Playing With My Food ~
A journal about food, thought, travel, and life; by Chef & Raconteur Chaz French.

Baked Sundays: Sunflower Butter Cookies With Cranberries

As there are more and more nut allergies (or perceived to be) these days, I decided to play with a classic peanut butter cookie recipe and swap the peanut for sunflower, and then add a little something in the form of ground cranberries.  They add a subtle note to the cookie.  The recipe requires a […]

Baked Sundays: Brown Butter Shortbread With Saffron

I am in fact, slightly evil.  To make it worse, I didn’t just make an addictive brown butter shortbread, I added saffron as a mood enhancer. Brown Butter Shortbread With Saffron Yeild: 64 2″ x o.5″ baton cookies  Time: 40 minutes, plus 8 hours chilling. Ingredients: 1 stick (4oz) butter 1/8 teaspoon ground saffron 3/4 […]

Baked Sundays

Welcome to Baked Sundays, wherein I bake and share on Sunday.  The photos at least you get today, the recipe was a first draft, so while you’ll get to see my chocolate/ginger/yogurt cake, and I get to eat it, you have to wait a bit to try it yourselves. Happy Baked Sunday! Tweet

Orange Loaf for Lionel

So, my buddy Lionel is a dessert man but he prefers the use of chocolate to be limited; he feels it’s overused in desserts, and he has a point. And it was a chocolate orange bread from Nigella Lawson, that got me thinking about an orange loaf, but I didn’t want a pound cake, or […]

Cheddar Brownie With Whipped Cream & Strawberries

Yep, you read that correctly, “Cheddar Brownie.”  And I’m here to tell you that it’s a brownie revelation. Update: August 1st. I won!  Vote for Chaz!. (deadline Friday July 29th). Some back-story, I was asked by the folks at Cabot Creamery to be one of five people to take part in their Summer Dessert Challenge.  […]

Auspicious Beginnings

On the first of January 2009 I found myself searching an external hard drive trying to find a photo, at first I couldn’t find the folder and was starting to panic, after a bit of digging I found the folder but not the photo… While searching through this folder I found another, one that had […]

Vanilla Bean-Cream Cheese-Buttercream

Oooh. Yes, you should go “Oooh.” and when you taste this you should go “Mmmmmmm, oooh, unnnngg mmmm.” Yeah, it’s that good. Ingredients: 2 8 ounce bricks of Philly cream cheese at room temp. 1 stick of butter at room temp 1/2 teaspoon almond extract 1 tsp vanilla extract 1 Madagascar vanilla bean (sliced, and […]

Brown Butter Carrot Spice Cake

Yeah that’s a mouthful, imagine if I had included “With Vanilla Bean Cream Cheese Buttercream” but I’m saving that for a separate post because it’s so damn tasty it deserves its own damn write up! So carrot cake, people either love it or hate it, I’m in love with it, but it has to be […]

Passion Fruit Frozen Custard

I first tasted passion fruit ice cream 3 years ago in Paris and just fell in love with it. A couple months after returning I got a craving for it and decided to track down a recipe, I found just the right one in Ultimate Ice Cream . Really great flavor, consistency, just like the […]

The Baked Peach

Silly me, I forgot dessert. The Baked Peach 2 peaches 2 teaspoons good vanilla extract sugar to coat Vanilla Ice Cream (the best you can get) Preheat oven to 400F Halve the peaches and remove the stones (cut in the direction of the indentation) score the peaches with a paring knife being careful to not […]