I’ve mentioned that we’re in the process of selling our house (Are your fingers crossed for us? Cross them harder, please.) and moving to a new home. I have grand plans for our new home. The kitchen will be full of windows, all light and airy. There will be lots of counter space and cabinets to store all my goodies. The backyard will be large and fenced in, ready for a swimming pool. I even have plans for a garden! (That sound you just heard was my husband groaning…I don’t have the best gardening track record.)

I’ll plant tomatoes, peppers, cilantro, and onions. I’ll call it the salsa garden. I love salsa. I’ll also have an area of the yard set aside for berries. It will be a large area. Very large. Large enough to grow blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries. Every berry imaginable! I love berries. Just no dingl…never mind. I’m not even going to finish that thought.

With those berries I will make this delicious cobbler. Today I’m using blackberries. Tomorrow I’ll make it with raspberries. I will not make it with blueberries, because blueberry cobbler is not something I enjoy. Sorry.

There are so many cobbler recipes out there, but this one is it. It’s the winner. It would take home the gold in the National Berry Cobbler Olympic Championship, if only such a thing existed.

Oh, and this cobbler? I baked it in my new cast iron pan. My parents bought it for me for Christmas, but this is the first time I’ve used it. I’m a wee bit scared of cleaning it. I know you aren’t supposed to use soap and water on them, but I just can’t imagine that it gets clean if you don’t scrub it with some Dawn, ya know?

I’m sure this sticky, gooey cobbler will be a breeze to clean up. Right? Please, just agree with me.

Blackberry Cobbler

For the dough:

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1  1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 9 tablespoons cold butter
• 1/3 cup boiling water

For the filling:

• 2 tablespoons corn starch
• 1/4 cup cold water
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 4 cups fresh blackberries
• 1/2 cup sugar

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

For the dough, mix the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon in a large mixing bowl. Cut in the butter until you have a coarse, crumbly mixture. Pour in the boiling water and stir together well so that all of the dough is wet. Set aside.

For the berries, dissolve the cornstarch in the cold water in a medium bowl. Add the lemon juice, berries, and sugar. Mix together well. Transfer berries to a 10 inch cast iron pan.

Heat mixture over medium heat until boiling, stirring frequently. Remove from heat.

Drop spoonfuls of dough over the berry mixture and place the cast iron pan on a foil lined cookie sheet and place in the oven. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the dough is golden brown and the berries are thick and bubbly.

(If you don’t have a cast iron pan, bring to a boil in a sauce pan and bake in a 9×9 baking dish.)

Everyone has little (or sometimes big) failures in the kitchen every now and then and I truly expected this pound cake to be one of my failures. You see, I was in a rush while I was mixing the ingredients and I made a mistake. Instead of using 1 1/2 cups of butter, I only used 1 1/2 sticks of butter (which is 3/4 of a cup). I didn’t realize this until the cake was already in the oven.

I hate when I make silly mistakes like that!

Happily, the cake still turned out pretty good! It was missing that super buttery flavor that I had hoped for, but it was still yummy, especially with the strawberry coulis poured on top of it!

When you make it (because you will make it, right?), please use the correct amount of butter. Learn from my mistakes. You really don’t want to live in a world where half of the butter is missing from your cake.

The strawberry coulis is amazing and I could have happily eaten it with a spoon. It was the perfect combination of tart and sweet and it was so fresh tasting. You could also use raspberries or blackberries, but be sure to adjust the sugar as needed!

Cream Cheese Pound Cake
Recipe adapted from allrecipes.com

• 1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese, room temperature
• 1 1/2 cups butter, room temperature
• 3 cups white sugar
• 6 eggs, room temperature
• 3 cups cake flour (all-purpose flour will also work if you don’t have cake)
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Pre-heat your oven to 325 degrees and grease and flour a bundt pan.

Cream together the cream cheese, butter, and sugar. Add in the eggs one at a time and make sure they are completely incorporated before adding the next. Add in the vanilla. Dump in the flour all at once and mix until combined.Pour batter into bundt pan and bake for 1 hour and 20 minutes, checking with a cake tester after 1 hour.

Strawberry Coulis

• 2 cups (12 ounces) hulled strawberries
• 1/4 cup water
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 3 tablespoons sugar

Add everything to a blender or food processor and process until smooth. Press through a mesh strainer to remove all the seeds. Refrigerate until ready to use.

Bread. It’s a beautiful thing. All floury and chewy and warm and, well, bready. I love bread. So do my kids. My daughter has been known to order a cheeseburger at a restaurant and then eat nothing but the bun. We’re bread people.

This bread is a bit different. It’s full of blueberries. I’ve had banana bread and pumpkin bread, but I’d never had blueberry bread before this. I’m not sure what the heck I was waiting for. This stuff is delicious. It’s also the healthiest dang bread recipe I’ve ever made. Even more shocking, it didn’t start out all super healthy, I adapted the recipe to make it that way. Usually I adapt recipes by adding more butter or sugar, but this time I was replacing oil with applesauce and using whole wheat flour in place of white. I’m not sure what was going on. Alien abduction? Mind control? Who knows.

Even with all the healthifying I did to this recipe, it was still delicious.

The next time I make this I’ll add in a cup of chopped walnuts. Walnuts just belong in fruity breads. It should be a law.

Blueberry Bread
adapted from Betty Crocker

• 2/3 cup packed brown sugar
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1/4 cup applesauce
• 1/4 cup canola oil
• 2 large eggs
• 2 1/4 cups King Arthur white whole wheat flour
• 1 cup rolled oats
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 cup fresh blueberries
• 1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Heat oven to 350 degrees and grease the bottom of an 8 or 9 inch loaf pan.

In the bowl of your mixer, add sugar, milk, applesauce, oil, and eggs. Mix well. Mix in the remaining ingredients except for the blueberries and mix until combined. Fold in the blueberries.

Pour in the loaf pan and bake for 45-55 minutes or until a tester comes out clean. Cool in pan for 10 minutes and then remove from the pan and cool on a wire rack.

I know it seems a bit crazy to be sharing an ice cream recipe in the middle of February, but yesterday it was 45 degrees outside! I was so hot and sweaty that I put on my swimsuit and went out back to sunbathe by the big pile of rapidly melting snow! Then I died of hypothermia. True story.

Honestly, though, I had planned on holding on to this recipe until it warmed up outside for real, but I just haven’t had the time to get in the kitchen lately. I’ve been busy with contractors making a mess of my house and staring at the pictures of my brand new nephew.  What’s that? You wanna stare too?

He’s even sweeter than this ice cream recipe I’m about to share with you.

Before I share though, I would like to take a moment to assure you that my children do not, in fact, sit around and eat sugar by the spoonful all day long. I know it seems as though all I do is bake goodies filled with sugar (and butter and, sometimes, bacon), but I’m actually pretty strict about my kids’ diet. They get one of each treat that I make and then the rest gets shipped off to work with my husband. Every now and then I’ll keep something around long enough for them to get two or three pieces, but that’s pretty rare. I figure they get enough sugar in the breakfast cereal they eat every morning, so I honestly try to limit sugar for the rest of the day.

You can imagine their surprise when I offered up ice cream for a snack, both because it meant something more complicated than me handing them a banana (the usual snack of choice) and because it was ice cream! At ten in the morning!

What they didn’t know was that their snack was still just a banana. My version of “ice cream” was just a frozen banana pureed in a blender. They were so excited that I felt a little bad for them and sprinkled some chocolate chips on top. They gobbled it up.

I’ve since made banana ice cream with a big spoonful of peanut butter mixed in. It gives it great flavor and the kids get a little protein. You could also stir in a bit of honey if you were feeling particularly nice, or better yet, drizzle in some chocolate syrup.

Banana “Ice Cream”

• One banana, with brown streaks, but not so far gone that it’s just mush
• optional: chocolate chips, peanut butter, honey, chocolate syrup, nutella, or anything else you’d like to mix in

A brown-ish banana will work best for this, because it will be softer. Peel and slice the banana into chunks and place them in a bag or bowl in the freezer until completely frozen. Put the chunks of frozen banana in a food processor or blender and process until creamy. Mix in any other goodies you’d like and serve immediately!

When I think of coffee cake, I think of a crumbly cake, preferably with a streusel topping, that you serve with coffee (much like this one).  I do not think of pastry dough and rolling pins, but this Raspberry Coffee Cake has shown me the light. The crust is so flaky and tender and the inside is just oozing with red raspberry preserves. It’s a raspberry lovers dream come true, but you could also make this with just about any other type of preserve you wanted. You could also use a seedless raspberry jam (which I usually buy, but my husband did the shopping this week) if you are scared of all the seeds.

The dough is a mixture of flour, butter, cream cheese, milk, a little salt, and some baking powder. It’s so simple! You just cut in the butter and cream cheese, pour in the milk and give it a quick mix, and then knead it just a tiny bit until you have this scraggly lump of dough.

Don’t be intimadated by this pastry dough! I had zero problems and the dough came out perfectly light and flaky! If the girl who relies on store bought pie crusts can master this dough, so can you.

Roll the dough out, transfer it to a baking sheet, and spread the middle third of the dough with preserves.

Slice the outer thirds of the dough diagonally, careful to leave a bit of space around the preserves, in about one to two inch thick strips.  Start on one side of the dough and flip one strip of dough over on top of the preserves.  Switch sides and just keep alternating back and forth until all the strips of dough are covering the preserves and you have a fancy braided looking coffee cake.

This bakes in just 12 to 15 minutes.

I forgot to line my pan with wax paper and my kids are really going to hate me for that when it comes time to wash the dishes. Oh well, I’ll just give them a big chunk of this as an apology.

Whip up some powdered sugar, milk, and vanilla and drizzle it over the top. You won’t regret it.

Mm! Perfect for breakfast, brunch, with coffee, or as a dessert. Heck, I might even eat this for dinner.

Raspberry Coffee Cake
Recipe from The Luna Cafe

• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup butter (recipe says unsalted, but I used salted butter)
• 3 ounces cream cheese
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup raspberry preserves (or preserves of your choice)

Pre-heat oven to 425 degrees. Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt into a large bowl. Cut in the butter and cream cheese. Pour on the milk and stir just until combined. Turn out on a floured surface and knead lightly 4 or 5 times. Do not overwork the dough! Roll the dough out on wax paper into an 8 x 12 inch rectangle. Transfer dough to a lightly greased (or wax paper lined) baking sheet. Mark the dough with a knife lengthwise into thirds. Spread preserves down the center third of the dough. Make diagonal cuts every couple of  inches on the outer thirds of the dough. Do nut cut into the preserves. Fold strips over the preserves, first from one side, then from other until you have folded over all the strips of dough. Bake for 12 – 15 minutes, until dough is fully cooked and lightly browned on top.

Icing

• 1/2 cup powdered sugar
• 1 tbsp milk
• 1/4 tsp vanilla

Stir together and drizzle over the coffee cake.

(The recipe posted on Luna Cafe does show how to fold the dough over to make the braided shape if you need a visual!)