Recipes

Easter chocolate is like the The Phantom Menace. After plenty of hype and lots of waiting you're all set for something dark and intense, but the final product is just a disappointing merchandising opportunity. Take the classic chocolate rabbit. Tall ears, a basket on his back...

This roasted cauliflower salad serves as my reminder that good recipes are flexible. Good recipes invite experimentation. They serve as helpful guidelines, not rigid rules. With titles like "The Best This" or "The Ultimate That" it's easy to forget no one recipe has a monopoly...

The vanilla extract on the left is full of seeds and has a whole pod in the bottle. The vanilla beans on the right are fresh, fragrant and supple enough to knot. Both products are Really Horrible. Seriously. They're from Really Horrible Enterprises located in Ottawa, ON. I...

These quotes wrap around the bulkhead in Casey Barber's kitchen. I like that she's not afraid of orange, or irreverence, or figuring out how to get the cream filling inside a homemade Twinkie®. Her book, Classic Snacks Made from Scratch: 70 Homemade Versions of Your Favourite...

When is a bowl of soup not a bowl of soup? When it's a community coming together in support. Soup Sisters is a registered not-for-profit organization with 12 chapters across Canada. Through the help of their volunteers, they have delivered more than 100,000 containers of hot,...

This is jar of freshly stained homemade ghee - pronounced GEE. It's clarified butter pushed to the edge. Done right,  it will reward you with golden brown, nutty goodness. Done wrong? Both you and the butter will end up weeping into the compostable waste bin....

These Danish treats are aebleskivers (or aebelskivers or ebleskivers or ebelskivers). Their pronunciation is equally elusive. Some say "able-skeever" while the Danish pronunciation is more "able-skewer" with a lilt I can't nail down. Literally translated, the word means "apple slices" since the traditional form has...

Chocolate pots de creme for two The astute among you will notice the subtle change in the header. Although the domain name remains the same, Christie's Corner has been replaced by The Messy Baker. Baby steps, Charmian. Baby steps. The new domain name and layout are coming. Just slowly. There's a lot of tech involved and that always takes more time and chocolate than I imagined. My eyelids are quivering and I'm not sure if that's from hours of staring at a computer screen or fuelling myself with caffeine and cocoa beans. Regardless, stay tuned for changes. I don't normally celebrate Valentine's Day, but am going to make an exception this year. I've been sitting on some news and think Valentine's Day is a great chance to share the love. The Messy Baker is going to arrive in bookstores in Spring 2014. Yes, that's later than originally planned, but it's going to be published in Canada via HarperCollins Canada and the US / rest of the English-speaking world via Rodale. I'm still in shock. Anyway, let's celebrate with chocolate. I've two recipes for you. One is a newly created, ultra-decadent, romantic French dessert scaled down for two. The other is a healthy, family-friendly treat for those with real kids or just a very persistent inner child. It's one of my favourites and courtesy of Mairlyn Smith. So get out the baking chocolate, find a few extra dish cloths to mop up the spills, and say I love you with food.
Curly Kale - The Messy Baker If I come back as a vegetable I want to be kale. Ruffly, versatile, pretty kale. Not only would I be my favourite colour (green), I'd finally have unstoppable curls — something I can't achieve even with hot rollers and a perm. But I'd be more than just another pretty edible. Unlike with cream puffs or macarons, my feminine exterior wouldn't wrap a soft, untoned middle. Quite the opposite. Instead, my frilly greens would stem from a strong backbone  that delivered the nutritional goods. And people would love me for it. They'd write blog posts in my honour. They'd hail me as a wonder. But best of all, they'd give me the royal treatment. Not all vegetables meet a pampered end. Carrots get stripped and shredded to pieces. Potatoes have their eyes gouged out before being mashed to a pulp, and we won't discuss what happens to poor old butternut squash. But kale? I kid you not, it gets slathered in oil and given a rub down. Yeah. I'd definitely come back as kale.

Massaged Kale: Basic Techniques

I learned about massaging kale from my cousin just the other week. At first I thought she was joking. In my family, you learn pretty quickly not to take odd-sounding advice at face value. One moment of misplaced trust can take years to live down. But it turns out this is a real thing. In fact, there are two full pages dedicated to kale massage in Wild About Greens: 125 Delectable Vegan Recipes for Kale, Collards, Arugula, Bok Choy, and other Leafy Veggies Everyone Loves by Nava Atlas, (© 2012, Sterling).  The following excerpt is from her book and published here with permission:
Black Forest Chocolate Bundt Cake Recipe - The Messy Baker I think I've created a new, never-heard-of-before dessert. Bundt Trifle. Not because I'm trying to be different or start the next food craze, but because my imagination plays tricks on me. I had wanted to make a trifle in one of those clear, straight-sided dishes that shows off all the layers. I knew my mother had one. I just knew it — as in Bet-Real-Money-on-It knew it. I could see it clearly in my head. I could even tell you where it was stored. So I phoned my mother and made arrangements to pop over and pick up the bowl. When I arrived, my mother handed me the cut-glass bowl with sloped sides she uses every year for the Christmas trifle. "Thanks, Mom. But I want your other trifle bowl." There was no other trifle bowl.