A donut "tiramisu" trifle

What do you do when you find yourself with over 50 donuts in the house?

This past week, I've been working on a collab with a donut shop & bakery (can't wait to share more... soon!) and was left with about 54 donuts in the house after the shooting was done. There was no way the two of us could eat all that many donuts, even after sharing plenty with friends. By day 4, I was left with some rather dry and stale donuts.... which are perfect for a donut "tiramisu"! Tiramisu is in quotes here because it's not a real tiramisu, with eggs. I used whipping cream instead, so it sort of makes this one a tiramisu-flavoured trifle. 😅

"D" is for post-shoot donut disaster

Most common suggestions for stale donuts involve donut french toast or donut bread pudding, but donut tiramisu, I feel, is the optimal way to go because what better flavour to pair donuts with than (boozy) coffee! *pats self on back* We also made a kimchi grilled cheese sandwich with one of the leftover croissant-donuts that was ... really good, but probably not the healthiest of workday lunches one could imagine. 

Unfort, I have no picture of the final tiramisu for you (there's one uber-grainy photo, on instagram stories--not worth enshrining here!), since I made it super late into the evening in some to-go containers and immediately distributed it around LA to friends who replied to my last-minute text of "who wants to eat my donut experiment?" But after one friend labelled it a "Best of Pandemic" dessert (it's a bop!), I felt like I should at least share the recipe with you here!

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Lemon Cream Pie

Back in November, two of my best friends got married (to each other!) in Hawai'i. It was this magical week of jumping off and diving under waterfalls, of eating-way-too-much poke and way-too-little shaved ice, of flower crowns, of sunsets, of driving all over Maui, of writing ukulele love songs after sundown, and of, most importantly, love and friendship. The day after the wedding, my friends and I drove up the coast to a little pie shop right off the highway, Leoda's, and bought a huge box of pies, and in true Hawai'i fashion, took them to the beach to eat. Pie on the beach! at sunset! As I said, magical.

The experience left me with, amongst all the warm and fuzzy feelings about friendships, this immense craving for mini pies. So around about December, I found this recipe for lemon cream pie and whipped up (ha!) mini versions. It makes about three mini pies, and, because I love whipped cream, I doubled the whipped cream portion of the recipe and threw some vanilla bean in. It ended up the perfect little, hand-held ray of nostalgic sunshine cutting through an uncharacteristically dark winter.

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Saffron Strawberry Peach & Vanilla Panna Cotta

I had a friend over recently for dinner who travels every year to Spain, so being the glutton for punishment that I am, I decided to attempt my hand at a Spanish-inspired menu: seafood paella (with chicken chorizo, shrimp, salmon, and tobiko), pan-blackened shishito peppers with smoked salt and shaved Iberico cheese (shishito because I couldn't find padron peppers at the market), and a vanilla panna cotta with saffron-infused strawberry peach sauce. Okay, so to be fair, it wasn't a traditionally Spanish meal, but the inspirations were fun to play around with! I particularly like this saffron-infused strawberry sauce. Strawberries on their own in a sauce tend to be a bit cloying and one-dimensional to me, so the saffron lends an interesting mellow exoticism. It's like that ingredient that you can't really pick out but the dessert would be otherwise empty without. I love those sorts of subtle hints. ;)

Panna cotta is one of those desserts that I just plain refuse to order at restaurants, because they're so easy and delicious to make at home! I like mine with a half-milk/half-cream mix, so that the texture is lighter and doesn't feel reminiscent of sunscreen the way that full-cream panna cottas do. But really, the name makes them sound fancier than they are! It's just milk jello, really!

Life has been cray cray busy lately, so it's nice to have this blog to escape to every once in a while without the pressures of being a regular blogger. Thank you all to those of you who still have me in your blog, email, instagram feeds. I think of you all often, and wonder what magic you're cooking up in your kitchens!


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Spiced Pepita Brittle and Pumpkin Panna Cotta

Happy belated Thanksgiving, everyone! This year, I was fortunate enough to have not only one but two Thanksgivings, so I'm still stuffed to the brim. I hope everyone's Thanksgivings were equally as delicious!

I'm so pleased to announce that I will be doing recurring recipe features over the next few months on the Anthology Magazine Blog! I got to work with Anthology last year for their gift guide, and I'm excited to be a part of that world again. It's a wonderful lifestyle and design mag, if you haven't seen it yet. This month's recipe is a spiced pepita brittle and pumpkin panna cotta--a balance of sweet and savory and light and creamy for the holidays. Click on over to the Anthology blog for the recipe!

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Passionfruit Tapioca and Lemon Cream Tarts

Happy Valentine's Day! Or otherwise known as, Happy stuff-your-face-with-desserts day! Now, I realize that I'm a little bit late to the Valentine's Day party, but this being a journal and all, I wanted to share what the dessert I'm actually having for Valentine's Day rather than making something weeks ahead of time that I wouldn't actually make again. ... and, I'm just running behind, so please forgive me! :)

It seems that, whenever I think about Valentine's Day desserts, I always come back to passionfruit. It's not your typically romantic fruit, like red strawberries dipped in chocolate--and frankly, it looks like dinosaur eggs, with its bumpy skin and bizarre, seedy insides. But, I think it's the name that gets to me, with passion, and I like that it's a little bit tart and sweet, like love.

This year for Valentine's Day, I decided to mix passionfruit with another thing that my bf and I are obsessed with: tapioca. I've always joked that you can't date me unless you like tapioca (with tea, that is), and one of the first things that happened years ago in our relationship was that Richard learned to like tapioca milk tea, just to hang with me. That's the sign of a keeper! Then, a few days ago, he showed up with a bag of lemons from his backyard (<3), which I also wanted to incorporate into the dessert.

Hence, passionfruit tapioca and lemon cream tarts! with passionfruit curd filling, which is super luscious and studded with small rounds of soft tapioca pearls, and mascarpone whipped cream, which is flavored with fresh-squeezed lemon juice and zest for an overall brightness to the dessert. It's one of those desserts that make you feel like you're eating pure rays sunshine, even if the weather outside and stormy and cold (as it finally is here in the Bay, after a winter of no rain!).

Even though it's a bit late, here's wishing you all a Valentine's Day filled with sugar and candy and delicious desserts (forget love and romance, all we need is sugar anyways)!


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Lemon Fritter-sticks and Nutmeg Pudding

It takes me a lot of time and hard work to maintain my 'geek' street cred.  Take, for instance, what I spent my summer doing (when not traveling): watching the entire rebooted series of Doctor Who, beginning to end.  I felt that it was my duty and obligation as a self-proclaimed, card-carrying geek to fill myself in on the cultural phenomenon that is the Doctor.  (that, and Star Trek: Deep Space 9 hadn't been released on Netflix on-demand yet.)  And I have to say, Doctor Who. is. awesome.

The one sad part about the show is that it doesn't seem to be quite as ubiquitous here as in the UK, so it's difficult to find people who "get" the Doctor Who references that I drop.  Laughing silently with yourself is just not the same.  So imagine my surprise and delight when my Doctor knowledge actually came in handy one day in class, of all places!  [warning: geeky story starts here]  One guy in class was joking around about true 'universal' statements in language, having come up with the seeming universal "All language must occur in time." (Backstory: universal statements about languages are really hard to prove and are constantly being debunked.  For instance, think all languages have numbers?  Some linguists have claimed that certain languages don't have numbers like we do, only concepts like "one, a few, many.")  From across the room, a girl in the class suddenly shouts, "Not the Doctor's language!  If he occupies the same point in time twice, then his language is occurring out of time!"  Now, it will immediately occur to all of you detail-oriented Doctor fans that this statement is blatantly untrue, because the Doctor cannot cross his own timeline, a fact which I quickly pointed out to the class.  Finally, in a coup de grâce, my friend in class leaned over and made a time-traveling and theoretical phonology joke that is just far too geeky to print on this blog.  #win.

So it seems that I am slowly discovering a hidden world of Doctor fans around me.  In reporting this incident on my facebook wall, I proceeded to learn that one of my advisors is an even bigger (and detail-oriented) Doctor fan that I am.  ... Here's a mystery of the universe for you: why is it that your advisors are always better than you at everything??? (And please don't say it's because they're doctors....!)

[click photo for larger image]

In my Doctor Who-craze, I really wanted to be a character out of the show for Halloween.  If I had the means and time, my first choice would be a Weeping Angel, because they are some of the awesomest and scariest villains on the show.  But, in lieu of a costume since I won't have much time this year, I thought I would dress my dessert up as something Doctor Who -inspired: fritter-sticks and pudding, a reference to the favorite (and disgusting) fishsticks and pudding combination of the latest Doctor incarnate.  This non-savory version is much, much more appetizing than fish and sweet pudding--I assure you--, consisting of lemon yogurt fritters and vanilla nutmeg baked custard: subtle spices of nutmeg and vanilla in the smooth cream, and a sweet tang of lemon in the deep-fried dough.  Eat it as the Doctor does: dipping the fresh, sugar-coated fritters into the pudding!

Even if you aren't a Doctor Who fan, or you have now decided to stop reading this blog because I have betrayed how much of a geek I am, at least try this recipe before you go.  No geek street cred required!


P.S. Favorite Doctor moments?  Share below!  Here's mine.
P.P.S. Also, my how lucky that I happen to have a Tardis-blue table on hand! :)


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Olallieberry Semifreddo

On July fourth weekend, some of my friends and I piled into our cars and sat through stop-and-go traffic on a windy and woodsy, two-lane road over the Santa Cruz Mountains and out to the coast.  It was traffic on this stretch of highway as I've never seen it before--bumper to bumper-- everyone in a rush to the ocean and the beach.  But we had slightly different plans.  We were in a rush, too, but we were in a rush to get to the coastal olallieberry fields, which sit on the cliffs that run right alongside the Pacific Ocean.  Tis the season of the olallieberry harvest!

Long time readers of this blog will already know that I am a self-proclaimed (and proud) olallieberry addict.  (Olallieberries are a cross between raspberries and blackberries several generations down.)  I hoard olallieberries.  Come season, I stuff pounds upon pounds of fresh olallieberries into the freezer (much to the dismay of my former roommate--but no, that is not the reason she's now a former roommate), just so that I can have olallieberries all year 'round, whenever I very well please.  Trust me, if you ever get your hands on these sweet, not-so-seedy berries, you should hoard some in your freezer, too.

[click on photo for larger image]

So here I am now, with a fresh new batch of frozen olallieberries, and it's time to use up and clean out what's left of last year's stash in the form of an olallieberry semifreddo.  This semifreddo is so creamy and rich, so packed with crushed olallieberries that it turns wonderfully bright pink, and oh so cold--perfect for the warm summer afternoons when the beach is just a little too far away.  It's also quick to whip up (hehe--literally!), since no ice cream machine churning is necessary--just make and freeze and wait.  The waiting is the hardest part.  I think I ate a good portion of the cream before it even made it into the freezer.

I have so many more plans for my little olallieberries, sleeping in the freezer.  Like the almond cakes that are baking in the oven right now, with olallieberries nestled inside.  But if you can't find olallieberries, blackberries could do just as nicely.  Or loganberries (a predecessor to olallies), or marionberries (I hear those are fantastic).  Heck, any berries, really.  Bonus points if you pick them yourself!

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Berries'n'cream Chocolate Chip Trifle

Oh, berries, berries....

I know that trifles are traditionally a Christmastime dessert, but since berry trifles are so deliciously good (I mean, the combination of berries and cream... right? right?), I associate the dessert much more with the summertime.  Also, the red and blue vibrant colors against the white--of course I couldn't resist a little berries'n'cream chocolate chip trifle to celebrate July 4th.

There's something about growing up in the U.S. that really imprints a love of Americana on you.  I'm sure everyone's associations of Americana must be subtly different, but at the core, I like to hope that there are certain details and little affinities that we all share in our definitions of Americana.  Like chocolate chip cookies (and road trips).  For some reason, these cookies just seem terribly American to me, so here they are, in this trifle (instead of sponge cake, which is arguably not in my definition of Americana).  So happy, Happy Birthday, oh amber-waved and purple-mountained country, you.

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Blueberry Rhubarb Deep Dish Pie

Someone please tell me what day and hour it is because I honestly don't know.  Last week was sort of this whirlwind of get-on-a-plane, get-off-a-plane, give-a-talk, get-back-on-a-plane, get-back-off-a-plane, meet-new-people, get-back-on-a-plane... and rinse and repeat and so on and so forth.  Hence, I have no idea what day it actually is right now!  One moment I was in Scotland, then the next in Manchester (UK), and then in Atlanta (Georgia), and then back in California, and my head is still spinning from it all, and I can't really stomach the thought of another long plane ride, like, ever again.  Or at the very least, for a few months, please I just want to stay in one place and time zone, thankyouverymuch.

Not to say that the trip wasn't incredibly fun.  I love getting away from my daily life every now and then, and even though this was a work-related trip, it still felt like a much-needed vacation.  Shaking up your 'normal' routine is so helpful every now and then, and seeing new places and meeting new people is refreshing after endless daysweeksmonths of the office-home-office routine.

The trip wasn't all work-related though.  I managed to make it to BlogHer Food in Atlanta on my way back from Europe to the West Coast (you know, cause it's, like, totally on the way), and it was so wonderful to meet so many of you in person and to see those of you I've met before again!  The best part of these conferences is being able to put faces to names/avatars, and I always enjoy that.  It just makes the whole blogging community much more human and tangible.  At BlogHer Food, Tami, Aran, and I gave a panel on "Finding your visual voice," during which I myself learned so much from listening to Tami and Aran speak--I just wish it could have gone on much longer because there were so many things to learn and so many great questions to discuss!  For those of you who couldn't make it to BlogHer Food, I believe the audio recording of our presentation should make its way onto the conference website sometime soon, and I'll make sure to let you know when it does.

I'll post more about my trip in the coming week after I sort through my thoughts and photos much more thoroughly--and after my body finally figures out what time zone it wants to be in again!  In the meantime, I came home wanting a simple and down-to-earth dessert, something hearty and uncomplicated to ease myself back into the swing of things (and something to accompany the long hours of wading through my email back-log that's built up over the past week or so).  Pie, for some reason, always fits the bill of the "homey classic."  For the past few weeks, I've been seeing the combination of blueberry and rhubarb together, so I put together this blueberry and rhubarb deep dish pie, with a healthy hint of orange zest and a generous splash of heavy cream. ... and deep dish because you can never get enough fruit into pies.  After eating this one--sweet, straightforward, bursting with blueberry flavor and a dash of rhubarb tartness, I have to say that I'm liking the blueberry+rhubarb (aka: "bluebarbberry") combination much better than the classic strawberry+rhubarb!  For some reason, blueberry+rhubarb just hits the right balance of sweet and tart and juicy for me in a way that strawberry+rhubarb doesn't.

One last piece of news:  desserts for breakfast finally has its own Facebook page!  It took a lot of nudging and convincing from friends, bloggers and non-bloggers alike, but now it exists, if that's your preferred mode of keeping up with posts and feeds and news.  So 'like' desserts for breakfast on Facebook!  Also, now that we have this little Facebook-based space, I want to open it up to you readers, too.  Have you made a desserts for breakfast recipe before?  Have you photographed it or blogged about it?  If so, shoot me an email (s [at] dessertsforbreakfast [dot] com) and tell me about it, and I'll share it on the new desserts for breakfast Facebook page.  I'm excited to see what you all have done!  :-D


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Kiwi Orange Creamsicles

Last week, we had a bit of a preview of summer: ~90 degree Fahrenheit weather, cloudless, sunny skies, and mild nights when you don't need a long-sleeve shirt to go outside.  It was even warm enough to have a midnight picnic out on the roof of our garage, which was pretty awesome because we snaked an extension cord from the house to the roof, moved an Ikea coffee table and a floor lamp out there, blasted Joni Mitchell from an open window, and sat, laughing and joking, on a blanket around a big spread of triple cream goat cheese and grapes and Piela Deen underneath the stars.

While warm summer-preview nights are a special treat, I often curse the hotter days during the daytime when I have to bike to and from school because who wants to arrive at class or at their meetings hot, sweaty, and coated with a layer of sticky grime?  Elghk.  Plus, I grew up in a different micro-climate around the Bay Area, where the weather really only rises above 80 degrees F for a few days out of the year.  I like my 50-75 F range perfectly well, thankyouverymuch.  So, on these days, the thing I look forward to the most is coming home from school, stowing the bike away, reaching into the freezer, and sucking down an ice cold packed-with-fruity-awesomeness popsicle.  I love how it makes my core temperature say 'ahhhhhhhhhh' in great relief.

Just so I'm armed and ready for any more hot days the current micro-climate that I live in might throw at me, I've packed our freezer with these little beauts: kiwi and orange creamsicles--little ice pops with tangy kiwi puree, unadulterated fresh-squeezed orange juice, and sweet, creamy custard, layered thinly so that you can get every flavor together in one long lick.  I also did the layers sort of haphazardly, pouring whichever one I felt like into random molds just so when unmolded, each one is a special little surprise.  I can't help but squeal a bit every time I pop one out of a mold just to see the different patterns of layers.  It's the little things like this that keep me happy.  :-)

Anyways, you really shouldn't be too jealous of our weather here.  This always seems to happen around the end of April and the beginning of May in parts of the Bay Area, but then we're cursed with grey skies throughout the month of June.  Alas, you can't always have it all when it comes to the weather.  But, you can always have popsicles ready and standing by.

[Don't forget to go and vote for desserts for breakfast for Best Baking/Desserts Blog in Saveur's Best Food Blog Awards!  Voting closes in just three days!  So stop dallying about and go vote!]


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