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Posts published in “Desserts”

Bananas Foster for Two

Bananas Foster for TwoBrowse recipes, menu ideas and more From Anna's Kitchen (www.fromannaskitchen.com)

No judgment here if you want to have your dessert for breakfast or brunch, or your breakfast or brunch for dessert. This is a fast, homemade, sweet dish for your Valentine to make tomorrow or this week. Serve this classic sauce (or is it a topping? or maybe it's a saucy topping...?) warm over waffles, crêpes, or ice cream.

Jump ahead to the recipe at the end if you wish, but first, I have to talk about crêpes. This was how we made and served bananas foster recently and I highly suggest trying it.

Quick cherry ice cream parfaits with dark chocolate and pecans

Quick cherry ice cream parfaits with dark chocolate and pecansBrowse recipes, menu ideas and more From Anna's Kitchen (www.fromannaskitchen.com)

This perfect dessert is a sweet way to end a casual Valentine's Day dinner. It's unfussy and great for a weeknight. Plus, who doesn't love ice cream?

For extra deliciousness, scout out your local area for a dairy or creamery where you can buy homemade ice cream. I've been fortunate to live near a few excellent places. In the Rochester, New York area, try Pittsford Farms Dairy & Bakery; in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania area, try Klein Farms Dairy & Creamery in Easton, PA. If you prefer, you can also use non-dairy ice cream and nondairy whipped topping.

Luxardo and Fabbri Amarena Wild Cherries in Syrup are the best for cocktails, but the juice that comes with them is liquid gold for an easy dessert recipe like this. You can use a few tablespoons of the syrup blended with vanilla ice cream, a little milk, and a little bit of ice to make a great milkshake, or with yogurt and ice for a smoothie, too. Substitute canned, dark cherries in syrup, if they are hard to find and you aren't able to order from Amazon or a specialty food store online. I wouldn't suggest using maraschino cherries for this, though; quite simply, they are not as good in this recipe.

Farmhouse Kitchen Sink Cookies

Farmhouse Kitchen Sink CookiesFarmhouse Kitchen Sink Cookies recipe From Anna's Kitchen (www.fromannaskitchen.com)

I was asked to bring a dessert for a recent dinner that Dave and I had with his parents. It was right before the cooler, fall weather started to kick in this past week (at last - my favorite time of year!) As much as I didn't want to turn on the oven on a warm day, these cookies were on my mind as an idea to make for quite some time now.

It was a perfect reason to use my new KitchenAid bowl, too, which is blue ceramic with a scalloped texture.

A few years ago, I had a clear glass KA bowl with a handle and cup measurements on the side of it that I loved. Unfortunately, it shattered into a zillion pieces when I was making cookies and it slipped out of my hands and broke on my mom's granite countertop.

They have a lot of fun patterns and textures now, which made it so hard to choose, but this one was unique and something I haven't seen in a lot of stores. And I just love the color...

The quest for a less-sweet lemon bar: The classic

The quest for a less-sweet lemon bar: The classicBrowse recipes, menu ideas and more From Anna's Kitchen (www.fromannaskitchen.com)

Every time I make one of my all-time favorite desserts, lemon bars, I'm always reminded of the insane amount of refined sugar that most recipes require. I tell myself the next time I'll find a better recipe that uses less sugar. But when that next time comes, the same thing happens.

I mean, 3 cups of sugar for a filling? Lemon bars are supposed to be sweet, but... yuck...

For that reason, I adapted Ina Garten's recipe to create a less-sweet version that cuts out half of the sugar in the filling and half in the crust.

A “new normal” farmer’s market visit & Strawberry-Rhubarb Crisp

A “new normal” farmer’s market visit & Strawberry-Rhubarb CrispGet summer-ready with this Strawberry Rhubarb Crisp From Anna's Kitchen (www.fromannaskitchen.com)

Farmers markets are a sign of springtime, one of my favorite things about the weather getting warmer and not to mention also a wonderful alternative to making a trip the grocery store—especially right now.

As I'm sure you've also experienced, grocery stores and super markets have been extra chaotic. Limited choices are available of produce, meats, dairy and other essentials unless you go to the store at specific times or on specific days. Masks, bandannas or some other kind of facial covering are required to enter the store—speaking for New Jersey, which mandated this at least three weeks ago, but now also Pennsylvania within the last week or two. And sometimes you need to wait your turn to enter the store because of restrictions put in place on the number of people allowed in at once, otherwise choose to come back at another time.

Visiting a farmers market, by contrast, is a nice break from making a now-normal grocery store visit, so this weekend Dave and I stopped at a farmers market we saw in a local strip mall parking lot. It was a very different experience when compared to visiting open air markets in seasons past .

Quick Chocolate Peanut Butter Chip Cookies

Quick Chocolate Peanut Butter Chip CookiesBrowse recipes, menu ideas and more From Anna's Kitchen (www.fromannaskitchen.com)

Have you ever had a craving for baked goods in the middle of the summer, or any other time when you don't want to turn on the oven?

Me too. The struggle is real, isn't it?

It always opens up this debate in my mind:

Option A. Give in and turn on the oven, making the whole house hot and uncomfortable in the process, even worse for Dave and me since we don't have central air.

Option B. Forget about it, and "save" the calories.

Option C. Forget the calories, and go get ice cream.

Recently, the idea came to my mind to use my toaster oven to make a quick batch of cookies. I wouldn't call this a brilliant idea, since I should've thought of it much sooner: my toaster oven is, in fact, an oven. A convection oven, at that. One with a little fan in it to simulate faster cooking.

Then again, I suppose my girlish figure is glad that I didn't think of this sooner. A successful batch of chocolate peanut butter cookies later, I have now opened up Pandora's box of small-batch dessert-making in the toaster oven that I probably should have just left alone.

Since this was a small batch and I left the butter out overnight before cooking, I didn't bother with the mixer. It was super easy to make these cookies by hand in about 10 minutes or less. At the end of it, I had a plate of warm, fresh cookies, and only a few tools to clean up. Super win.