Golden Butter Rum Cake (with a Jonathan Gold Seal of Approval)

This luxurious boozy dessert deserves its claim to fame! Awarded “Best Tasting” by acclaimed food critic Jonathan Gold in 2014, my favorite Golden Butter Rum Cake recipe features a decadent yellow cake soaked in a slightly sweet, rum-infused syrup that will leave you (and your guests) clamoring for second servings.

I’ve got a rummy little treat for you today! I first made this Golden Butter Rum Cake in 2014 for UCLA’s annual Edible Book Festival, a literary celebration where bookworms like me get to bake their nerdiness into all sorts of crazy edible concoctions…and where I also had the Read more

Chocolate Kahlua Rum Balls

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Posts might be sparse around here these weeks, but food is most definitely not in short supply! Part of the reason for this is because I just got back from a Charles Dickens conference in Santa Cruz, where 300 Victorianists from all over the world  congregated to discuss Dickens’ 1848 novel Dombey and Son and lament the dining hall food in tearful, poetic unison. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from our week-long stint, it’s that no academic event is complete without good, old-fashioned booze–and lots of it! Which, of course, makes these booze-soaked chocolate Kahlua rum balls super topical … Read more

Bananas Foster Bread Pudding for #SundaySupper

Bananas Foster Bread Pudding 2--121915Have you ever brought something to a potluck and the only thought running through your mind as you’re dragging your feet from the car to the front door is: “Oh my god, this is SO hideous I hope nobody knows I brought this“?

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Truth be told, over half of the desserts I make when I’m alone at home look like they were pooped out of a woolly mammoth and left to fossilize for a few dozen centuries under mountains of snow. That’s one of the big reasons why food blogging is such a godsend. Making delicious stuff that … Read more

Caramelized Banana Upside-Down Rum Cake for #SundaySupper

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BREAKING NEWS: GOOD PEOPLE DO EXIST.

Last Thursday, apparently I lost my wallet. I did not know I lost my wallet. In fact, if I hadn’t received the email from the police department the following afternoon, I probably would not have noticed until I was late for an important meeting and could not find my wallet anywhere. 

But I did not know. So the email was all like, Surprise! We gotz yer wallet! Come an’ get it. Humdiddlydum, Police Guys. 

And I was all: ……….Oh.

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So after somehow muddling on my boots and feeling pretty nervous, I mucked down to … Read more

The Best Blondies for #SundaySupper

Quick Etsy shop announcement: this month’s new featured item is my Coconut Rum White Chocolate Blondie: perfect for pre-holiday season gifting! If you’re looking for other thoughtful gifts, you can browse my whole selection and learn more about the shop’s history here!

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It’s clear what kind of a spinster I will be: not an old batty cat lady (I’m allergic to cats), but a decrepit little woman who bakes Coconut Rum Blondies at 4 AM after finishing a terrible Ginnifer Goodwin rom-com alone on my couch.

On the bright side, there are worse things. For example, I could … Read more

Edible Books Festival 2014 (Part II)–Two Award-Winning Recipes

Last week I shared with you the enormously successful Edible Books Festival that our library hosts every year around the beginning of April.

Well, today I’m sharing two award-winning recipes: Soaked coconut poke cake, and Kahlua rum cake!

(Don’t forget: WG’s personalized care package giveaway ends tomorrow, 4/22–hurry and enter!)

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(Photograph: Shaking hands with Jonathan Gold, the LA Times restaurant critic, acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winner in criticism, and source of smart writing/eating-as-a-career validation to boot.)

Edible Book Festival 2014 Melting Snowmen Sculptures Coconut Poke Cake 13--041114 I am unapolegetically posting these photos of my Calvin & Hobbes-inspired entries–after spending basically 50 hours planning & executing my interactive cakes/cookies/displays, my hands were … Read more

The Best Bananas Foster Toffee Coffee Crunch Cake

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One of the things I love most about blogging is licking the bowl afterwards having the chance to sit down and tell a story. Food blogging in particular trains us to write good content: it gives you brain fuel (i.e. cake), patience (actually waiting for your cake to cool completely before frosting it), creativity (transforming your 5th over-crumbly cake into gorgeous cake balls), and really good storytelling skills (explaining to your parents the philosophical implications of writing your baking blog when you really should be reading Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter).

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As I slipped … Read more