The combination of saucy tart rhubarb and fluffy cake makes this wonderful Rhubarb Upside Down Cake. Mind you anything with rhubarb in it is wonderful in my books. This cake is the perfect recipe to make for a special dinner as it looks quite impressive even though the process of making it is quite simple. The rhubarb cooks at the bottom of the pan into a delicious sticky sauce which when you flip the cake out onto a serving plate makes a very pretty topping.
This Raspberry Coffee Cake is like one gigantic raspberry muffin that you can cut into any size you like. Depending on the time of day or your appetite you get to choose how big the piece will be. This recipe is one of those special ones that you get up in the middle of the night and eat a piece leaning over the kitchen sink to catch the crumbs so no one is the wiser in the morning. This Raspberry Coffee Cake is a little lighter than a previously posted coffee cake with raspberries in it. With no streusel topping, just a little sprinkling of brown sugar it is definitely easy to eat on the go. The batter is very thick but results in a light and airy cake- it is amazing what chemistry does.
One more maple flavoured recipe if you don’t mind…I just love all things maple. Maple Frosted Apple Slab cake is full of cinnamon, ginger, apple and topped with a fudgey maple frosting. The perfect combination for a dessert, or snack, or meal – you choose. There is a lot of fresh apple in this recipe so I think it really should be in the snack category. One can’t have too many apple recipes.
I love coffee cakes…they are simple and satisfying. This Pecan Maple Coffeecake has the flavour of spring – maple syrup! Maple syrup should be a food group all by itself. I love to use it in recipes and cooking or just stirred into my coffee. If you are lucky enough to live where maple syrup is produced then you will have access to maple sugar as well. Maple sugar costs almost as much as gold but it is a nice treat to use in baking or sprinkled on your oatmeal.
The Perfect Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Frosting is a recipe that every home baker needs in their repertoire. What makes this Chocolate Cake so special is the simplicity of the batter and the frosting. The batter is mixed all in one bowl and the frosting has only 2 ingredients! I have posted this cake recipe before with a little more decadence but for this one it is all about the chocolate.
This delectable Tosca cake recipe comes from a Finnish friend of mine who used to bring Tosca cake to all of our potluck dinners. It was a family favourite of hers which had been passed down from her grandmother to her mother. I was lucky in that she shared the recipe with me. I have made it multiple times over the years for important family events. Every time I make Tosca cake it reminds me of my bubbly friend Maritta, who unfortunately passed away 20 years ago. Looking at the recipe in her handwriting when I am making it brings back wonderful memories of all of the laughs we had together.
Tosca-Cake
During the snowy cold winter there is very little local fresh fruit so we look forward to the citrus fruit that comes to us from south of the border. The sweet oranges and lemons are the foundation for so many of my favourite desserts. Glazed Lemon Loaf is one of those favourite citrus recipes. It is rich yet refreshing, it can be breakfast or dessert or both!
Well January is a busy birthday month for our friends and family, so this Triple Lemon Layer Cake was bound to make an appearance at one or two of those celebrations. Our friends Karen and Gord happen to have birthdays just a few days apart so a double whammy was the perfect reason to make this special cake. Besides getting together with friends for the birthday celebration we also watched the second episode of Downton Abbey of the season…now that was all worth making this Triple Lemon Layer Cake!
There are a lot of steps to making this beautiful cake, but if you like lemon, it is so worth the time and effort. Even though there are a lot of steps, none of them are difficult, so don’t be intimidated by the long list of directions. I would recommend baking this cake on a day when you have time to dedicate to the project – as you can see in the photos it was a snowy cold day when I baked it- the perfect day for such a project.
The little clementine oranges in their little cardboard boxes are like little parcels of sweet goodness during the cold winter. I am sure that in the month of December we devoured at least 4 boxes of clementines. But even though they are delicious and the perfect packaged snack there always seems to be a few left at the bottom of the bowl, a little shrivelled and ignored. Before you toss these in the compost- read this recipe for Clementine Loaf. Zest and juice those less than perfectly plump clementines and you have the star ingredients to bake up a refreshing loaf. Now clementines don’t have as strong a flavour as say a lemon or navel orange, but they do make a nice change. To enhance the clementine flavour you can make a glaze for the cooled cake from a little more clementine juice.
After the Thanksgiving turkey is done and it is still a month before the next turkey roasting, there is always that 1/2 jar of cranberry sauce sitting in the fridge looking lonely. When I happened upon a recipe that used cranberry sauce instead of jam in a filling for a cake I thought hmmmm that might be a good idea. I have made coffee cake with fresh cranberries and it was yummy so using cranberry sauce should be even better. We have cranberries growing in the wetlands in our area so my Mom is always picking baskets of cranberries in the fall. She also makes most of them up into cranberry sauce, so having another recipe that will use cranberry sauce is a welcome addition to the recipe box.
