desserts & sweets Archives • Page 2 of 5 • Ant & Anise

Chocolate Covered Coconut Snowballs: Gluten & grain free holiday treats

I’m going to cut to the chase here.

Not just because it’s a few days before Christmas and I have yet to get all my shopping done. (Eek!) But if you want to make these in time for the big day, you need a few hours of serious focus. Most of that time is for dipping in chocolate and rolling in coconut.

What I wanted to do is improve upon Purdy’s snowballs. I don’t buy a lot of chocolate at Purdy’s but every so often, when I’m walking down South Granville or through Oakridge mall, I’ll pop in and buy a couple snowballs or coconut clusters to nibble on my walk….

Oat Cardamom Shortbread

Marion Smith, a Scottish friend and neighbour of my grandmother’s, was an expert shortbread maker. Every year she would make multiple batches of her shortbread to package up in tins and mail to faraway friends and family.

I loved Marion’s Scottish shortbread. It had the same basic ingredients — butter, sugar, flour — as my mom’s melt-in-your-mouth shortbread (also delicious). But it was dramatically different: Sturdier, more grainy, and always presented in plain petite wedges without any red and green sprinkles.

One year, Grandma managed to persuade Marion not only to part with her beloved shortbread recipe, but to give us both a live demonstration of how she made it. (It’s true, Grandma was very good at getting people to do things for her.)…

Phyllo cups: an all-purpose dessert delivery system

One of the things I love about cooking with my niece is her decisiveness. Last spring, we were making a company dinner together. I had conceived of a dessert of grilled figs in phyllo pastry, but couldn’t quite figure out how it would work.

“Got a muffin tin?” she asked.

A short while later, there they were, phyllo cups for dessert. Phyllo pastry, brushed with melted butter, sprinkled with a bit of sugar and baked….

Quinoa chocolate cake in the spotlight

When Eve and I started this blog, we saw it as a chance to share recipes and ideas. It was also a chance to get to know each other a little better, outside of a few family get-togethers throughout the year to mark birthdays and holidays.

Ant & Anise started off as a conversation between the two of us. In the very first posts, we make essentially the same recipe with different variations — like slow roasted tomatoes (here’s Eve’s version and mine made into a pizza sauce) and crostini topped with caramelized onion, gorgonzola and pear (here’s Eve’s version and my canape-sized interpretation)….

Grilled peaches, memories of Okanagan holidays and hanging onto summer

The last day of August. How did this month fly by so quickly? It seems only last week I was waking up, day after day, to bright sunshine that would warm up to make another spectacular day. The long, hot days in July and most of this month blurred together bike rides around the seawall, trips to Granville Island market, and Sam the (fair weather) cat only too happy to spend all day and all night outside sleeping in the garden.

One of the things I love about summer is the relaxed pace, the meandering of different schedules that aren’t as rigid as they are any other time of year. It means there’s a chance that best friends, who we haven’t had over in months, can make it over for dinner with only a few days’ notice. (It helps they have a daughter who, at 12, is a qualified babysitter only too eager to left alone with her younger sister for an evening.)

What better way to celebrate summer than with a dinner for friends that enlists the grill in every course, from appetizer (chicken satay) to main course (fresh halibut) to dessert? Yes, dessert. I’m talking grilled peaches….

Cabin Cooking: from brie on sourdough to Chocolate Wiggies in nine days

I’m back from two weeks of unbroken sunshine, warm lake water, starry nights, canoeing and encounters with wild things.

Some, like the carpenter ants invading the cabin, were unwelcome. Others were magical. One day I lifted a board in the compost pit, and found a handsome garter snake, black with a yellow stripe, coiled up in rectangles with the precision of a small modernist sculpture.

On the trip in, we barged the Land Rover onto the island. On landing, our friend Jerome had an encounter with a clamp on the barge that cut a deep gouge on his right forearm.

We drove up to the cabin, found the first aid kit, cleaned the wound and put on a bandage, then unpacked the truck, made up the beds and put away everything that’s dangerous to eat if it’s not kept cold – all while trying to keep Jerome sitting down….