Baked Peaches

I've been on a real food kick recently. For my regular readers, that's probably a pretty obvious statement. It's not to say I am leaning towards becoming a food blog, I just really like sharing things I've come up with, or felt inspired by. For example, baked fruit seems to be popping up here and there, and I wanted to give it a whirl. My mom taught me how to make apple crisp at a pretty young age and it's a recipe I have mastered over the years. I applied basically the same ingredients in that recipe to this, and it turned out great! I'm excited to try it with apples this way, too, instead of chopping them as you do for crisp, you simply cut them and half to bake them. Easy peezy, lemon squeezy.

Baked Peaches
yields 6 servings
6 Freestone peaches 1/2 cup quick oats 3 tbsp brown sugar 1/4 cup butter, melted 2 tsp cinnamon 1 tsp allspice, of a pinch each of nutmeg, cloves and ginger
♥ Line a paring knife up with the line on your peach and cut around until your cut meets up, like you've sliced the peach in half. Hold the two pieces with each hand and gently twist until the two sides pull apart. One side will have a hollow, one side will have the pit. Gently scoop out the pit with a teaspoon. Do this to all six peaches and lay them out in a deep baking pan, as shown below. (Note, this technique only works well with freestone peaches, if you have others, you may need to wrestle the peach a bit to get the pits out.)

♥ Melt your butter in a small saucepan on low heat. Or, you can melt it in a medium sized bowl in the microwave for 30 seconds. Add brown sugar and spices and stir until well combined. Take off heat and add your oats and stir again. Feel free to add more oats if you'd like a crispier top. Drop mixture into the peach hollows, about a tbsp for each peach. Drizzle the remaining mixture on top of each peach if needed. Smooth out the oats, covering each peach top. 
♥ Bake in the oven at 350 degrees F for 25-30 minutes, or until skins start to separate from the fruit. Serve two slices of peach, warm, with either a small scoop of vanilla ice cream or freshly whipped cream. Sprinkle with cinnamon. Enjoy! xo

Strawberry Dragonfruit Sorbet

Have you ever wanted to try something really bad but never got around to it or had the means to do so? Well, in this case, that's what happened to me two fold. I have been dying to try dragonfruit and I also have always wanted to make my own ice cream or sorbet. So when our grocery store had a few dragonfruit in stock, I snagged it up quick! I googled ways to eat dragonfruit and found this yummy recipe for dragonfruit sorbet and had to try it. 
As always, I had to mix the recipe up a bit to try something new. I love adding my own little flair to things. I read that dragonfruit goes really well with any berry, and that dragonfruit is like kiwi's sweeter cousin. What goes great with kiwi? Strawberries! We had a clamshell of strawberries that had been frozen in our fridge for some reason and I had to use them up that day. Perfect. That combination of fruit is not too sweet, light and just the right amount of tart. It was a match made in sorbet heaven.

Strawberry Dragonfruit Sorbet
Adapted from Sugarlaw's Dragonfruit Sorbet recipe
1 dragonfruit 8-12 fresh strawberries 3/4 cup cold water 2 tbsp sugar, brown or white 1 tbsp lemon juice 1 tsp lime juice (optional)
♥ Cut your dragonfruit in half and scoop out the flesh with a spoon or melon baller. Freeze the shells if you want to keep them for bowls later. Rinse and hull strawberries and then slice them.  ♥ Place dragonfruit and berries in a food processor, or in my case a blender, along with the rest of the ingredients and pulse until nice and smooth. Taste and add more sugar or lemon/lime juice to taste, is desired. ♥ If you have an ice cream maker, add mixture and churn until frozen. If not, you can put the mixture into a baking pan (I used a casserole dish), and place in the freezer. Stir after two hours until it runs smooth again, and freeze again. Repeat process in another two hours and then leave overnight to freeze fully.  ♥ Sorbet should scoop out nicely with an ice cream scoop or melon baller into dragonfruit shells for a pretty desert. Keep frozen. Makes about 4 cups. 
Happy Monday! xo

recipe // easy cream cheesy whoopie pies

Cake
1/2 cup butter, softened

3/4 cup sugar

1 egg, room temperature

1 tsp vanilla

1 3/4 cup all purpose flour

2/3 cup cocoa powder

1 cup milk

1 tbsp vinegar

Cream Cheese Filling

1 pkg (8oz. or 1 cup) cream cheese

1/3 cup butter, softened

1 tsp vanilla

2-3 cups of icing sugar, sifted

Gel paste food colouring (optional)

♥ Preheat your oven to 350°F (180°C).

♥ In a medium sized bowl combine flour, cocoa and baking powder and whisk until well combined. In a seperate small bowl, make your buttermilk by adding the vinegar into the milk and stirring. Let sit while you do the rest so it can thicken up. You can also use regular buttermilk, but this is a great substitute as most people don't just have buttermilk laying around. You can also use lemon juice if you don't have vinegar.

♥ In your stand up mixer, or in a large bowl, beat butter and sugar on medium speed until light and fluffy (about two minutes). Crack open your egg in a separate bowl or cup and then add to mixture. Add vanilla. Beat until just combined. Alternating the flour mix and buttermilk, add it to the butter mixture. Start with the flour mix and end with the flour mix (3 additions of flour, 2 additions of buttermilk).

♥ You can drop by 2 heaping tbsp on a greased baking sheet, but I like to pipe it into mounds with a Wilton 1A piping tip. You be the judge of size. For 12 to 16 whoopie pies, I'd make them about the amount of 2 tbsp but you can make them bite size or large if you'd like!

♥ Bake for about 12-13 minutes, or until tops spring back when lightly touched. Let cool on a rack.

To make filling:

♥ Beat together butter and cream cheese until light and fluffy. Add vanilla once it's smooth. Sift icing sugar one cup at a time into the bowl and beat on low-medium speed. (Tip: I cover my stand up mixer with a tea towel while doing this to avoid a big cloud of sugar dust!) Add the next cup of sifted sugar. This should be more than enough icing sugar but if you like your fillings really thick you can add another half a cup or a whole cup. I don't like my icing that sweet though, so I stick to less as possible.

♥ You can add gel paste food colouring at this point if you'd like. I used Wilton Violet gel paste for mine to make a nice pastel purple, but you can use any colour you want. You could even mix it up and make a few different colours for extra fun! I wouldn't suggest using liquid food colouring as it will tamper with the texture of your filling and make it runny.

♥ After the cake has completely cooled, you can either blob the filling onto the flat sides of the cake cookies and smush another one into it like a sandwich. Or, again, you can pipe the filling on with a 1A piping tip for a smoother, more pretty look.

Show off your cute little desserts and share with your friends and family. Come back and tell me what you think!

P.S Don't forget to enter to win a pair of Freshly Picked baby moccasins, contest ends tonight at midnight EST!!

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