Strawberry Lime Bundt Cake
My hands are tan. The tops at least…the palms are pinkish/orange (my carrot intake might be a touch out of control…again). They don’t look like my hands. Honestly, I think they look dirty…I am just so darn used to them being pale. My mind is weird. I can see the million tiny crevices and lines much easier now and they don’t seem sooo veiny right now. The skin on my knuckles are more reddish than tan…perhaps brick red? My scar on my left hand near my thumb, right at the wrist…the exact spot where your hand would hit the top oven coil if you were pulling a tray of cookies from the oven…that scar is almost invisible – blending nicely with the tan. And by most accounts…I am still pretty pale.
My hair is lightening up…nothing like it was when I was a little tike (see below)…but definetly blonder…especially the baby fine hair around my temples. I love the effect that warm sunshine has on my hair. P.S … I was not a photogenic child. There are a few hundred photos of me, in my parents hutch, of me …with that same exact face…
Freckles across my nose and cheeks have popped and are in full bloom. They make me look younger than I am. No matter the amount of sunblock will stop the freckles from sprouting….Freckles have had a permanent residence on my face from spring to fall since I was a child. I welcome them with open arms…I enjoy seeing them when I glance in the mirror, always a bit of a surprise that first week or so of spring. I wonder if there will be a summer where they won’t show up…most adults don’t have freckles. Or maybe they are just wearing makeup, hiding the little guys.
Iced coffee is becoming my morning ritual. It has thrown the barista at the hospital’s coffee cart for a loop. Nate now asks if I want it hot or cold…he is a quick learner. For some reason, iced coffee needs a touch of cream. Why? Hot coffee is taken black. Iced…I need cream. It is something I don’t understand. But Nate knows to give me the room for cream when I drink it iced. He is this good with the entire hospital staff and our insane coffee addiction.
Popsicles have found their way into my fridge. I bought a mixed box (strawberry, lime, and wild berry) and a coconut/banana box yesterday. I devoured a lime one on the short car ride home. I couldn’t wait. It is a childhood habit. Remember those Good Humor Strawberry Crunch bars…those were our favorite. I have switched to all-natural, real fruit, popsicles…but the feeling of summer in the air is the same. I am thinking of sticking one in my gin and tonic tonight.
I guess what I am saying is that summer has entered into my little world and is letting istelf be known. Hi. Welcome. I’ve been expecting you. Stay awhile. Warm my skin, lighten my hair, and brighten my days.
I have been craving lime for weeks now. The almost nightly gin and tonics with a squeeze of lime have been hitting the spot as of late, but I want more. I want to put it in everything I cook and bake. A squeeze here, some zest there…So, when I saw that Joy had whipped up a lime and berry bundt cake…I knew it would be recreated in my kitchen, sooner or later…or sooner rather than later. I swapped mixed berries for strawberries and added a lime glaze to make it really limey…and ladled roasted strawberries over each individual slice – a total must! Roasted strawberries in general are a total must, but that is for another blog post…
Not a lime fan? Swap it for lemon. Only have raspberries? Ok. No bigs. Make it your own and enjoy it in the late evening with perhaps another gin and tonic. Eat it as the sun is setting and the shadows are getting longer and the air begins to cool. Enjoy it as you relax on your patio and smile as you hear the squeals and laughter of the kids next door as they play late into the evening. Eat it as you sit and listen to baseball on the radio like your grandparents did… Eat it as you welcome summer…
- 1½ cups granulated sugar
- 1 tablespoon grated lime zest
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 tablespoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 3 large eggs
- 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
- 1 cup buttermilk
- 1 tablespoon fresh lime juice
- 2 cups Fresh Strawberries, hulled and cut in half
- Icing
- 8 Tablespoons Fresh Lime Juice
- 3 to 3½ Cups Powdered Sugar
- Zest of 1 Lime
- Pinch of Salt
- Preheat oven to 350F. Butter and flour a bundt cake pan. Set aside.
- In a small bowl, combine sugar and lime zest and with back of a spoon or fingertips, rub the zest into the sugar. Voila..you have lime sugar!
- In a large mixing bowl, whisk together lime sugar, flour, baking soda, and salt. In another bowl (or large measuring cup), whisk together eggs, butter, buttermilk, and lime juice.
- Pour wet ingredients over drying ingredients. Stir until all dry ingredients are combined and moistened. The batter will be thick. Fold in strawberries to evenly distribute.
- Pour batter into prepared bundt pan and place in preheated oven and bake for about 45-55 minutes until a toothpick when inserted comes out clean. Remove from oven and let cool for about 20 minutes before inverting cake onto wire rack – let cool completely before icing.
- Once cool, prepare icing. In a medium bowl, whisk together lime juice, powdered sugar, lime zest, and salt. Whisk until smooth. The icing will be thin. Pour icing over cake and serve immediately. Note: I refrigerated the icing, making the icing thicker without adding more powdered sugar.
Adapted from Joy the Baker
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They say it’s your birthday / It’s my birthday too, yeah
30 years. 3 decades. 1,565.32 weeks. Even more days, hours, minutes, and seconds. 30 years of heart beats and breaths. 30 years where smiles have outnumbered frowns. Laughter has been abundant. Tears have been rare. Cities have been explored and oceans have been swam. Miles have been walked, ran, and flown. Friendships forged and loves lost. There have been high hopes and big dreams alongside stinging disappointments and slight blunders.
While the past 30 years (especially the previous 5+) have seemingly flown by with little resistance (and I am sure the next 30 will do the same)…I am honestly and wholeheartedly looking forward to this upcoming decade. I would be lying if there haven’t been moments in the past year where I have slightly freaked out about turning 30…they weren’t moments of comparison between my position in life and that of others. We all lead different lives at varying paces. However, do you ever feel like you are just tumbling along like a rogue sock in this big dryer called life? Yeah…moments of feeling lost in the shuffle have made me apprehensive about turning 30. I guess I always assumed 30 year olds didn’t tumble. 30 year olds knew what they wanted. They walked confidently. How naive my younger self was. While I don’t feel like I am tumbling about, but have gracefully graduated to gentle stumbling…I think learning how to confidently walk is what awaits me/us in our 30’s. And you are silly if you can’t find the joy in that.
Birthdays have a tendency to be celebrated with layered cakes and multiple scoops of chocolate ice cream and rivers of hot fudge and mountains of whipped cream and showers of sprinkles. However, after I recently had a rather heated (ha!) text message conversation with a friend over the best cake flavor (chocolate versus spice), we both realized that cake was our 4th favorite dessert. Who argues over their 4th favorite dessert? Pies, cookies, and brownies are favored over cake…all day, every day. So, on this 30th birthday of mine…there will be no cake, but a dessert I have made no less than 5 times in the past 3 weeks. A favorite of mine? Perhaps.
The simplicity that is a crisp is why I favor this dessert in the spring/summer. A few cups of fruit that is hanging about the house, tossed with some sugar, a thickener, and perhaps a squeeze of a lemon or lime…topped with a quick crumble and in no time you have a dessert that will please everyone and anyone. Young and old. Friends, coworkers, and family.
Plus, when you have a friend who supplies you with bundles of rhubarb because it grows in abundance behind her house ( I give thanks to whoever owned the house prior to her … we would have been fast friends as well) and when the strawberries are sweet and delicious … my mind can think of nothing else besides strawberry and rhubarb. Rhubarb and strawberry. It is the only thing I have been pumping out of my kitchen.
So, while I enjoy a bowl of warm strawberry rhubarb crisp and say adieu to my roaring twenties…I am giddy and anxiously awaiting what my 30’s will have in store for little old(er) me. Cheers!
- Crumb Topping
- 1 Stick Unsalted Butter, melted
- 1 Cup All-Purpose Flour
- 1 Cup Old Fashioned Oats
- ¼ Cup Granulated Sugar
- ¼ Cup Brown Sugar, tightly packed
- pinch of salt
- Filling
- 2 lbs Strawberries, hulled and sliced in half
- 2 Cups Rhubarb, ½ inch dice.
- ¾ Cup Granulated Sugar (less if you like it tart)
- 3-4 Tablespoons Corn Starch
- Juice of 1 lemon or lime (if you don’t have citrus, just omit – it’ll still be awesome, trust me)
- Preheat oven to 350F.
- Prepare topping first: In a medium bowl, combine all crumb topping ingredients and mix until well combined. Place in refrigerator for about 15 minutes. Prepare filling.
- In a large mixing bowl, toss together strawberries, rhubarb, sugar, corn starch, and lemon/lime juice. Carefully toss to combine.
- Pour filling into 9 inch deep dish pie plate (or an oven safe dish that will hold this amount of filling – casserole dishes work well).
- Carefully spread chilled crumb topping over fillling.
- Placed in preheated oven (place a baking sheet/tinfoil below baking dish to catch any drippings) and bake for about 45-50 minutes until the top becomes golden brown and the juice around the edges are bubbly.
- Remove from oven and let cool before serving.
- Store at room temperature loosely covered.
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Oatmeal Pecan Scotchies
Food is quite the memory jogger. A trigger of sorts. Much like music. Or certain smells.
I don’t know if everyone is like this, but I want to think that a warm chocolate chip cookie takes everyone back to their childhood – I think my first memory of a chocolate chip cookie and looking back, probably the first time I took comfort from food or felt love through its simple preparation, was when our first childhood dog – ‘Puppy’ – original, I know…died.
I was curled up on dad’s lap in our old gray (it wasn’t old yet) recliner and I was sobbing and mom, from the kitchen, offered to make cookies – ‘maybe that will make us feel better’. I don’t remember the taste of the cookies or if we even ate them that night – I am sure we did, with large glasses of milk and spoons to fish out soggy lost bits and pieces. What I remember, as dad sat reassuring us that Puppy was in heaven causing ruckus up there, was that mom, while also mourning the loss of her beloved dog (even though she would holler and throw spoons in his direction from the back door when he would bark and howl), took time to bake us cookies – hoping they would ease our tears and cheer us up a bit. Which, I am sure they did.
Cookies have that sort of power. Especially if mom is making them.
Oatmeal Scotchies … guess what..you got it, comes with a memory. Like any cookie, they remind me of my grandma. As most things I bake do, but these are most definitely a Shirley memory. On Wednesday evenings, grandma had church choir practice or perhaps it was the Women’s Society meeting…all I know, is that she was at church on Wednesday nights and the church was just 2 blocks from our house. Therefore, Wednesday nights always guaranteed a visit from grandma and she normally brought a bake good ( and I wonder where I get this habit from). Cookies or pie. And if it was cookies…4 out of 5 times, they would be chewy oatmeal scotchies.
As grandma and mom sat and chit chatted and gossiped … we 3 kids scarfed down cookies, leaving just crumbs behind. Sore jaws and crumbs.
I hadn’t had an oatmeal scotchie in years. Years! Quite devastating, seeing how the recipe for these magic little guys are on the back of the bag of Nestle butterscotch chips. And when something is this good, there is really no need to tinker with the recipe. Well, I kinda did…I added roasted pecans, because pecans kind of rock in cookies. No?
Of all the cakes, cookies, and pies I have taken into work…I believe these cookies received the most hubbub. The container was returned with a pleading of it being refilled with more. People were hiding and stowing away cookies in lockers. They were being eaten 2 and 3 at a time. I wanna believe it was because these cookies were not only chewy and delicious, but because their flavor and texture and slight hint of cinnamon took them back.
Back to grandmas, school lunches, after school snacks, Wednesday nights.
- 1 Cup (2 sticks) butter, room temperature
- ¾ Cup white sugar
- ¾ Cup, light brown sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1¼ Cup flour
- 1 tsp baking soda
- ½ tsp cinnamon
- ½ tsp salt
- ½ Cup Roasted Pecans, roughly chopped
- 3 Cup Old Fashioned Oats
- One 11-oz bag butterscotch chip
- Preheat oven to 375F.
- In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt. Set aside.
- In a mixing bowl, cream together softened butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, until incorporated. Beat in vanilla.
- With mixer on low, add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients and mix until incorporated – the dough will be tacky.
- With a wooden spoon, stir in the oats, pecans, and butterscotch chips.
- Drop rounded spoonfuls of dough onto parchment lined (optional) baking sheets and bake for 7-8 minutes for chewy cookies or 9-10 minutes for crisp cookies.
- Remove from oven and let sit on cookie sheet for 5 minutes before transferring to wire rack to cool.
Adapted from Nestle TollHouse
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