fairy french toast casserole

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Hello all! I hope you’re enjoying your holidays!! Bernie and Nick and I are on our beautiful Italian fake-cation and I left my computer behind! But I wanted to leave you with this fairy bread-inspired overnight baked french toast because I cannot imagine a better New Year’s brunch dish. Can you??? It’s as if the Times Square ball dropped and instead of confetti, sprinkles poured out, and luckily we were standing there with a casserole of bread sandwiched with almond paste. (You are all hip to fairy bread, right? The Australian delight that consists of buttered bread and sprinkles?!! If not, get on it!!)

fairy french toast casserole

serves 4-6

Ingredients

¼ c unsalted butter or coconut oil, melted 

¾ c sugar

1 loaf challah or french bread, cut into 1-inch slices

6 oz almond paste, grated on the big holes of a box grater (or if it’s too soft to grate you can tear it into little tiny pieces)

8 large eggs

1 c milk (whole, 2%, or dairy-free)

1 tb vanilla extract

1 tsp almond extract

½ tsp kosher salt 

Zest of 1 lemon

½ c sliced almonds

TONSSSSS of Rainbow sprinkles*

*make sure they’re rainbow sprinkles you really like the taste of. the sprinkles in this photo are a mix of india tree’s nature’s colors sprinkles and good old wilton nonpareils. 

Clues

Pour the butter or oil into a 9x13 casserole dish and swirl it around to coat evenly. Sprinkle on the sugar. Arrange half of the bread in the baking dish, overlapping if necessary, and sprinkle on the almond paste. Arrange the remaining bread on top.

In a large bowl whisk together the eggs, milk, vanilla, almond extract, salt, and lemon zest and pour evenly over the bread slices. Sprinkle the almonds all over the top.

Cover and place in the refrigerator for 4 hours or overnight.

When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 350ºf.

Bake uncovered until browned on top and set throughout; begin checking for doneness at 35 minutes. If the top starts browning too much, tent it with foil.

Remove casserole from oven and take no prisoners while you cover it completely with sprinkles. Enjoy!!

birthday battenberg

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hello, hi! how are you doing? are you enjoying this weather? can you believe that it is... summer kind of?? bernie and i have been lapping up the sun like thirsty puppies. nearly every afternoon, we pack a little bag of water, bamba or freeze-dried berries, sunscreen, books, and toys, and bring it out to a blanket on our lawn where we bask and play and listen to the sound of music. sometimes my phone doesn't get very good reception however so instead of julie andrews serenading us it becomes me squeaking out i-am-16-going-on-17-doo-doo-dee-doo-dee-doo because i don't know the words and the whole time i have to ignore the vision in my head of john mulaney doing the creepy version on SNL. it's really awful when we have to resort to me singing, i can’t wait for the future when cell phone reception is better. regardless, these pre-mosquito days are idyllic. bernie is in this painfully perfect sweet spot where she has learned not to put everything in her mouth (dirt, bugs, the cold noodles leftover in the grass from her sensory play weeks ago) and she can't yet walk or run very fast so i don't have to chase after her worried that she's going to run into the construction hole in our yard (more on that eventually…!). we can just sit contentedly on the blanket with crayons or balls for hours and i love it.

so that's what we did on my birthday last friday! nick was planting sugar beets and bernie and i spent the day outside. we blew up her new kiddie pool and tested out what it would be like to sit in it (it was still a little chilly for water) and zoomed with all of our people. we had homemade egg mcmuffins, as is tradition on my birthday, and sausagey pizza for dinner. after bernie went to bed, i zoom aperol spritz’d with rob and brian and then watched center stage. center stage is SO GOOD. 

for my birthday cake this year, i decided to make a battenberg cake! 1) because it’s been a long time since the last time i made a battenberg, 2) it's fun, and 3) it's a great cake for a tiny party of three because it's small yet festive. it also lasts for a good few days so you can chip away at it without feeling the rush to gobble it up, and the fact that it has no frosting gives it this sense of snackiness which lends a tiny bit more legitimacy to the urge you'll have when you’re passing through the kitchen and just want to shave off one bite. 

the cake itself is dense and delicious, with a hint of rose. as with most of my butter-based cakes, i added a little coconut oil to ensure that this cake has no choice but to be moist. you can use unrefined to add some coconut flavor, but i chose to go with refined so that it wouldn't interfere with the power couple of marzipan and rose. for the jam, i used an amazing strawberry rhubarb kumquat situation that my aunt gifted me from sqirl. design wise, my laziness to fully knead the food coloring into the marzipan made it look like my tie dye sweats that i wear every day so i just went with it! then i cut out marzipan "stickers" using tiny cookie cutters and smooshed them right on. 

my biggest battenberg tips are: roll the marzipan out on a silicone mat! you don’t get the scrunchy lines in it like you would if it was on parchment and you don't get it messy with powdered sugar (which is fine for the interior surface of the marzipan but on the outside it’s not a great look). also, let the cakes cool completely before trimming them so you can get the cleanest edges, and use a very sharp knife (i’ve been loving this knife for this). once the cakes are trimmed, you can definitely stick them in the freezer, wrapped in plastic, for up to a few weeks until you're ready to decorate (or up to a few months if you also wrap in foil). once you decorate, let the cake come to room temp before serving!

happy battenberg-ing, everyone!

Birthday Battenberg

Makes 1 loaf cake

Ingredients

Cake:

2 2/3 c (347g) all-purpose flour

2 1/4 tsp baking powder

1 tsp kosher salt

1 c (240g) heavy cream

1/4 c (60g) sour cream

3/4 c (169g) unsalted butter, softened

6 tb (75g) refined coconut oil

1 1/2 c (300g) sugar

3 large eggs

2 tsp vanilla extract

2 tsp rosewater

3 tb (36g) rainbow sprinkles (classic cylinders are ideal, not nonpareils)

Pink food coloring


Assembly:

14 oz marzipan, plus more for decorations as desired

Food coloring

Powdered sugar, for dusting

6 tb (120g) jam

Clues:

preheat the oven to 350ºf. turn an 8” square baking pan into a battenberg pan: first, fold a long piece of foil onto itself a couple of times to a create a foil barrier to divide your pan in half, making sure that the barrier is at least the height of the pan or even a little more. then spray the pan and each side of the foil with cooking spray (to help the parchment stick) and line each half of the pan with two overlapping pieces of parchment paper, one going widthwise and one going lengthwise, with enough parchment paper to come all the way up the sides and then some. get your scissors out and trim the parchment so that it lays nicely and doesn’t curl around the corners and make you go crazy. sorry, i know this is a lot of parchment paper (i reuse parchment all the time!). ok, set this aside.

in a medium bowl, sift together the flour and baking powder, and then lightly stir in the salt and set aside. in a large measuring cup, whisk together the heavy cream and sour cream and set aside. 

in a stand mixer fitted with a paddle, cream together the butter, coconut oil, and sugar on medium high for 3-4 minutes, until light and fluffy. add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each and periodically scraping the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula. add the vanilla and rosewater and mix to combine. reduce the mixer to medium low and add the dry mixture and cream mixture in 3 alternating additions, mixing until 80% combined. divide the mixture in half. in the first half, fold in the sprinkles as you mix until the batter is combined. pour into one side of the pan and use a small offset spatula or a spoon to carefully spread it out evenly. in the second half of the batter, add a few drops of pink food coloring and fold it in as you mix until the batter is combined. pour into the other side of the pan and use a small offset spatula or a spoon to carefully spread it out evenly. bake until the tops of the cakes are browned and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with a few crumbs on it; begin checking for doneness at 45 minutes. let cool in the pans for 10 minutes and then use the parchment wings to left them out of the pans and onto a wire rack to cool completely. 

once the cakes are cooled, level them and trim off the sides if they're uneven. cut into 4 equal rectangles that are as wide as they are thick (measure the thickness of the cake once it’s leveled and then turn your ruler 90º to measure that same amount on top of the cake and score with an accordion pastry cutter). enjoy a bite of cake scraps and set these aside.

knead the marzipan with food coloring to get your desired color, dusting with powdered sugar if it gets too sticky. on a silicone mat (or a big piece of parchment or a counter dusted with powdered sugar, but i strongly recommend a silicone mat so that you don't get powdered sugar all over what will eventually become the outside surface of the marzipan) roll the marzipan out into a rectangle that's about 7 1/2” wide by about 13” long, dusting the top with powdered sugar as needed to prevent sticking. trim the edges so they’re straight. brush all over with a thin layer of jam and place a rectangle of pink cake at one end. brush the exposed surfaces with a thin layer of jam. squish a rectangle of sprinkle cake right next to it and brush the exposed surfaces with a layer of jam. stack the other two rectangles of cake on top, brushing with jam, to form a checkerboard pattern. carefully roll it onto its side, pressing the marzipan all over so that it sticks, and then continue to roll until the cake is covered. trim off any excess marzipan, wrap in firmly plastic wrap and let set in the fridge for a couple of hours. decorated with additional marzipan decorations and sprinkles as desired. let come to room temperature and enjoy!

this cake will last at room temperature, wrapped in plastic or in an airtight container for up to a week.

-yeh!

rhubarb cake!

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It is my birthday! And also Doug’s and the eve of my Dad’s and the dawn after Stefani’s. And maybe also yours??? Happy birthday to all of us! It’s a great day to turn 29. 28 was honestly starting to feel a little stale, although it was a great year! It had a solid ratio of time spent doing things I love (making cake! traveling about! sitting on the couch with Eggboy watching tv eating dinner with my favorite spoon!) to things I don’t love (brushing my hair! cleaning the fridge!) so I’ll try to keep that going. Overall I think one big takeaway from this year was that I learned to like doing healthy things more, like drinking green juice and being up to date on my dentist visits. Kind of vanilla, right?!? My 22-year-old self would have felt so ashamed that this was my big birthday takeaway but well here it is. It’s probably just that my older wiser brain can now see further into the future and know more easily when something that feels fun at the time, like putting too much mayonnaise on my french fries, isn’t going to feel good in my belly after an hour. Which doesn’t mean I don’t do that anymore I just do it less. 

So with that I’d like to announce a temporary hold on my birthday breakfast sandwich tradition, for I will be having a green juice. And then I’ll be working out, and then getting a massage with the strongest masseuse in town, then I’m going to lunch at the museum cafe, and then I’m going to sit down with my favorite cookbooks and plan really awesome dinners for the rest of the week until dinner time when I’m going to make chèvre chaud salads for Eggboy and me. A salad! For my birthday dinner! I barely recognize myself. I’ve just been craving it soo hard since Paris (omg cannot wait to tell you about Paris) and fried cheese on a salad is my favorite form of balance. 

There will also be this rhubarb cake but not until the weekend when I defrost this sucker for some friends!! It was going to be an alpaca cake until I realized that llama has a silent “l” at the beginning and that’s way more quirky and cool than the trendy alpaca. No offense, alpacas. So this is a happy llama cake! It was inspired by this embroidered llama and I used this cookie cutter. My biggest challenge was making it not look like a baby shower cake, hence the mustard yellow frosting. 

I’m so happy that I could use some of our backyard rhubarb in this. Before it even popped up, I knew I wanted to make a pink fluffy buttery cake. Just like Stella's and Adrianna’s strawberry cakes but rhubarby. Only when I googled rhubarb cake the only things that came up were cakes with entire stalks of rhubarb in the batter or upside down cakes. So I experimented, using my sprinkle cake as a general roadmap and turning to Stella's and Adrianna’s cake as examples for incorporating fruit purée. I thought I’d have a long road of hibiscus-cake-style tweaking ahead of me since rhubarb is quite sour and anytime you change the pH of a batter you need to pay attention to the leavening amounts, but it turns out strawberry and rhubarb have extremely similar pH levels. So the first go was deeelicious! Fluffy, buttery, fruity, and bright. A handful of moisture tweaks later and here it is! It's so tasty and the sourness of the rhubarb balances the sweetness really nicely. To emphasis the rhubarb flavor, I’ve added a layer of rhubarb jam between the layers, along with buttercream. I like a basic vanilla buttercream with this but if rhubarb buttercream is speaking to you then go for it!

rhubarb cake

makes one 2-layer 8" cake

ingredients

cake:

10 oz (284g) rhubarb, chopped

1/4 c water 

1/2 c whole milk

2 3/4 c (352g) cake flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 c (225g) unsalted butter, softened

1/4 c (50g) flavorless oil

1 1/2 c (300g) sugar

Red or pink food coloring, optional

4 large egg whites, at room temperature

2 tsp vanilla

 

assembly:

vanilla frosting (recipe here) or rhubarb frosting (recipe below)

rhubarb jam (1/4 c per layer)

sprinkles, marzipan, optional but recommended

 

clues

Preheat the oven to 350°f. Grease and line the bottoms of two 8” cake pans with parchment and set aside. 

Combine the rhubarb and water in a saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium high. Reduce heat to medium and simmer for about 15 minutes, until the rhubarb is very soft. Let it cool and then combine with the milk in a blender and purée until very smooth.

In a medium bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

In a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, combine the butter, oil, sugar, and food coloring, if using, and beat on medium high until light and fluffy, 3-4 minutes. Add the egg whites one at a time, mixing after each, and then add the vanilla. Reduce the mixer to medium low and add the dry ingredients and rhubarb purée in three alternating additions, mixing just until incorporated. Do not over-beat. Divide the batter between the two cake pans and spread it out evenly. Give them a tap on the counter to get rid of any air bubbles and then bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with just a few crumbs; begin checking for doneness at 30 minutes. Let cool in the pans for 10 minutes and then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

Make your frosting of choice! 

Stack up the layers with a thin layer of frosting and rhubarb jam in the middle. If you want to get really fancy and have more rhubarb jam distributed throughout you can slice the layers in half to make four very thin layers. To make the cake pictured, add a layer of funfetti cake in the middle.

Decorate with sprinkles and a marzipan llama. Or alpaca. Up to you.

rhubarb frosting

makes enough for one 2-layer 8" cake

ingredients

8 oz (226g) rhubarb, chopped

2 tb water

1 1/2 c (338g) unsalted butter, softened

5 c (600g) powdered sugar

2 tsp vanilla bean paste or extract

1/4 tsp rosewater, optional

1/4 tsp kosher salt

3 tb heavy cream

pink food coloring, optional
 

clues

Combine the rhubarb and water in a saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium high. Reduce heat to medium and simmer for about 15 minutes, until the rhubarb is very soft. Let it cool and then purée in a blender.

In a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, beat the butter until soft and creamy. Add the powdered sugar gradually and mix until combined. Add the vanilla, rosewater (if using), and salt and then gradually mix in the cooled rhubarb puree. It may look curdled but continue to beat for 3-5 minutes until combined. Add the heavy cream and food coloring (if using) and beat until combined.

-yeh!

Photos by Chantell and Brett Quernemoen

Pictured: Sweater (cuyana), Funfetti socks (old navy), cake stand (mosser glass)


P.S. Thank you, friends, soooooooooooo much for all of your sweet messages about Girl Meets Farm!! I am so darn thankful for your support and I cannot wait to show you behind the scenes pics and vids and tell you all about the process of filming. Don’t forget to mark your calendars for June 24th, 11am eastern/10am central/11am pacific!
 

pistachio nutter butters + a giveaway!

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Hello to my birthday month, the month where I get to chill a little more, eat a little more, and spend a little more, at least at Sephora, so I can get my free birthday lip gloss. Every day feels like pizza friday during birthday month! And this month I’m going to Stars on Ice so like, wow, if you thought I freaked out at the Olympics, just wait until Meryl and Charlie take the ice. I cannot wait.

Here are some photos from over the weekend when I met Nile’s Beethoven dog puppy, Frida, and then went to the Empire gala! We danced our butts off, wore big dresses, sang, it was the perfect eve to birthday month. 

Now I’m kicking off May with two recent objects of my obsession: pistachio nutter butters and jewelry that reminds me of rainbow sprinkles. Pistachio nutter butters felt like such an obvious thing to do, given my love of pistachio butter (see: pistachio buttercream and pistachio pudding pops). So I replaced the peanut butter in my favorite peanut butter cookie recipe for pistachio butter and they came out chewy and amazing. And then when sandwiched with creamy pistachio frosting, they just got better. They are thick nutty wonders of the cookie world. And, yes, they deserve to be rolled in sprinkles.

Speaking of sprinkles, I have the most fun giveaway happening over on Instagram for the colorful ring that I’m wearing in these photos! I have been a fan of Elisa Solomon’s jewelry for years, ever since finding her rings at Catbird. (I sometimes just go onto the Catbird site just to look at this ring). Her jewelry is right up my alley, it’s colorful and whimsical and dainty and every time I look at my ring I think of rainbow sprinkles!! So I could not be more excited to partner with her on this giveaway. To enter, head over to Instagram (but if you don’t have Instagram, you can leave a comment here)! And be sure to check out her other jewelry, like this Sven cat ring!!! 
 

Pistachio Nutter Butters

Makes 8 large cookies

Ingredients

Cookies

1 1/4 c (160g) raw pistachios
1 1/4 c (160g) raw almonds
1/4 tsp kosher salt
zest of 1/2 lemon
1/2 tsp almond extract
1 c (200g) sugar, plus a couple more tablespoons for rolling
1 large egg

Filling

6 tb (85g) unsalted butter, softened
1 c (120g) powdered sugar
Pinch of kosher salt
1/4 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp almond extract
a pinch of lemon zest
Optional: splash of rosewater

Sprinkles
 

Clues

Preheat oven to 350ºf. Line two baking sheets with parchment and set aside.

To make the cookies, in a high powered food processor, blend the pistachios and almonds for 10-15 minutes until spreadable. Remove 1/4 c (or 64g) of the mixture and set aside for the filling. To the food processor, add the salt, lemon zest, almond extract, and sugar to the food processor and blend together. Add the egg and blend to combine. Scoop out 16 tablespoon sized balls and roll in sugar. Place on baking sheets 1 inch apart and flatten with two presses of a fork to get a crisscross pattern. Bake for 12 minutes (they’ll still be very soft but they’ll firm up as they cool). Let cool on the pans for 10 minutes and then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

To make the filling, in a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, blend together the butter and reserved pistachio butter. Add the powdered sugar and blend to combine. Add the salt, vanilla, almond, lemon zest, and rosewater, if using. 

Fill a piping bag with the filling and pipe in the centers of half of the cooled cookies, sandwich them with the other half of the cookies and then roll in sprinkles. Enjoy!

-yeh!

photos by chantell and brett quernemoen!

apron from enrich and endure, cookie plate from le creuset!