Lemon Polenta Snacking Cake with Lemon Custard Buttercream

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While I am curious and uninhibited about emerging food trends, the term “snacking cake” inspires within me a certain luddite cantankerousness. How can this term justify its existence when all cakes can be snacked upon? I don’t need a cake to announce its relevance to me! And the offered criteria seems to just describe, well, cakes. I understand that we have yoga pants and riding boots and breakfast burritos and so on but “snacking” is too broad a verb to cling to that noun with such unmerited authority as far as I’m concerned.

However!

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Hands-free Black Bean and Brown Rice Casserole

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Where last week’s recipe was flighty and fancy, this Hands-free Black Bean and Brown Rice Casserole is more sensible and functional — not exactly dinner party fare but highly amenable to that evening slump in energy and inspiration when you require dinner but wish to neither think nor try. While my blog is not generally a perky resource for busy people with many mouths to feed — it’s merely a collection of recipes that I love — I aim, at least, to be practical about the outwardly impractical. This recipe, however, is pure pragmatism without qualification. You plonk a bunch of long-life pantry ingredients in an oven dish, bake for an hour, and there’s your dinner.

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Lemon Vodka Pasta

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You might well ask, how can I possibly wring further mileage out of the pairing of lemon and pasta when there’s already the Pasta with Lemon, Garlic, and Thyme Mushrooms; the Lemon Rosemary Fettuccine; and the Lemon “Parmesan” Spaghetti recipes on here for starters? It’s not just a case of if you get it you get it, but to me each of these recipes has their own personality, narrative, energy, and — importantly — flavour — and I could probably come up with another ten recipes combining lemon and pasta and argue for each of their relevance. But still, you might well ask, and I shall answer: what sets this Lemon Vodka Pasta apart is its spirited spin on the French beurre blanc sauce, where wine and vinegar are evaporated down before having butter whisked in. Here, the strong and sour components come from vodka and lemon, further adulterated with cream to give the emulsion a helping hand.

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Blackberry White Pepper Gingerbread

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In my ongoing battle to bargain with my brain to do small, unremarkable tasks, I’ve found that I have better success with my to-do lists if I scatter the jobs across the page — like sprigs of basil adorning a plate of pasta al pomodoro — rather than simply listing them one after the other. It’s stupid, but it generally works, which means it’s possibly not so stupid after all. Frequently, one of those untethered tasks is the phrase “vibe with food” which is my designated time to sit on the couch and try to invent or mentally develop and coax recipes into existence. Alas, because this task is non-urgent and fun it tends to get shunted (the system is sound but not bulletproof) but on my most recent attempt at vibing with food, two ingredients bobbed in my head: ginger and blackberries, and like Homer Simpson’s “dental plan/Lisa needs braces” reverie, through the repetition of both words I eventually thought: what if I put blackberries in gingerbread?

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stovetop buffalo cauliflower mac and cheese

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This may be a common way of visualising the various events and diary-dates of one’s life and not worth commenting on but when drifting through my memories I tend to recall most sharply what I ate and what I wore — that night was the Chorizo Wellington, that evening was the vintage black velvet jumpsuit, that party was the Lemon Prosset when I tried to make a double batch and it didn’t quite set, and so on. And so, it is with earned confidence that I can claim I’m very sure I’ve never actually had buffalo sauce, or any buffalo-adjacent dish in my life, and it is with unearned confidence that I present today’s recipe for Stovetop Buffalo Cauliflower Mac and Cheese. Does dousing something in buffalo sauce make it, well, buffalo? Possibly not. But, does this taste good? You already know!

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Small-batch Peanut Mocha Cookies (gluten-free)

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Despite the fact that not once in my sixteen-year career as a food blogger have I ever had a large group of dependents to regularly feed, I still tend to bake as though many hands will be reaching for the finished product. What can I say, I like filling the tins, I like abundance, I like knowing that the sweetmeat I’ve eaten won’t be my last, that it has brothers rising up and multiplying behind it like the brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (actually that’s not a great analogy because that part terrified me as a kid, but it demonstrates the vibe nonetheless.) What care I for the small-batch cookie? Not much, initially. But my head can reliably be turned by novelty value, and so here we find ourselves with these Small-Batch Peanut Mocha Cookies, the yield of which can be easily summarised by Dee Dee Ramone counting off a song.

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Sheet Pan Gnocchi Puttanesca

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Look, I’m the first to yell about how SEO has ruined food blogging and I know we probably don’t say “sheet pan” in New Zealand, but sometimes you have to dance with the enemy in order to steal their jewels, and so this recipe is called Sheet Pan Gnocchi Puttanesca in the hopes that capitulating to Big Algorithm delivers me some sweet, sweet optimisation. That modern ugliness aside, what this recipe will undoubtedly deliver you is a delicious, hands-off dinner in little more than half an hour.

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Banana, Pear, and Dark Chocolate Muffins

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Of all the foods we’ve done a disservice to, muffins are probably low on the apology list, but! I just don’t think muffins should be six dollars, or the size of a sandcastle, or bogged down with too much ostentation. These are a simple, small cake, best homemade, cosy rather than mind-blowing, an accompaniment rather than dessert. Whenever a muffin is too rich or gilded or secretly a brownie or cupcake in a fake moustache and trenchcoat the effect is somewhat unsettling, like being drunk at 9am or regarding a map of Pangea with its sloshed-together outlines of all the countries. Muffins should be calm and small!

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Four-Bean Soup with Kewpie Aioli

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It’s the verboten, not-as-intended foods that I’ve always been drawn to — cake batter, cookie dough, pilfered leftovers straight from the fridge, cold canned spaghetti, uncooked 2-minute noodles. To this list, we can add today’s Four-Bean Soup with Kewpie Aioli in its ice-cold, waiting-for-tonight state. Despite the unappetising prospects of congealed barley, I could not stop swiping spoonfuls of it. Luckily for those of you who do not share my deranged tastes, it’s also excellent in the more expected temperature of piping hot — but it does benefit significantly from cooling down before being reheated. In that time the barley hungrily absorbs the murky broth while the beans mind their own business, and the flavour develops from 480p to 1080p in that mysterious way food can do.

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Simple Rhubarb and Custard Tart

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Sometimes when a recipe appears visuals-first to me the result is abundantly successful, like these Marble Heart Cookies. And sometimes, in the case of today’s recipe, which I envisaged decorated with pink plaited ropes of shaved rhubarb fibres to tumultuous applause and frantic, viral sharing, it…simply doesn’t work. The stringy fibres did not braid smoothly, producing a bedraggled, limp and hairball-ish rope that immediately unravelled. So I set aside that folly and continued with this Simple Rhubarb and Custard Tart unadorned but for some green tendrils of thyme, and perhaps it’s for the best: chewing through a fibrous lashing of interlaced rhubarb would be, at the least, counterproductive, and the brink-pink splendour of the rhubarb stems themselves provide their own plentiful visual spectacle.

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