When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade.

But when life hands you a 2-day-old baguette, a freshly opened bottle of Maker’s Mark and five delicious snowbound days, you make Bourbon Bread Pudding. With a warm, buttery bourbon sauce. And bourbon-soaked raisins.

It’s the sort of dessert you want to curl up around and savor while you watch the snow fall. Or read a book. Or watch “The Matrix” trilogy from start to finish in its entirety. Read More…

Here in Nashville, there’s a certain low-frequency buzz. And if you’re quiet and listen very hard, you’ll hear the sounds that make up that buzz – the electronic bleeps of grocery cash registers ringing up hot chocolate and popcorn, the rumble of salt trucks and the fervently whispered prayers of thousands of kids (and their teachers) – because, OMG, SNOW IS IN THE FORECAST.

Four inches. This Friday.

To many of you, that’s nothing. A dusting. A joke. But here? Any accumulation is cause for celebration. And an excellent excuse for making a chocolate chip cookie bigger than your head. Something fun to bake, break and nibble while you watch the big flakes fall.

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Back in the days of my Bachelor Girl apartment, I read one of those “step outside your box!” articles and decided to give “sleep naked!” a try. My bedroom was three floors over the parking lot, so there was no reason to break out my giant martini glass and work up a Burlesque routine. Nope. I just shimmied out of my clothes, hopped into bed and waited to greet the morning.

Only the morning greeted me first.

I woke up to a row of construction workers standing on the roof of the building across from mine, looking down through my blinds at my naked-naked self.

However, I still believe that trying new things is always a win-win situation. If all goes well, you’ve added something new to your repertoire. And if something goes awry, you’ve got a great story. Either way, you become an even more fascinating person. So, here’s a new experience for you: making panna cotta. Read More…

Do you remember in “Steel Magnolias” when Shelby (Julia Roberts) says, “I would rather have 30 minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special”?

That’s how I feel about dessert.

After spending this week trying healthier options, I can honestly say I’d rather have a spoonful of Banana Pudding than a metric ton of Quinoa Fruit Pudding.

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So, you’ve managed to eat this and not that, your willpower is at its zenith, and you’re starting to think maybe Jillian Michaels should be calling you for tips. THAT’S when it strikes. A chocolate craving so intense you start feeling around in the cabinets for loose chocolate chips. You debate the merits of just making a pan of brownies and snorting them with a straw.

OK, deep cleansing breaths. You are not comic-strip Cathy. (ACK!!) At least, that’s what I told myself last night when I was ready to trade my car for a peanut butter cup. Seriously.

I was flipping through my cookbooks, looking for SOMETHING that might tame the beast without leaving me with an entire batch of cookies, candy or cake lying around. And that’s when I stumbled on this Chocolate Orange Fondue. Read More…

Growing up, I never really understood fruitcake jokes, because Mom’s Chocolate Fruitcake was something you waited for all year. A rich, fudgy bundt cake baked with Jack Daniel’s in the batter and studded with chocolate chips, chopped pecans, raisins, maraschino cherries and candied pineapple pieces.

Oh, you don’t even know.

It’s unconventional and delicious and slightly trashy, and I wish I had a great, epic story about the making of this fruitcake. Something like Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” with Mom using a dilapidated baby carriage to gather pecans and buying bootleg whiskey down by the river. But actually, she starts with a cake mix (devil’s food with pudding), moistens it with Jack Daniel’s and sour cream (instead of oil and water) and a few eggs, and stirs in all the good stuff. Pair a dark, chocolaty slice with an embarrassingly mountainous dollop of freshly whipped cream, and you’ll understand why I have no idea whether it really can last two weeks in the fridge.

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A few months ago, I promised a marshmallow tutorial –WITH PHOTOS! – to Laura and Karen, to prove that, YES!, they can make marshmallows at home. Big, soft, happy, puffy marshmallows that taste much better than any you’ll find at the grocery. Marshmallows that actually MELT in hot chocolate instead of bobbing around looking stupid.

Are you ready for the challenge?

Let’s go! Read More…

A PR rep sold me on trying this recipe by saying it was the perfect dessert to make “when you might not be the best cook in the kitchen.”

Fair enough.

Not everyone wants to invest time in pie crust and water baths when the holidays are in full swing, but we all want to serve a dessert that tastes like we did. “No-bake” recipes typically aren’t sophisticated – there’s no pesky nuance to distract you – but  who’s going to complain about a bright pumpkin filling with cream cheese, butter, vanilla, nutmeg and powdered sugar? It’s got all the major food groups. And, “no-bake” means no fuss. No baking time beyond the seven minutes the crust spends in the oven. No water bath. No pastry to roll and shape. Add a healthy spoonful or two of whipped cream, and you’ve got a cold, creamy dessert that won’t cost you much time or money. And no one else has to know.

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When I made these bars during the Barefoot Bloggers’ “Week of the Contessa,” I wasn’t sold on them. Then I realized that, like the mogwai in “Gremlins,” Ina Garten’s crank-it-to-11 Peanut Butter and Jelly Bars have rules:

1. Never eat them straight from the oven. They smell like peanut butter cookies, but hot jelly is a bad experience. The bars are much, much better cold. Straight from the fridge, even.

2. Pick a jelly with some bite, like raspberry, grape or blackberry. The peanut butter portion of these bars is stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth rich, so you want something that can stand up to that. Hint: not strawberry.

3. Always have a glass of milk nearby. Preferably large and ice cold. Maybe two.

These bars completely lack in subtlety. They couldn’t find it with Google Maps, GPS and a compass. But what they deliver is a full-tilt, no-hold-barred, peanut butter and jelly experience. If that’s your kind of thing, you’ve met your match.

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A few months ago, I was reading Garden & Gun’s list of “100 Southern Foods You Must Absolutely, Positively Try Before You Die,” and it mentioned the pecan pie at Brigtsen’s Restaurant in New Orleans. Their pie had two ingredients I’d never tried before: ground roasted pecans and dark corn syrup. Inspiring. So, I challenged myself not to settle for the same-old pecan pie. To make Something Better.

After a little trial and error, I came up with this Southern Comfort® Pecan Pie. Chopped pecans mingling with ground pecans that were toasted in butter and cinnamon. A rich, caramel-like mixture of light and dark corn syrups. And a few tablespoons of Southern Comfort® to balance the sweetness and move the pie from “as pure as a prayer” into more interesting territory. It’s a pie with so many layers of flavor and texture, you might forget the whipped cream. Thank you, Frank Brigtsen.

Now, if I can come up with a way to inject Jack Daniel’s directly into our Libby’s® pumpkin pie, this will be a Thanksgiving to remember.

If we can.

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