Cheesecake Blondies

Instead of a regular chocolate base for cheesecake...cheesecake blondies:

First, the blondie batter - lots of rich brown sugar and butter:

Then the cheesecake:

And a swirl!

Cheesecake Brownies

I needed something a little fancier than brownies:

Step one: melted chocolate and butter mixed with sugar and eggs:

Once flour and vanilla was added to the chocolate mixture, I whipped up some cream cheese, sour cream, eggs and vanilla:

And a quick swirl later, they became an elegant dessert:

Oreo Cheesecake Cupcakes

Oreos. Yum:
I hardly ever purchase a package of Oreos, but as you can see, these cookies had a purpose - they were the crust for my latest cheesecake creation!

The recipe is from "Martha Stewart's Cupcakes," a new addition to my bookshelf full of cookbooks. The recipe is a fairly straightforward cheesecake - here, I've blended softened cream cheese, sour cream and sugar:

To this mixture, a few more chopped cookies:

And then the cupcake tins are filled:

The trouble with these cupcakes is that you have to wait for them to cool, and then chill them for a few hours before taking a big bite:

Garlic Scape Bread

I've gotten a fair amount of garlic scapes - a stalk from the garlic plant that is harvested when it is young, tender and full of flavor- from the farm share this year:

My friend Sam pointed me toward this garlic bread recipe that he thought scapes might be good in, so I gave it a try. I mixed together my spices with the huge amount of yeast specified, spices, cheese and garlic scapes:
And then I set the bread for a quick rise. There is a ton of yeast and sugar in the recipe so the bread really does gain volume quite quickly.

Here's the bread after the first and only rise:

After this the bread is shaped and sprinkled with more cheese, it is placed into a cool oven while it pre-heats to both rise and bake:

The resulting loaves are pretty, but not the tastiest I've made - when you cut short rising time by using heat and a lot of yeast, you sacrifice a lot of flavor that comes from your flour.

Blueberry Sour Cream Pie

I love a good fruit pie, but sometimes dessert is tastier when the kitchen is a bit cooler. This pie features fruit and a quick cooking graham crust - perfect!

Once the graham cracker crust is baked, the only heat involved in this pie is in cooking the berries. The recipe calls for frozen berries, so it can be made at any time of the year. Here, I'm beginning to cook the berries down with a bit of lemon juice and lemon zest:

Once the blueberry mixture was fully cooked and cooled a bit, I spooned it into the crust and left it in the fridge to set:

The next step in this pie was the sour cream based topping. It is a mixture of sugar, cream cheese, sour cream and a bit more lemon - basically a no-bake cheesecake:

Once the topping was well blended, I smoothed it over the blueberry mixture and put it back in the fridge until time for dessert: