Easter Eats

If there's one thing I love more than a good dinner party, it would be dining as the guest of an equally as (or more) skilled culinary mastermind.

For Easter this year, I got to be an esteemed guest in my SoBe partner in crime's beautiful new home and enjoy a wonderful spread of traditional lamb and mint jelly, with all sorts of fixings.

Of course I'm not one to show up as a guest empty handed. For the cocktail hour (or hours as is the case with my friends) I whipped up these Rachael Ray Sage Sausage Bites with Balsamic Apricot Dip. These little Italian sausage meatballs are always a big hit with a sauce that offers the right mix of sweet and savory.

For dessert, I whipped up one of my all time favorite desserts - one I also consider an Easter staple. Carrot cake. I could not resist trying the Cake Boss Buddy Valastro's recipe, and turned to Ina Garten for the cream cheese frosting. The cake was perfectly moist and flavorful, and the cream cheese frosting rich, but not too sugary.

My efforts, however, were quite humbled by the spectacular spread. I'd never had lamb with mint jelly before, and was pleasantly surprised by the flavor combination (courtesy of Tyler Florence's take on years of tradition). It was lucky too that I saved room after the cocktail hour, since I could not get enough of another one of my friend's veggie pizza, a cream cheese, ranch dressing spread covering croissants and topped with carrots and broccoli. This recipe looks pretty similar to the one she told me.

Of course one of my favorite stars of the show were the lamb cupcakes another friend showed up with. The loving detail with which she placed little white chocolate chips to look like fur, and marshmallows for ears was just priceless!

Scones, revisited

So a few years ago I picked up this little scone habit.

I don't remember quite how it started. A friend of mine in high school seemed to eat them a lot. Then I started buying them at Starbucks with my Americano nearly every morning.

But after a while those dollars add up, and one tires of the hard, frozen and over processed taste of the Starbucks pastries.

I figured I might as well just start making them.

Thus opened the door to my scone obsession.

I started with a blueberry scone with lemon glaze, courtesy of Tyler Florence. I then moved on to create my own cinnamon scone recipe, determined to get a one up on Starbucks. I tried raspberry, peach, peppermint chocolate. Some Sundays I just set up my own little scone test kitchen and baked all morning.

As with many obsessions, this one turned out to be somewhat passing. At some point, I tired of making scones every Sunday and their creation in my kitchen became more and more infrequent.

But apparently the memory of the scones still lingers, particularly in the mind of the locally famous weatherman who works at the TV station in our building. A few weeks ago he reminded me how much he loved the blueberry scones, so I promised to make some for him.

So that's what I did Sunday. I dug out the original Tyler Florence blueberry scone recipe that started it all.

One thing about these scones: they're more like biscuits. Or the really, really fresh scones you get at some independent bakeries. They're moist, not hard. My British friend actually said he liked them better than the traditional scone you find at stores (now that's an endorsement).

And a note on the recipe: You might want to try your own luck coming up with the lemon glaze topping. I find that if you follow Tyler's instructions, the glaze is really runny and watery. I like mine thicker, so tend to just melt the butter, use less lemon juice and then add in the confectioners sugar until I reach the desired consistency.

I forgot all of this however, and went with Tyler's method. I ended up adding a ton of confectioners sugar to thicken it up, and then had a serious glaze surplus.

So I went with the obvious solution. I made an Ina Garten pound cake to soak up the rest of it. This worked out well since I had all of the ingredients in my kitchen except for the buttermilk, but found recipes on line for a substitute that involved about 3 tablespoons of lemon juice to three quarters a cup of milk.

And that was the culmination of my Sunday morning baking. Who knows, maybe this will jump start another scone revolution and I'll end up sharing my recipe for the cinnamon ones ...