Bunny cake for Easter.
Happy Easter to all. Happy Passover as well. And regardless of faith, we hope you are enjoying a day with family and friends. There is no greater gift than time with the people you love.
It is why we do things like making a Bunny Cake for Easter. Carolyn did great job and the boys loved it. Nothing better.
With kids in the house these do not last very long.
There is one thing we know for sure at Putney Farm, you can never have enough chocolate chip cookies, or enough good chocolate chip cookie recipes. And you do need more than one chocolate chip cookie recipe. There are so many variables to consider: crunchy, chewy, cakey, buttery, salty, chunks, chips, dark, milk, white, nuts, thick and thin. All these variables can be part of a truly spectacular cookie, but not all go together. It takes time, skill and testing (yum) to get the best cookies. 
So with the goal of having a full set of different, but awesome, chocolate chip cookie recipes we are starting a series of tests. We are happy to share the results. And please hare your own recipes and tips, we are happy to try them.
So here is cookie recipe #1, the Big Chocolate Chip Cookie. Continue reading
This is what breakfast SHOULD look like!
A metaphor for a food blogger indulging all day? Maybe.
A way to get some points with the kids? Possibly.
But a good idea? Yes. HELL YES!
I say we should have ice cream for breakfast any time. Homemade ice cream, at that. OK, at least on weekends.
Now before you go all “healthy”, take a step back and think about breakfast. Dairy? We eat loads of dairy with cereal and in coffee. Sugar? Look at the ingredients of kids cereal or flavored yogurt. Fat? Plenty of fat with bacon or eggs (but no need to give those up). We do eat fruit at breakfast, but that goes in ice cream, too, right? Heck, coffee and ice cream are natural allies. So why not start the day right? Why not feel good? Why not have a breakfast you really enjoy? Continue reading
It is Mardi Gras and every year we make a basic jambalaya and king cake. Truth be told, Carolyn uses a King Arthur Flour kit for the king cake, it is one of the few things she does not make from scratch. But the cake is sooooo good and it looks great- the kids and I love it. So does everyone else. A few years age we had a houseguest (and good friend) who liked it so much he ate half the cake over a day. He is still sheepish about that, but we understood entirely. Sweet, moist cake with almond paste is hard to pass up!
While we grow a lot of our own citrus at Putney Farm, we do not get warm enough in the Bay Area to grow one of our favorites, Blood Oranges. At our farmers market, we do get Moro blood oranges from the lower central valley, usually from about 100-150 miles away. Local enough. 
And certainly good enough. Blood oranges are a fantastic ingredient and worth the time to seek out. The color can be a beautiful, intense, reddish purple that just pops visually. It screams FLAVOR, and it does not disappoint. The juice has distinct raspberry overtones along with traditional orange flavors and sometimes features a pleasant tartness. While I love pure, sweet orange flavor, the added complexity (and beauty) of the blood orange really shines in cocktails and sorbet. Blood orange sorbet may be one of the best “bang for your buck” desserts you can make at home- and it is easy to make. Continue reading
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