Frittelle Di Semolino Dolce - Sweet Fried Semolina Snack

July 01, 2011 by Monica in Appletizers & Snacks, Desserts, Family, Family Cookbook, Sweets

Today, I started to clean my home office and came across a box and inside I stumbled unto my old recipe notebook that I started when I was twelve years old during one of my visits to my paternal grandparent’s home. When we moved to the states, my sister and I would travel during the summer months to visit them in Venezuela. And during one of those visits, I decided that I would start writing my Nonna’s recipes, so I could bring them back and make them.

As I opened the old falling apart yellow notebook, memories rushed back at me

HCB: Golden Lemon Almond Cake

May 02, 2011 by Monica in Baking, Baking Club, Cake, Desserts, HCB, Sweets

See the pretty cake?

You can send many thanks to my main chica Jenn at Knitty Baker. Go on, visit her and leave a message and tell her how great she is because that beautiful picture up above, I owe it to her.

I’ll wait.

The backstory… every time we would have a HBC cake in the line up that resembled a dense cake that called to use a bunt pan; I would suddenly be hit with pan envy. Every week as I visited all of the HBC blogs, I would covet everyone’s fancy baking pans while whining like a 3-year old lamenting that I needed to get with the program and buy a fancy pan.

My plain old bunt cake pan was not cutting it anymore among all the fancy bakers.

Jenn was listening. I mean what are “chicas” for right?

Golden Carrot Cake with White Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting

May 01, 2011 by Monica in Baking, Decorating, Desserts, Family Cookbook, Sweets

I really don’t know if this will count towards my Heavenly Cake bake-a-long. Mainly because I adapted so much of this recipe at the end, I feel like I actually ended up doing something totally different than the original.

Talk about inspiration.

The background of this cake is simple. One of my best friends birthday was coming up. Her boyfriend, who is an avid cook like me, sent me an email and asked me if I be willing to bake her the birthday cake. At the same time this was happening I was already thinking of offering my baking services to the cause. I love when the universe works all of these tweaks and everyone ends up getting what they what.

After a bit of investigating efforts of the boyfriend, we narrow it down to her favorite cake being carrot cake.

Which was perfect for me, since I had not baked the carrot cake when it was in rotation, so again win-win.