My sister is always telling me she can’t do the Tuesdays with Dorie recipes at home. Too many pans, too many steps, weird ingredients.

Jennifer, this one is for you: apple cheddar scones.

You probably have most of the ingredients right now. And if you don’t, this is a great recipe for substitutions. Not feeling the apples? Replace the 1/2 cup of apple juice with water and the 1/2 cup of dried apples with something else (i.e. a 1/2 cup of smoked bacon, country ham, sausage, dried blueberries, dried cranberries). Or trade the cheese for toasted walnuts or pecans.

Seriously, you don’t even need a rolling pin. Stir the ingredients together, sprinkle a little flour on the counter, and pat the dough into a circle or rectangle, 1/2-inch thick. Then cut it into 12 slices. If you’ve patted it into a circle, cut it pizza-style. If you’ve done a rectangle, cut it into 12 smaller rectangles or grab a glass and cut it biscuit-style. Then place the slices on a baking sheet, and bake them for about 15 minutes.

If you don’t want 12 scones, divide the recipe in half.

The apple cheddar scones are great plain or with butter. But if you decide to go with fruit and nuts instead, try making a glaze with powdered sugar, milk (or cream), and a little vanilla. And invite me over.

For the full recipe, visit Karina of The Floured Apron.

I love cobbler. When I was a kid, summer started when my Mommaw pulled the season’s first huge, bubbling, lattice-topped baking dish of peach cobbler out of the oven. She would let me eat it as hot as I could stand it, with a huge scoop (or two) of Breyers Natural Vanilla. And when I spent the night at her house, instead of oatmeal or scrambled eggs or Shredded Wheat, she’d let me eat peach cobbler for breakfast, saying, “It’s got all the food groups: fruit, flour, and fat.”

So, I bent the rules a little on this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe, mixed berry cobbler, chosen by Beth of Our Sweet Life. I used Dorie’s filling (five cups of frozen berries, plus sugar, lemon zest, and cornstarch), but instead of her biscuit topping, I substituted my grandmother’s pie crust on the top and bottom. It gave me an excuse to try a lattice top for the first time. And it will make an excellent breakfast.

I’ve lost my techno mojo.

Saturday morning, I baked this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe, a cream puff ring chosen by Caroline of A Consuming Passion. Monday night, I plugged in my digital camera, and the photos were gone. The next day, I baked another cream puff ring, took more photos, wrote another post, and our cable Internet connection went out. The cable came back; the post didn’t. Yesterday, I wrote another post. Added the photos. It didn’t save.

So, once more with feeling, let’s talk cream puffs.

Before you ignore the recipe link, let me warn you that you’ll be missing out on something amazing. You probably have everything you need for the dough right now: milk, butter, sugar, salt, flour, and eggs. You’re going to boil the liquid, add the flour, and stir the mixture until it makes a smooth dough that smells like really buttery grits. Place the dough in the bowl of your mixer, and paddle out the steam before you add the eggs.

To form the cream puffs, either pipe or spoon the dough into portions the size of a golf ball onto a prepared baking sheet. They’ll need to be about two inches apart. If your kitchen is really warm and things are looking messy, pop the entire baking sheet into the freezer for up to 30 minutes.

Once your cream puffs have baked and cooled, slice them in half and fill them with whatever you’d like: pastry cream, flavored whip cream, fruit, nuts, Nutella, chocolate, tofurkey. Then put the tops of the cream puffs back on, and dust them with confectioner’s sugar.

The hollow pastries can hold a surprising amount of filling, but once you add it, the meter is ticking. You’ve got approximately eight hours before they go soggy. Prepare to share!

P.S. I hope this post actually makes it to you this time. One, two, three … PUBLISH!

It’s too hot. For complete sentences. Sleeves. Maybe breathing.

Perfect weather for a fruit tart.

Unlike the wholesome, humble, “American-as” pie, the tart isn’t afraid to show off her goods. You wouldn’t catch a tart dead in a fussy lattice cover-up or quaint maple-leaf border. Tarts go topless. They’re bold. Confident. Hard-wired for a good time.

A pie will pay your bail. A tart will sit with you in jail and say, “Wasn’t THAT fun?”

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie challenge is another one of Dorie Greenspan’s French favorites, La Palette’s Strawberry Tart.

The recipe is easy. Start with Dorie’s Sweet Tart Dough. While the crust is in the oven, grab a quart of strawberries and slice them into halves or quarters. Toss them with sugar, and add any extra flavorings you’d like. (Dorie suggests a splash of liqueur and a turn of freshly ground black pepper.)

Once the crust has cooled, spread it with a generous layer of strawberry jam, and top each slice with a tumbling spoonful of berries and a dollop of whipped cream or creme fraiche. Don’t worry about the berries falling off the crust. It’s not messy; it’s carefree.

As other fruits come in season, you can adapt this tart to other crust-filling-fruit combinations. Blueberries and pastry cream. Peaches and mascarpone. Raspberries and Nutella. Sautéed apple slices and caramel. Pears and ricotta. Feel free to mix-and-match.

If it’s true that we are what we eat, then by the time you finish a slice of Dorie’s strawberry tart, you’ll feel a little more relaxed. A little juicier. Two slices, and you’ll feel ripe and unruly. It’s mid-June. If you’re still wearing pantyhose, the tart says to stop.

We took these French Chocolate Brownies to a “Lost” season finale party Thursday night, and it’s a good thing the room was dark, so no one noticed exactly how many I wolfed down.

I needed something to supplement our dinner, which was a menu of Things That Are Difficult If Not Impossible For Me To Eat In Public. We’re talking corn-on-the-cob, which makes me obsess about my teeth. I think there’s something stuck between them. Can he see it? Maybe if I drink some water. Nope. Where’s a mirror? Maybe I can just keep my mouth shut all night. Is that a kernel?

And there were vegetables that had to be sliced with a knife.

Remember that scene in “Pretty Woman” where Julia Roberts tries to shuck an oyster and winds up hurling it across the restaurant? That’s me. That’s why I like to order things that stay put, like taters.

Anyway, I made a meal of these brownies. The crackly top adds a little texture to an otherwise completely moist, melt-in-your-mouth, fudgy brownie. Perfect for picnics, parties, and corn malfunctions.

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So, way back when Tuesdays with Dorie made Brioche Raisin Snails, I used the other half of the dough to make this week’s recipe: Pecan Honey Sticky Buns.

If you don’t make another thing you ever see on this site, make these.

Baptized in honey.

Christened with pecans.

Worthy a two-syllable damn.

Even after you eat one of these perfectly golden, buttery sticky buns, you’ll find yourself snacking on the gooey orphaned pecans at the bottom of the dish every time you walk by. Because willpower is so overrated.

And who needs to wear shorts?

Nom. Nom. Nom.

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Unless you’re in traction or trapped under something heavy, life’s too short to read Remembrance of Things Past. It’s more than 3,000 pages–roughly the length of War and Peace, Gone With the Wind, and Bill Clinton’s My Life combined.

What do you need to know about Marcel Proust’s masterpiece? It’s all about involuntary memory. The narrator tastes a madeleine, remembers ones his aunt gave him as a child, and starts remembering his childhood in detail. From there, he decides to write about his entire life. Proust kept adding details until he died. I’m surprised his editors didn’t kill him.

Today’s Tuesdays with Dorie assignment is the traditional madeleine. I’d always assumed madeleines were cookies, but they’re actually buttery, lemony little tea cakes. If you piped a little marshmallow fluff inside, they would taste like very high-end Twinkies. The shell shape comes from the madeleine pan.

How did they fare at our house? Jeff and I thought they were good, but Henry the French Bulldog inhaled them. I used them to sneak him his allergy meds. Do you remember the scene in Velvet Goldmine where the rock star snorts cocaine off a hooker’s back? That was Henry with the madeleines. Then he passed out on the couch and started nursing in his sleep. Dreaming of life as a puppy.

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My nephew, Jack, is rocking in my dad’s recliner when Henry the Wonderdog launches over the armrest and licks the tip of Jack’s nose.

“HENRY TRIED TO BITE ME!”

We tell him nooooooo, Henry was just trying to kiss him.

“HENRY KISSED ME!”

I tell him he should feel special, because Henry doesn’t go around kissing everyone. This doesn’t help.

Finally, Jack asks for the only thing that will take away the pain.

“Are we having pie?”

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe, Peanut Butter Torte, is pie taken to the extreme–big flavors in ridiculous quantities–and it’s illegal in states that frown on The Devil’s Threesome: Oreos, peanut butter, and cream cheese. There’s also butter. Ganache. Chopped peanuts. If I didn’t know it was a Dorie recipe, I’d swear Emeril. This is a recipe that goes over the top, then takes a hot air balloon and a rocket.

So, how is it?

Straight out of the fridge, it softens fast, gets hard to slice, and the peanut butter-cream cheese filling has an odd twang to it that makes two bites plenty. I divided it into Rubbermaids, shoved it in the freezer, and forgot about it for a few days.

Put it in the freezer. Seriously. The texture and flavor are much, much better. The filling mellows and becomes more like ice cream. Frozen, it’s Jack-worthy.

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When I was 17, a friend set me up on a blind date with her cousin. He picked me up in a monstrous white truck with extra stereo speakers installed where padding should have been. The windows rattled. Deafening. He drove me to his parents’ house, had his mother make him a grilled cheese and tater tots (nothing for me), and ranted about how his ex-girlfriend had cheated on him and women couldn’t be trusted.

What does all this have to do with Dorie’s Fluted Polenta and Ricotta Cake?

It’s like a blind date. You want to like it.

What’s not to like about polenta, ricotta, sugar, honey, butter, and figs? Separately, delicious. In this particular combination, grainy and cloying.

Still, I wasn’t ready to give up on it. I tried adding Dorie’s suggested whipped cream sweetened with honey.

Didn’t help.

Sometimes bad cakes, like bad blind dates, require dumping. But one woman’s frog is another’s prince, so I give you the Fluted Polenta and Ricotta Cake recipe.

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My birthday was last Sunday, and my sister’s was on Friday, which means last weekend was a birthday extravaganza, filled with grilled steaks and twice-baked potatoes, brownie pie, baked brie, fruit salad spiked with fried goat cheese, Belgian waffles, a picnic in the park, and a wedge of chocolate cake so uncompromising I know it’s still sitting, like the Lincoln Memorial, in one of my arteries.

Such gluttony, mere days after “The Biggest Loser” finale! Beatings, beatings, beatings.

This morning, I was back to the breakfast of the penitent: high-fiber cereal, 1% milk, and shame. But then I remembered this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie challenge, Bill’s Big Carrot Cake. And out came the butter, the sugar, and the cream cheese.

Oh, well. Everything in moderation. That’s why I turned Bill’s Big Carrot Cake into cupcakes. Portion-control and DENIAL.

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