh, yeah.  2 schools of thought:  creamy or yeasty.  Many recipes call for cream cheese, butter, etc.  This gives a very nice, rich dough that is sometimes flaky, but is more “new world” than traditional, in my opinion.  “Old world” is to make a pareve treat you can actually eat following a good meaty Shabbos meal.  (“Awesome new world” is to think of these not as PAREVE but as VEGAN… oh, but start with an eggless dough if you want to totally feel the vegan virtue.) Like kokosh, blueberry buns, and many other yeasted delicacies from the Ashkenaz tradition, rugelach were probably invented as a way of either using up challah doug...