…it’s time to eat.

Last year at this time, if you had asked me to write an article about desserts, I would have responded with, “How about a dessert wine? Hmmmmm??"

I have never had a sweet tooth. Gourmet Beef Jerky is a much more delectable treat to me than a chocolate bar. After dinner, you would find me getting my sugars and carbohydrates from that perfectly poured martini or that dark and alluring foam-capped stout…then I got pregnant and really, really, really wanted a cinnamon roll and a piece of lemon meringue pie and some dark chocolate ice cream and maybe some Peanut Butter M&Ms.

Now in my eighth month of pregnancy, I have spent these booze-free months delving enthusiastically into the world of desserts, from the simple Sundae to the delicately flavored Tiramisu, from a flaming Bananas Foster to a fresh-from-the oven chocolate chip brownie, drizzled with caramel chocolate syrup and topped with homemade whipped cream.  My favorite desserts are not complicated. They do not assault you with sweetness. My favorite desserts are tart and bold in flavor but never overbearing.

Enter, the Lemon.

Is there any dessert flavor that invokes summer more than the Lemon? Lemonade actually tastes like summertime. Always welcome at the picnic table, this little citrus gives us Lemon Meringue Pie, Lemon Sherbet, Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins, Lemon Cake, Cookies, Pudding and Tart. You can add lemon to nearly any ‘vanilla’ flavored dessert and it is instantly perkier.  But what I want right now, I mean right this very minute, is a Lemon Bar.

Oh, the Lemon Bar, with its buttery crust, glistening lemony filling and light dusting of powdered sugar. It is such a simple, friendly little dessert that travels well in Tupperware (especially to the office in my lunch bag), shows well at parties and can be sold for ridiculous amounts of money at community bake sales (some little Trump-in-the-making was charging $4.50 a pop for those suckers at the last school bake sale I attended. Outrageous… But I still bought it.)

This incredibly simple dessert has relatively few ingredients, is easy to make and yet somehow still lends its maker the glow of the Master Baker, that ‘Martha Stewart’ aura that can get us into trouble when people assume we are much more capable around a KitchenAid mixer and rolling pin than we actually are.

Lemon Bars
derived from Allrecipes.com

Prep Time: 
15 Min

Cook Time: 
40 Min

Ready In: 
55 Min

Servings : 
36

Ingredients

Crust

• 1 c softened butter
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• Dash of salt

Filling

• 4 eggs
• 1 1/2 cups white sugar
• 6 tablespoons flour
• 4 lemons, juiced (around 2/3 c)

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F

In a bowl, blend  butter, 2 cups flour and 1/2 cup sugar. Press into the bottom of an ungreased 9x13 inch baking dish.

1. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes (or until golden, baking time depends on your oven). In another bowl, whisk together the remaining 1 1/2 cups sugar and 6 tablespoons flour. Whisk in the eggs and lemon juice. Pour over the baked crust.
2. Bake for an additional 20 min in the preheated oven. The bars will firm up as they cool

Notes:

Lemons – Meyer lemons are a truly delicious variety of lemon. In general, I’m not an ingredient snob and strongly feel that delicious food can be made with less than ideal ingredients (just ask the French…  and their garden snails), but when it comes to making lemon desserts, you will get yourself halfway to Awesome merely by using Meyer lemons.

Additions – You can get creative with fruity additions to these, perhaps drizzling some raspberry sauce over them before baking, you could also substitute lemons with limes, I imagine.

The Summer Solstice approaches and what better way to celebrate than these little bites of sunshine? Make some lemon bars, eat them outside, enjoy them with a golden, sweet wine, a Muscat or a Riesling perhaps, for me.

Kelly Fiore works, writes, bakes, and teaches in Maryland, where she lives with her husband, son, and many, many, many cupcakes.

I was never that great science. Honestly, what I remember from 9^th grade Introduction to Chemistry and Physics is having a crush on a boy at the table in front of me and sitting next to my friend, Carrie. I’m sure we did labs, I just don’t remember any of them. The thing about baking is that it’s a lot of chemistry – allegedly. But, really, a lot of it is just feeling your way through. Sometimes it’s more about texture than quantity. Sometimes it matters how warm or cold an ingredient is. And, yes, you need measuring cups and spoons and what-not. But, really, in the end, you might have something a little too moist or a little too dry, and you eat it because you made it and it’s sweet and it’s there.

But, when you decide to share your baking with others – particularly selling to others – that acceptable consistency is no longer good enough. You pay closer attention to how much and when. You buy cake flour instead of making do with all-purpose. You spend the extra money on good ingredients – vanilla from Madagascar, organic flour, spun sugar flowers to top each perfect icing swirl.

When I decided to start Dolce Fiore Cupcakes as a farmer’s market venture, it was to give me another “something” to occupy myself during the summer when school’s out. People ask me if I love to bake – it’s not really that. I’ve got two really great recipes – one yellow and one chocolate. Each time I bake them, I adjust the flavors to create a unique new taste, such as toasted coconut, rum, espresso, and countless other variations.

Which got me thinking – why am I so lackadaisical when it comes with baking for myself, and such a perfectionist when it comes to baking for others? Don’t I deserve a near perfect product? What is it about bakers that make them say “I’ll eat the burnt one” or “Leave the overdone piece for me”?

For those of us who were raised baking, we remember the reasons most of the baking was done – occasions. Baking for other people was the biggest reason to bake at all. I have great memories of standing on a chair next to my mom, working on a batter in the ancient mixer (which is mine now, actually, and still works like new). Whether it was for a cookie swap or a party, the point was to show only the best products. Like parents show off their accomplished children, so does the baker display her most desirable delectables.

For what it’s worth, baking is both joyful and frustrating. But the product you create should be for you to enjoy as well. Personally, I think it’s essential to taste each batch of cupcakes to make sure they taste right. I don’t shove a chunk in my mouth and squirt some icing on top as an afterthought. Cupcakes, and most baking, are a lot about aesthetics. I brush off the crumbs. I ice the top with a soft-serve ice cream-esque curlicue. I sprinkle on whatever embellishment I’m using for that flavor. And I enjoy it. Because, in the end, it’s about the moment you spend eating it more than the “it” itself. The time you’ve set aside to say, “Yes. I’m indulging. What of it? It’s not like I’m drinking melted lard?!” In my humble opinion, baking is a privilege, not a right. Like spandex. If you throw a Duncan Hines mix in a bowl with the required ingredients and the end result is a perfectly respectable cake, more power to you. But that’s the paint-by-number version of baking – I wouldn’t call you Monet. Maybe Thomas Kincaid.

The chocolate recipe I use is the closest thing I have to a family heirloom and, although I’m not trying to be the Bush’s Baked Beans guy, I would never divulge the recipe. It’s just one of those things. But my Yellow Cake recipe (enclosed) is one I’ve honed from other recipes and I think it’s the closest thing to perfect that I’ve found. I think yellow cake from scratch is a lot more challenging to perfect than other flavors. I hope you’ll feel the same way about this version.

Dolce Fiore’s Yellow Cake

This is a huge batter. I’ve only used it with Jumbo Cupcake pans, of which it makes 3 dozen, but obviously it would do well in a sheet pan, spring form pan, etc.

4 cups plus 2 tablespoons cake flour (not self-rising, not all-purpose. Yes, it matters.)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, softened
2 cups sugar
2 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
4 large eggs, at room temperature
2 cups sour milk (2 cups milk plus 1 tbsp. White Vinegar) or buttermilk

Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease your pans (I use cooking spray I’ve made with an atomizer and canola oil.)

Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl. In a large mixing bowl, beat butter and sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer at medium speed until pale and fluffy, then beat in vanilla. (You should taste it at this point, if for no other reason than because it’s delicious!)

Add eggs 1 at a time, beating well and scraping down the bowl after each addition. At low speed, beat in sour milk until just combined (mixture will look curdled). Add flour mixture in three batches, mixing until each addition is just incorporated.

Spread batter evenly in cake pan, then rap pan on counter several times to eliminate air bubbles. (I like to drop mine a few times from two inches up.) Bake until golden and a wooden pick inserted in center of cake comes out clean. I’m not telling you how long. Every oven is different. You can use other cakes you bake as a ball-park, but you should be checking on this one to make sure it doesn’t over cook. Cool in pan on a rack 10 minutes, then run a knife around edge of pan. Invert onto rack and discard parchment, then cool completely, about 1 hour.

Carrie Hribar is Project Coordinator with the National Association of Local Boards of Health in Bowling Green, Ohio, where she writes about environmental health issues like food safety, factory farms, and air and water quality.  She is a baking and music enthusiast who blogs at chasingpaper.blogspot.com and contributes to dontforgettodance.com.

My family takes its desserts very seriously. This is because I come from an accomplished line of bakers, including both my grandmother and my mom. I unfortunately do not recall much about my grandmother’s baking (except that there was a fresh coffee cake made every time we’d visit). But I’ve heard stories – my father speaks of his mother-in-law’s pies reverentially— so I know she was amazing.

My personal baking idol is my mother. She regularly whips up a couple pies or has cinnamon rolls in the oven before I’ve even stumbled out of bed in the morning. Barely reliant on recipes, she masterfully measures out cups of flour when I would still be trying to remember how much salt the recipe calls for. I had the good fortune of growing up with homemade treats – store-bought birthday cakes were not typically found in our house. One of my favorite dessert memories is the cake from my fifth birthday, shaped like an ice cream cone with a rainbow of scoops of ice cream on top. I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever seen (however, if you ask my mother about it now, she says it was a nightmare to make, with ice cream melting everywhere).

I gradually learned to bake from my mother. Every Christmas, my mother, sisters, and I would bake and decorate Christmas cookies together. When I became an adult, my mother started me out on easy recipes, for example, a simple graham cracker torte with sliced fresh fruit and whipped cream on top.   My first attempt at making a homemade pie crust from scratch went so horribly that I did not try it again for several years. I was beyond proud when I finally managed to make an edible pie, even though I probably called my mother at least five times during that first successful attempt. The frantic calls home have lessened over the years, but my mother continues to be my own personal expert hotline.

I’m pleased to say I’m growing into my role as a baker. Whenever I express frustration at not being able to replicate my mother’s results, my husband reminds me that she has 30 years of experience on me.  As I practice, I’ve started trying to bring some of my own creativity into my desserts. My blueberry pie gets some ginger added or I’ll attempt baking with gooseberries, which weren’t readily available where I grew up. Not all of my experiments are a success, but I enjoy trying to expand on the skills she gave me.

These cupcakes are the result of such experimentation.  The base of this recipe is a pistachio coffee cake that has been passed down throughout my family. Every time my mother makes this cake, it promptly gets inhaled. Perhaps a snootier baker would frown at the use of prepackaged cake mix, but I vow he or she would change his or her tune after tasting the cake. I was inspired to turn the cake into cupcakes for some friends’ birthday, one of whom does not enjoy typical sweet goods. This is probably one of my most successful attempts at experimenting with or adapting a recipe, and I’m proud of how it bridges an old family recipe with one of my personal obsessions, cupcakes.

Pistachio Cupcakes with Maple Cinnamon Frosting
Makes approximately 18 cupcakes

Cupcakes
1 box yellow cake mix
4 eggs
1 cup sour cream
1 small package pistachio instant pudding mix
1/4 oil
1 ½  cups chopped walnuts
3/4 cup sugar
1 ½  tsp. cinnamon

Frosting
1 Tbls & 1 1/2 tsp maple syrup
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
3/4 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup milk
4 1/2 cups powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 350. Combine chopped walnuts, sugar, and cinnamon into bowl. Place paper liners into cupcake pan, and sprinkle half of the sugar-walnut mixture into a thin layer that covers the bottom of the liners.

Beat cake mix, eggs, sour cream, pudding mix, and oil until thoroughly mixed. Scoop a small spoonful into liners until filled until almost halfway. Sprinkle another layer of sugar-walnut mixture on top of batter, and top off with another spoonful of batter. The batter is a little thick, so smooth the top with a spoon if batter isn't completely covering sugar.

Place cupcakes in oven and bake for approximately 20-25 minutes, or until the cupcakes are golden on top and a toothpick comes out clean. Remove from oven and let cool before frosting.

Make sure your butter is well softened so the frosting doesn't turn out lumpy. I recommend leaving the butter out of the refrigerator for at least 45 minutes before attempting to make the frosting.  Beat the maple syrup, cinnamon, butter, and milk until smooth. Add the powdered sugar gradually, beating until combined. Using a knife, frost the cooled cupcakes and serve.

Aaron Behnke lives in Morgantown, WV where he runs a small vegan baking company called the Venerable Bean. When he's not inventing tasty new treats, he spends time with his family in their vegetable garden or with his friends riding bikes.

I really do not remember exactly when it was that my sweet tooth became the monster it is. I would guess it was sometime between 1996-1998. I am terrible when it comes to remembering dates. These were the beginning years of my being vegan and it wasn’t easy to find vegan desserts. Actually it was nearly impossible unless I wanted tasteless packaged cookies that were accidentally vegan. If I did find a good vegan dessert I had no problem devouring it and bringing more with me for later. The sweet tooth was probably always there but easy to please. Once it became more difficult to please I was always looking for more. I won’t lie; I still get excited to find vegan desserts.

I’m pretty sure it is The Chicago Diner that’s responsible for my love of cake.  They have an unbelievable cake selection that is entirely vegan. Their cakes made me realize that vegan cakes can be delicious. I have had quite a few vegan cakes that were barely edible. I have also made endless disasters along the way while trying to master the art of vegan baking. For a lot of years I have been learning through trial and error. I am still learning and had no idea of the chemistry involved. I was just following recipes and adjusting them after poor results. Most of the time it would just end up being another poor result. I wasn’t baking all that often but just when I was craving something sweet. I actually started to get good results when I started writing down the changes I was making. I don’t know why it took me so long to do this. It was really important for me to be able to see what I had changed and notice what difference it was making. Taking notes in the cookbooks I had was a turning point for my vegan baking. These notes made me start understanding what the ingredients were doing in the recipes. I was still baking some bad desserts but this was when I started baking more good than bad desserts.

It’s years later since my first attempts at vegan baking.  I now own and operate The Venerable Bean Bakery. It’s a small wholesale/special order vegan bakery located in Morgantown, West Virginia. A few months after starting the bakery I had a request for gluten-free cupcakes. I knew absolutely nothing about baking gluten-free but told them that I could do it. I was a little nervous but I started looking for recipes and was shocked at the ingredients. White rice flour, garbanzo bean flour, quinoa flour and almond flour. None of these seemed like flour or sounded even close to edible. My first test batch was not good. I was surprised that it was pretty close to being edible and that these flours might not be as bad as I expected. After a few more test batches with heavily topped vanilla buttercream, they tasted decent. The customer was happy and I learned more about gluten-free baking. There are so many gluten-free flours available that I can’t even name them all. I’ve tried quite a few and have taken notes with each one. I regularly bake gluten-free cakes now that are delicious instead of just decent and I’m proud of that. I also bake gluten-free brownies and cookies. Each of these has taken endless mistakes to get to a good final product. The only way I can learn is through trial and error while taking notes along the way.

Catherine Templeton has just landed in Taos, New Mexico with her dog Finneas. She has an MFA in creative writing from Bowling Green State University and a culinary degree in Patisserie from the California School of Culinary Arts. You can look for her upcoming sweets and treats on her website SweetNoWheat.com.

About a year ago, my sister took a little detour from the traditional Western medical suggestions she’d been getting for her debilitating tummy aches. “Try this antibiotic,” and “this antacid,” and so on, and so forth. None of it was helping, and the stomach pains were getting worse. She was getting pale, she was getting more and more sick.  So finally, she went to a Chinese doctor who suggested she cut out gluten.  And it worked, tralala! As a pastry chef, I was rather confounded. No brioche for my baby girl? No more tarte tatin? No cupcakes for her birthday? Quel dommage! How would she love me? But she was my sister, and she seemed to persist in that silly admiration and adoration that we share, whatever trials and travails we endured. I made a few little stabs at gluten-free desserts, but they were sort of picked over and we cast them aside and we enjoyed a glass of wine and our lovely little commiserations on life and love in other, beautiful, ways, the ways that we do. We survived. She thrived.

Meanwhile, I was fighting my own battles with migraines. I was trying different medications that didn’t work, making lists of “triggers,” and becoming a recluse, trying to avoid light, sound, smells, and even “negative energy;” basically, anything that seemed to aggravate the escalating onslaught of pain. Nowhere online or anywhere else was there any suggestion of gluten-free diets working for migraines, but somewhere in my discussions with ma belle sister I got an inkling that she was onto something, that what she was doing just might work for me too. What did I have to lose, when every afternoon was spent in a blacked out bedroom with ice on my head and pain killers tearing up my stomach anyway?

I’d tried migraine diets, of course, which suggested cutting out all of my favorite foods: cheese, (brie, impossible!) nuts, oh dear, (a life without almonds, tragique!) and worst of all, chocolate (dark chocolate: at different stages in my life substitute for, supplement to, enhancer of love, sex, sensuality - absolutely essential to my existence as a woman.) Needless to say, “the migraine diet” didn’t work.

So, gluten-free. I stopped eating pasta in the middle of an Ohio winter with a foot of snow on the ground. I gave up my nine grain La Brea bread with a quarter inch butter (butter isn’t forbidden, of course, but the bread is, and the butter alone was pretty, but not that pretty, even to a pastry chef. Not enough to eat alone anyway, even if it was from a local dairy.) Soft, white gluten though, how I missed it, six hours after dark descended on blue-snowed-flat-winded-threshed corn fields. Gnocchi, cookies, cake, manicotti… I sought out spinach, and flax and as many kinds of lentils as Kroger and Meijer and Wal-mart could collectively offer. I bought broccoli and squash out of season. I filled my refrigerator with Naked juice. I did well. The skull I wanted pressure washed, sand blasted, replaced began to ease up. I felt lighter and brighter. The nights were just as long, but I slept through them.  And with sleep, unlike insomnia, comes dreams.

Oh yes, a beautiful man was giving me dark chocolate. Merci Mon Dieu! for surely I couldn’t have lived without it, but clearly, something was still missing from my gluten-free life, as rich in vegetal minerals as it may have been. It began with dreams of crackers. I didn’t want them exactly. But I dreamt I was eating them: sesame, poppy seed, cheddar – nothing I couldn’t, theoretically, manage gluten-free. Then it was animal crackers. A more immediate craving was creeping into those dreams, a bit more strangeness as well. One night, I sat straight up in bed. The animal cracker dream was back. In it, my friend Anne and I were playing with silver-colored fish in a bowl that had come from the Barnum and Bailey box. Her birthday was in a week! And my dear friend Jacky’s too! I was the pastry chef! I was the one that made them cupcakes! How in the world would I make my girls happy? How would I, in the midst of all of the celebrations, manage in my small little way to get in my teeny tiny bit of being adored? How would I play my role in making them celebrated? How would I decorate for them, if not with buttercream?

The butter from the special cows at Happy Badger glistened and gleamed in its wax paper in the refrigerator. Gluten-free? Oh yes, of course!  Half-way to buttercream? Oh, a gluten-free journey indeed! I could still pipe out little flowers of frosting!  But just like a quarter inch of pure butter on a slice of toasted air rather than on La Brea bakery bread, buttercream flowers wouldn’t be very appealing on a phantom cupcake. I had to make gluten-free cupcakes.

I looked up recipes for gluten-free cupcakes. Ground up chickpeas? Really? Teff? Quinoa? How could those taste good, at least in a sweet. And Crisco? I just couldn’t. I was trained in patisserie for goodness sake. Mon Dieu! Sacre Beurre!

I spent several hours doing research to discover that xantham gum was a binding agent, and that tapioca starch, while not the yummiest part of a gluten-free cupcake, could be pretty helpful in getting it to stand up, and would not turn a cupcake into bubble tea, though it isn’t used here. Brown rice flour, to me, tastes better than white rice flour, and isn’t as squeaky. Far better for most baking.

Several experiments and failures and recipe and website conflations – and even a few tears later— I had it. I loved being able to decorate again.

I’m far from scientific, so I couldn’t begin to explain the science behind gluten-free baking, or why a gluten-free diet has worked for my migraine headaches.  I just know that life has opened up for me in new ways, and that I am starting a bakery in Taos, New Mexico for celiacs and migraine sufferers with an aesthetic streak. If you’d like to track my progress in the next few months, I will soon update my website, SweetNoWheat.com.

I’m honored to be able to share my first successful cupcake recipe with you. Here it is! Enjoy!

Gluten-free Vanilla Cupcakes

7/8 cup organic granulated sugar

2 large free range, local eggs

1 1/4 cups brown rice flour

1/2 tsp salt

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp xanthan gum

1/2 cup melted butter

1/2 scraped vanilla bean

1/2 cup whole milk

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Place cupcake baking liners in a 12-cupcake baking pan. Beat sugar, eggs and vanilla in the bowl of electric mixer at medium speed for about two minutes. Add flour, salt, baking powder, xanthan gum, oil, and milk ; beat at medium speed for one minute. Pour batter into cupcake cups. Place in oven and bake for about 25 minutes or until centre springs back when touched and cupcakes are very lightly browned. Let them cool completely before icing and decorate away.