with Mary Anne Mohanraj
No recipe from me, because I basically just followed this one:
https://cardamomandcoconut.com/ginger-peach-scones/
And when I say “I”, I mean Kavi, because I texted her the recipe and asked her to make them. I did collect the peaches from our tree and cut them up for her, though. 
These scones don’t keep more than a day or two at room temperature, so eat fast, or freeze for later enjoyment.
Another one for the Patreon boxes!
(30 minutes, makes 30 bars)
What’s summer without s’mores? You can make these with brown sugar, of course, but jaggery adds an extra dimension of yumminess. They are very gooey, in the best way.
1 c. butter, melted
2 eggs
2 c. jaggery (or dark brown sugar), packed
2 T. vanilla extract
1 1/2 c. flour
4 c. graham crackers, broken into small pieces
2 heaping c. mini marshmallows
2 c. bittersweet or semi-sweet chocolate chips
1. Preheat oven to 350F; butter and flour a 9×12 baking dish.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together melted butter (cooled slightly) with egg, brown sugar, and vanilla.
3. Add flour and stir until just combined.
4. Add graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate chips; fold until blended.
5. Pour batter into prepared baking dish, smoothing out as needed.
6. Bake 22-25 minutes, until edges are set and lightly browned, with the center of the pan relatively firm.
7. Cool bars in pan for 30 minutes, before attempting to slice. Slice and serve. Can be frozen for long-term storage.
Variation: Try mixing in some salty pretzels!
Finishing up the Patreon baking. For the fairy theme, I thought it’d be fun to do a spin on classic fairy bread, which is bread and butter with sprinkles, popular in Australia and New Zealand.
I did sugar cookies instead of bread, spread with a rose & vanilla buttercream and covered in sprinkles. The end result is quite sweet, but I gather fairies are very fond of nectar, so it does seem appropriate.
*****
The Spruce Eats had some fun notes on fairy bread:
“The exact origin of fairy bread is not known, but some say it may come from the poem “Fairy Bread” by Robert Louis Stevenson in his anthology A Child’s Garden of Verses published in 1885. The poem is as follows:
Come up here, O dusty feet!
Here is fairy bread to eat.
Here in my retiring room,
Children, you may dine
On the golden smell of broom
And the shade of pine;
And when you have eaten well,
Fairy stories hear and tell.
For a variation on fairy bread, try topping buttered bread with chocolate sprinkles instead. This treat is popular in the Netherlands, where it is called “hagelslag,” which quaintly translates to “hailstorm.””
(makes one giant dessert drink)
Ready to be indulgent? When my daughter and I were traveling in Sri Lanka, she decided that Sri Lanka was the land of ice cream, because we ended up eating it most places (especially when the dishes were too spicy for her). I wouldn’t serve her this drink, but for an adult libation poolside, this lush concoction will delight. (The pistachio margarita is still tasty, even if you skip the float entirely.)
3 oz. tequila, chilled
1.5 oz. pistachio orgeat (syrup)
1 oz. fresh lime juice
dash of Strongwater’s Virtue bitters (rose, alpine, and sage) (optional)
2 oz. lemon-lime soda
lime and sugar for rim
pistachio ice cream (or to kick it up a notch, use bastani: Persian pistachio-rose-saffron ice cream, see below)
chopped pistachios and/or rose petals for garnish
1. Rub fresh lime along rim of cocktail or margarita glass, and dip in sugar.
2. Combine tequila, pistachio orgeat, fresh lime juice, dash of bitters, and lemon-lime soda.
3. Top with scoops of pistachio or bastani ice cream, garnish with chopped pistachio. I recommend serving with a spoon and/or straw.
*****
Bastani: Persian Pistachio-Rose-Saffron Ice Cream
8 egg yolks
2 c. sugar
2 c. whole milk
1 c. chopped roasted pistachio nuts (salted is fine)
1 t. vanilla extract
1/2 t. rose extract (or 2 T rose water)
1/2 t. cardamom extract (optional)
generous pinch saffron threads
pinch salt
2 1/2 c. heavy cream
1. Beat egg yolks with sugar until smooth and foamy.
2. In a medium thick-bottomed pot on medium-low, heat the milk to boiling while stirring. Add vanilla extract, rose extract, cardamom extract, saffron threads, and salt.
3. Slowly and carefully, pour the foamy egg/sugar mixture into the fragrant milk, using a whisk vigorously while pouring (to avoid scrambling the eggs).
4. Turn heat to low and continue heating, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, until custard thickens. (It should thinly coat the spoon).
5. Pour custard mixture into a bowl, and refrigerate until well chilled (at least 4 hours, and overnight is not unreasonable.)
6. Churn in an ice cream maker (be sure bowl has frozen for at least 4 hours, overnight is likely better), or hand-churn (stick in freezer and stir every 30 minutes to break up the ice crystals, until it is well-mixed).
7. When ice cream is at soft-serve consistency, stir in chopped pistachios, then freeze until hard (about 2-4 hours).
I didn’t write up a recipe for this, because all I did was use a standard fairy cake recipe, add a little rose to the batter, and then divide the icing and flavor it with gooseberry + citrus, rose, and violet. But they’re charming, no? Would be fun for a tea party, or a kids’ birthday party.
Honestly, the rose ones and the violet ones are a little sweet for me, but I love me the tang, so gooseberry+citrus is my jam. These would also be good with jam.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/fairycakes_93711
For the Spring/Summer Patreon boxes — alas, it is too late to sign up for those now. New sign-ups will get the Autumn box, probably somewhere around November.
Boo! I seem to have accidentally deleted my draft recipe for this chocolate-cherry cake (made for the Patreon treat boxes). Alas! It came out well — key elements were a bit of coffee in the batter to bring out the chocolate-y-ness, and a bit of cayenne for a little excitement. Oh well…maybe I’ll try to recreate it at some point.
Cherries are ripe now, in the height of summer, but the overall look of the cake is very Christmas-y. A dilemma!
(Makes 24 mini-muffins or 12 regular muffins)
You can certainly make these in regular muffin pans, but I was making these for my Patreon treat boxes, which have a fairy theme this month, so I went for mini muffins instead — smaller, cuter, fairy-sized. It does take a little longer this way to fill and bake them, but the result is adorable.
Skip the drizzle for a slightly healthier version — but it does add a very nice zing! My kids don’t like cooked blueberries (weirdos!), so I just left the blueberries out of the first batch; they loved the plain orange muffins, no drizzle required. (Kavi thinks she doesn’t like orange, but she is wrong.)
Batter:
2 large eggs
2/3 c. granulated sugar
2/3 c. vegetable oil
1/2 c. sour cream (room temperature)
1/2 c. orange juice
1 t. vanilla extract
3 c. flour
2 t. baking powder
1 t. salt
zest of 1-2 oranges
1 c. blueberries
Drizzle:
1 c. confectioners’ sugar
2-3 T lime juice
1 t. vanilla
1-2 T milk, if needed to thin drizzle
1. Preheat oven to 350F; grease mini muffin pans.
2. In a large bowl, add eggs, sugar, oil, sour cream, orange juice, vanilla, and zest; whisk until well-combined.
3. In another bowl, sift flour, baking powder and salt together.
4. Add dry ingredients to wet and stir until just combined; gently fold in blueberries, and scoop into muffin pan.
5. Bake 20-25 minutes, until the top is lightly browned and a toothpick comes out clean.
6. Remove muffins from oven; remove from pan and cool on wire rack.
7. Make drizzle: whisk together confectioners’ sugar, lime juice, vanilla. If a thinner consistency is desired, whisk in 1-2 T milk.
8. When muffins are completely cooled, drizzle, let set, and enjoy.
(about one hour, plus cooling time; makes 16 bars)
These fruity little fusion bars could be breakfast or dessert! I used up the last of the berries from my spring garden, along with rhubarb, and gave it a slightly Sri Lankan inflection with lime juice in the filling and cashews for the topping.
If you don’t have fresh berries and rhubarb on hand, frozen will work fine — just cook them down long enough for the excess water to cook off, so you get a good thick filling consistency.
If you’re making this in Sri Lanka, you might use native embilla, a berry with a flavor that’s somewhat similar to grapes, or try Ceylon gooseberries, which have a flavor reminiscent of apricot.
Filling:
1 1/2 c. rhubarb, cut into small pieces
1 1/2 c. fresh berries — raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, etc.
1/2 c. sugar
2 T lime juice
1 1/2 T cornstarch
Bar:
1 1/4 c. flour
1/2 c. quick oats
1/2 c. jaggery or brown sugar
1/2 t. salt
1/2 t. baking powder
1/2 t. cinnamon
1/2 c. butter
1/2 c. chopped cashews
1. Preheat oven to 350F. Line an 8×8″ square pan with parchment paper. (You can butter and flour the pan instead, but it’ll be a little harder to take the bars out neatly.) Set aside.
2. In a small saucepan over medium heat, bring filling ingredients to a simmer. Cook, stirring occasionally, for about ten minutes, until the filling is thickened and rhubarb and berries are starting to break down. Remove from heat; set aside until fully cooled.
3. In a large mixing bowl, combing flour, oats, sugar, salt, baking powder, and cinnamon. Melt butter and drizzle in, stirring until the mixture forms loose crumbs.
4. Press half the mixture into the prepared baking pan. Spread cooled filling onto the crust, and crumble the reserved topping evenly onto the filling. Scatter chopped cashews over the top, pressing in lightly.
5. Bake for 25-30 minutes, until filling is bubbly around the edge and topping is lightly golden. Let cool completely in the pan. Transfer to a cutting board and cut carefully into 16 bars. Enjoy!
Kavi (age 15, on summer vacation) has realized that she can cook anytime she feels like it. Which is great, except that mostly she wants to bake cookies. Which is also great — her first batch of shortbread was perfect — but as you can see from the fact that this many cookies had disappeared within the first hour of her baking them, we may be in some trouble here. We all really really like shortbread.
Oh well. It’s not the worst way to go… and hey, the first strawberries from the garden are ripe enough to harvest. Isn’t that lovely?
I wonder if I can convince Kavi that she really wants to learn how to make fabulous salads…
Just one more Easter pic, the kids making the jello that went into the trifle o’doom. At least they had fun.