Sugar Free Carrot Cake

Today I had a bag of baby carrots that needed to be used ASAP. I baked the Sugar Free Carrot Cake recipe from Sugar Free Recipes. The cake came out amazingly moist, fluffy and flavorful, with just the right amount of sweetness. Here are my notes:
- Replaced the white flour with Hodgson Mill whole wheat flour
- Added cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. I didn't have allspice
- Mixed in toasted coconut. I was out of walnuts but still wanted a nice nutty flavor
- Left off the cream cheese-apricot mix. It just didn't sound appetizing. That's not cake frosting, no matter how you spin it. And this is coming from someone who loves apricots mixed in creamy desserts.
- Grated carrots will blend into your batter and give you carrot cake. Shredded carrots will give you a great spice cake with carrot strips mixed in.

*ETA: Yes, I know the honey and shredded coconut have sugar in them.

Your Pie, Fleming Island, FL

1545 County Road 220, Suite #125

Fleming Island, Florida 32003

904-375-9771

Spotted in Fleming Island today: A new pizza restaurant under construction called Your Pie. It's on the right corner of the Winn Dixie shopping center. Your Pie's Facebook page says they'll open in March of 2013. Their menu of salads, paninis, custom pizzas, sorbet and gelato sounds tempting! Seeing vegan, vegetarian  , dairy free and gluten free options on Your Pie's menu is further incentive for me to try it out. 

*02/19/2013: The opening date will be March 15, 2013. 

"Your Pie. Express Your Inner Pizza"

Bad saganaki

I had lunch at a restaurant today (we'll call it Restaurant X). I ordered Greek saganaki as an appetizer, because I've been craving it since I was in Norfolk over the Christmas holiday (I didn't get a chance to visit my beloved Orapax for my usual saganaki fix.) What arrived at my table was a culinary catastrophe: the greasiest, saddest lump of low quality cheese I've ever seen. The saganaki looked like someone fished a hunk of cheese from the bottom of a deep fryer. I had two tiny bites and couldn't eat more. It was just a mouthful of oil. Gross. This was nothing like the hot, delicious saganaki I eat at Orapax, which is set aflame table side and extinguished with fresh squeezed lemon.

Restaurant X took the appetizer off my bill, which I appreciated. But I will never order saganaki from them again. I'm going to stick with Orapax when I want freshly prepared saganaki. Substitutions = no dice, buddy.

Pepperidge Farm Milano Cookie Cake

"Temptingly moist vanilla cake is surrounded by chocolate buttercream icing and topped with real Milano cookie crumbles."

The ride home jostled the cake a bit. 

Today I bought a Pepperidge Farm Milano Cookie Cake from the Pepperidge Farm Thrift Store in Jacksonville. I've been interested in taste testing Pepperidge Farm's Milano cookie cake since August.There is also a chocolate chunk cookie cake available; I might buy that next time. 

The Milano cake was vanilla with chocolate buttercream icing. I enjoyed the moist and fluffy cake. The icing was thick, rich and broke off into chunks of fudge when I cut the cake. I think the buttercream was more solid and candy-like than other Pepperidge Farm frostings I've had in the past. However, I was disappointed by the Milano cookie chunks. There weren't many cookie pieces on top of the cake. The Milanos were too soft and crumbly to taste, unless I scraped a piece off. 

Would I buy this cake again ? You bet. The cookies didn't add to or take away from the cake; but other than that, it was a fabulous cake sure to satisfy one's chocolate cake cravings.

Apple Coconut Dessert Pizza

My original plan this afternoon was to make the Apple Cookie Rolls (Elmali Kurabiye) from Binnur's Turkish Cookbook blog. I've had good luck with her recipes, such as the ramadan pide I made a few years ago. But then I discovered I was low on butter and out of lemon. Plan #2 was to make something with my Hodgson Mill whole wheat flour. The flour bag had recipes for whole wheat pumpkin muffins and whole wheat pizza crust. I decided to combine the pizza crust recipe and Binnur's apple filling to bake a dessert pizza.

These are the changes I made to Binnur's apple filling, which I used for the pizza topping:
- Used two Granny Smith apples and one red apple
- After following Binur's directions for cooking the apple filling, I removed it from the stove and temporarily set it aside in a glass bowl.
- Toasted 1 cup sweetened coconut flakes in a pan on the stove with 2 Tbsp of butter. After toasting, I poured the apple filling back into the pan and mixed it with the coconut.
- Put a handful of Ocean Spray Reduced Sugar Craisins into a cup of water and allowed them to plump.
- Broke up a couple pecan halves
- Removed the coconut-apple mix from stove. I combined that with the pecan halves and Craisins. Then I spread the apple coconut topping on the baked crust with a rubber spatula.

This is the Hodgson Mill crust recipe and the changes I made:

- Added in 1 1/2 teaspoons of pumpkin pie spice and 1/3 cup Nice! 100% Pure Honey for more of a dessert flavor
- Used canola oil instead of olive oil.
- Let the dough rise two times. The first rising was for one hour instead of the suggested 15 minutes. The second time, I rolled out the dough on a floured surface, placed it into a large greased and floured skillet and let the dough rise for two hours (cold weather has been messing with my baking times this week).

- Baked the dough in the skillet for 15-20 minutes at 365 degrees. 

- Removed the skillet from oven with a towel (super hot pan handle!) and flipped crust onto baking sheet. Decorated crust with Binnur's apple filling and cut into slices

I'm very pleased with how the recipe turned out. The pizza crust wasn't tough or overly thick. The apples and pumpkin pie spice gave the dessert pizza a fragrant autumn scent. I want to make this again for Thanksgiving.