Gluten-free apple spice cake for six months

Lucie turned six months old the other day. And we held a little party.

Why not celebrate six months? It seems like a pretty big accomplishment to us. Recently, I was talking to my sister, whose baby boy is 4 and a half months, and we both said we used to wonder why parents held parties for little kids. What’s the point? we thought. Like the kid cares. It’s all for the parents.

Now we get it. Exactly! It is all for the parents. And the parents need those parties. It’s a way to say, “Look! We made it! You are six months old and you are still alive and healthy and happy!”

Gluten-free Nova Scotia oatcakes

Growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, oatcakes were a coffee shop staple. A cross between a cookie and a biscuit, they were the size of pucks and nearly an inch thick, and sometimes dipped in chocolate. I remember often buying them and almost always being disappointed – they were usually far too sweet and far too dry, with a texture reminiscent of sawdust. But somehow I couldn’t stop giving in to the oatcake temptation.

I was reminded of oatcakes a couple of years ago when talking to a colleague who worked in Nova Scotia for a while. During that conversation I realized for the first time how regional the oatcake is. I had never thought about the fact that I didn’t really see them anywhere but in Nova Scotia.

Watermelon Ginger Popsicles

The weather in Edmonton has been absolutely lovely. It really couldn’t have been more perfect for the three weeks of my mini waiting-for-baby vacation. We’re still not sure how long this vacation will last. The baby is due tomorrow, but who knows when it will actually decide to show up? We’re hoping sooner rather than later. We’re so excited to meet it!

I’ve been spending lots of time outdoors, walking to and from various errands and sitting on the balcony soaking up the sun. I was telling J the other day that it’s amazing how much Edmonton transforms itself at this time of year. All of sudden green is everywhere you look – vibrant, pulsating green. We live right near the river valley, and it becomes a haven of greenery, the complete opposite of the brown and white we see most of the year. I love all the flowers covering the tree branches right now – to me, it’s one of the most beautiful sights in this climate. The air is so fragrant. It’s wonderful.

I’ve also been spending a lot of my free time in the kitchen, and with the warm weather, thoughts turned to summer treats like homemade popsicles. They are so easy to make, and there are so many delicious combinations. I’m inspired by a brilliant cookbook I have about Mexican popsicles, called paletas, written by Fany Gerson. She runs a paleta business in New York City. The book is beautiful and filled with recipes for all kinds of various popsicles, shaved ices, and aguas frescas. My first batch was grapefruit popsicles, which were fantastic. A blend of fresh grapefruit juice and simple syrup, they had a perfect tartness.

These watermelon popsicles were an inspiration from J. I bought a big watermelon on sale at the grocery store earlier this week and was planning to turn some of it into popsicles, using the recipe in Fany’s book. I also made ginger syrup this week, and J suggested combining the two. They turned out great. So refreshing from the watermelon, and the ginger adds a really nice little kick. J said the ginger came through as an aroma for him. I made my ginger syrup really strong and spicy, but feel free to play it down if you like. Know, however, that if you make it too weak you might not taste ginger in the popsicles at all.

You could also easily make these with a plain simple syrup, as the original recipe suggests. If you’re a fan of popsicles and other frozen treats I highly recommend this book. Most recipes look very easy and take advantage of summer’s bounty. There are a few Mexican ingredients that might be hard to find, but that could be a fun challenge too (depending on where you live).

Watermelon Ginger Popsicles

1/2 cup ginger syrup (recipe follows)
1.5 pounds peeled and diced watermelon (about 4 cups)
1 Tablespoon lime juice

Put the watermelon in a blender (I actually used an immersion blender) and blend until smooth. Add the syrup and lime juice and mix again until blended.

Pour into your popsicle molds and freeze until solid.

Makes about ten 2.5 oz-popsicles (the mold in the first picture above is a smaller one – I used two different-sized molds. )

To make the ginger syrup:

2 cups chopped ginger (from a few large hunks fresh ginger root)
4.5 cups water
1.5 cups sugar

These amounts will make about 2 cups very strong, spicy, not very sweet ginger syrup. If you don’t want it so spicy, use less ginger or more sugar. It’s great to have on hand to add to water or mixed drinks, but you only need 1/2 cup for the popsicles.

The ginger should be chopped into small pieces. Put it into a pot with the sugar and water and bring to a boil so the sugar dissolves. Simmer for about 30 minutes so the ginger flavour infuses the water. The longer you let it simmer, the stronger it gets. Let cool, strain the ginger and pour the syrup into a jar or bottle.

Gluten-free Christmas Cookies & Some News

 
The Christmas baking started a couple of weeks ago around here. A little early, yes, but I had an excuse: I attended a cookie exchange for my friend Mackenzie's wedding shower. It was a great excuse to make up a big batch of dough for the holiday season. There's still some in the freezer for the coming weeks.

The wedding shower was great. Unfortunately I couldn't eat most of the tasty-looking treats, but since neither the host nor I can eat gluten, her mother brought a few gluten-free chocolatey things from the Old Strathcona Farmers' Market which were delicious.

The cookies I made are my first attempt at converting a favourite Christmas recipe, and they were a huge success. . J and I first made Nigella Lawson's Christmas Decoration Cookies five years ago (!) when we were living in our first apartment together in Charlottetown, the site of the original little red kitchen. We've loved them ever since. I think it's the unexpected spiciness from the black pepper, and the use of brown instead of white sugar. It turns them into a cross between sugar cookies and gingerbread cookies. They adapted perfectly well to my whole-grain gluten-free flour blend, without any xantham gum or guar gum. The dough was easy to work with and the taste was just what I remembered.

 
The icing is a nice way to dress up these cookies, but I'm not sure it's entirely necessary. I think the spicy flavour comes through better without it.

 
(We don't usually make these to hang on the tree anymore - we'd rather eat them fresh. But they do look lovely if you want to turn them into decorations.)

J and I are getting pretty excited about Christmas. We're staying here in Edmonton, and it's the first year that neither of our families will be coming to visit us. A different, quieter Christmas, but I think it's a good thing. From here on out Christmas will probably be crazy, since there will be an added element.

 
Yes, this is our last Christmas just the two of us. By next year we'll have a seven-month old for everyone to spoil and enjoy. We're expecting our first baby on May 25. Needless to say, we're pretty pumped about it!

And that's the main reason the blog has been so quiet over the past few months. I haven't been feeling so  great - lots of nausea and fatigue. It's been an adjustment, and blogging is not a big priority. But having rounded the three-month mark a few weeks ago, I'm hoping that more energy lies ahead. We'll see how it goes.

 
Enjoy these cookies and the start of your holiday season! These days I'm really enjoying candlelight in the evenings and looking at the sparkly coloured lights on the legislature grounds outside our window. Here's to lighting up the Edmonton darkness however you can.

Gluten-free Pepper-Spiced Christmas Roll-out Cookies
adapted from Nigella Lawson’s Christmas Decoration Cookies

Ingredients
For the cookies:

3 1/2 ounces (100 grams) unsalted butter, softened
3 1/2 ounces (100 grams) dark brown sugar
10 1/2 ounces (300 grams) Gluten-free All-purpose flour mix, plus extra for dusting (I used this one)
Pinch salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1 to 2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper (I like it with 2 teaspoons)
2 large free-range eggs, beaten
4 tablespoons clear honey

For the icing and trimmings:
2 ½ cups icing sugar, sifted
6 tablespoons water
Gold or silver sugar balls or sprinkles
Ribbon or wire, for hanging

Directions:
Preheat oven to 325 degrees F (170 degrees C).

Place the butter and sugar in a clean bowl and beat with an electric mixer until the color and texture of the mixture becomes pale. Place the mixture into the bowl of a food processor* and add the flour, salt, baking powder, cinnamon, cloves and freshly ground black pepper. Blend the mixture. While the food processor is blending, gradually pour the eggs and honey down the funnel of the food processor's lid into the bowl until a dough has formed (you may not require all of the liquid if the dough has come together before it is used up). If the dough is too dry add a little water to the mixture. If the dough is too wet add a little flour.

*If you don’t have a food processor – blend the dry ingredients in a large bowl, then add the butter and sugar mixture and beat with the electric mixer until it is a sandy texture. Then gradually add the egg and honey while the beaters are still on until the dough comes together. Stop and test after you’ve added about two-thirds of the liquid to see if you can squeeze the dough together into a ball. If not, continue to add liquid until you can.

Halve the dough. Wrap one half of the dough in plastic wrap, place it in a freezer bag, and refrigerate. Place the other half of the dough onto a floured work surface. Roll the dough, with a rolling pin, into a disk to about 1/4-inch thick. Using cookies cutters, cut decoration shapes out of the dough. Re-roll the remaining dough and cut out more shapes until the dough is used up. Remove the second half of the dough from the fridge and repeat this process.

If you want to hang your cookies on the Christmas tree: with the pointed end of a small icing nozzle, puncture a hole just below the top of each decoration (through which ribbon or wire can later be threaded to hang them).

Arrange the decorations on baking sheets lined with a layer of reusable silicon baking parchment and cook for 15-20 minutes or until they are cooked through and golden-brown in color. Transfer the decorations to a wire rack to cool.

To make the icing, mix approximately six tablespoons of boiling water with the sifted icing sugar and stir until you’ve got a thin, glossy glaze. Ice the cold decorations using a teaspoon (use the tip of the spoon for dripping the icing onto the decoration and the back of the teaspoon for smoothing). Scatter sprinkles or gold and silver balls as you desire. Cut the ribbon into short lengths and thread the ribbon through the holes in the decorations.

Pumpkin apple upside-down cake–again

In my last post, I forgot to include the link to the recipe for that pumpkin apple upside-down cake I made for Thanksgiving, so here it is. J also made it for his co-workers the other day and they all loved it. The office resounded with the typical refrain of "I can't believe it's gluten-free!"

I've actually found it quite easy to make delicious gluten-free cakes, especially when you add great flavours like pumpkin. (I recently made a fantastic and very easy chocolate cake for a dinner party, also from La Tartine Gourmande blog. You can find the recipe here. )

Since I now turn to the Ahern's whole-grain gluten-free blend (just scroll down to find the recipe) so much, I substituted that mix in equal weight for the flours originally called for in the pumpkin cake. This time I mixed up my blend using brown rice, sorghum, millet, buckwheat and teff flours, along with a few starches.

That's the great thing about the mix - so easy! Just dump it into the bowl and weigh it. You don't even have to get out all your different flour containers. Using the whole-grain blend (which is a 70/30 mix of whole grains to starches) created an even darker, moister cake. Maybe it was the teff and buckwheat. It almost reminded me of gingerbread. Perfect for these blustery fall days. 

In the right place

It has been a crazy couple of weeks around here.

Tomorrow night is a big event in my husband's life - his final voice recital for his Master's of Music degree at the University of Alberta. He'll be singing an hour-long program of music, from classical to 20th-century, in five languages, accompanied by piano.

Solo recitals are always a big deal for musicians, but this one is especially important for several reasons. J has spent three years working on his Master's degree, after starting out in music theory and switching to voice performance after one semester. It's the culmination of nine straight years of post-secondary education, which included several shifts. He started out as an accordionist in Paris, then moved back to PEI to study organ, started taking voice lessons, took on voice as a major, and then started out in theory here in Alberta.

He's definitely in the right place now. I truly believe singing is what he was meant to do. See and hear him on stage and you'll agree with me.

But the craziest thing about tonight's recital is a more recent change. Last summer J was in Austria for a five-week training program in German song and poetry. He worked with some of the most famous classical singers and coaches in the world. It was there he learned that he's not actually a baritone, the voice type he'd been singing as for seven years. It turns out he's a tenor! (Tenor is the highest male voice type, followed by baritone and bass.) Needless to say, this was a surprise. He's spent the past nine months adjusting to this new reality, learning new repertoire, and tackling many technical challenges with his ever-supportive teacher and coach at the U of A.

You could say tonight is his Edmonton debut as a tenor. At age 26, he's considered a very young tenor, and his voice will still change a lot in the coming years. But tonight he gets to show it off in a program of beautiful, challenging music.

J's parents arrived in town today, and my mother, a classical musician herself and a huge fan of his, flies in tomorrow morning. Many of his friends and colleagues will be there tomorrow night too.

J started working full-time a few weeks ago, so he's been preparing for the recital on top of a 9 to 5 job. I am also playing piano for one song cycle on the recital, so I've been practicing extra-hard and we've been rehearsing together.

On top of all this, (were you wondering if there was a food element to this story?) I'm preparing and baking the food for the post-recital reception.

I have to admit there's some pressure about making this reception delightful in every way. But I think all the pressure is coming from me. At UPEI, where J did his undergrad degree, student recital receptions were kind of a big deal. Everyone tried to have the best one, most enlisting the help of their mothers and friends to cook and bake up a storm. The last reception I created like this one was for an organ recital J did back in 2007. I remember baking sugar cookies two ways, preparing chocolate-dipped strawberries, smoked salmon crostini and goat cheese-sundried tomato dip, all in our tiny red kitchen on Pownall Street in Charlottetown (the original little red kitchen, incidentally).

That reception was a ton of work, and this one has been too. But it's work I enjoy. I love the planning process - deciding what to make for a balance of foods and flavours, which foods work best in a reception setting (all cold food that's easy to pick up and eat), having enough options for the vegetarians.

And of course it's all gluten-free.

The biggest challenge, for me, is trying to figure out how much food to make. I really have no idea how many people will come to the reictal - it's hard to predict these things when it's free and you don't need to buy a ticket. I'm erring on the side of making too much instead of too little, but it may be that we are foisting off platters of cookies and crackers on our friends at the end of the night. 

In terms of preparation, I am just about where I want to be at this point. The baking is done, and tomorrow morning I'll finish up the things that will not keep so well. It's going to be a bit of a blitz, with J's parents coming over to help me wrap dates in prosciutto and stick feta and tomatoes on skewers.

Here is the menu:

} Cinnamon sugar cookies
} Chocolate chip-walnut bars
} Lemon ginger bars
} Pumpkinseed Brittle
} Hummus with vegetables and crackers
} Tomato-feta skewers
} Prosciutto-wrapped dates stuffed with goat cheese

I've been doing all my baking lately - and everything for this reception - using a new-to-me GF flour blend. It's from Gluten-free Girl, one of the most popular and authoritative GF voices writing online. Her blog has been around forever, and she has published two cookbooks. I greatly admire her drive and her work in raising awareness about celiac disease. So far, her flour blend works very well.

I'm off to cut the lemon bars. If you're free tomorrow night, come hear my husband sing! I promise it will be a fantastic performance, and if everything comes together, the reception should be decent too.

The recital is at McDougall United Church in Edmonton – 10025 101 st., 7:30 pm on Thursday March 31st. Admission is free.

Pumpkin Seed Brittle

On top of busy workdays and finishing essays, we're starting to celebrate the holidays in small ways around here. This is one of them.

We made this pumpkin seed brittle as a gift for two of J's teachers, along with an amazing roasted vegetable curry from the Moosewood Simple Suppers book. J's voice teacher and voice coach have really gone above and beyond this semester, so we wanted to find a small way to repay them.

We had never made brittle before, but I found the recipe on smitten kitchen and it looked easy. It was. More importantly, it was absolutely fantastic. The texture is hard, but kind of chewy at the same time, and the flavour is more than pure sugar: it's dark and complex, tasting of browned butter with salt, almost like toffee. It's really intoxicating, and I think it will become a Christmas-season staple.

In other news, we're going away for Christmas this year. It's a completely unexpected trip - we were planning a small, quiet Christmas in Edmonton with J's brother and his wife. Instead, Christmas in Rome with my entire family is how we'll be spending the holiday. It's unbelievable really, and even though we're leaving in a few days I haven't exactly realized that yet. We've never been to Italy, and I'm sure it will be amazing. Apparently it's a fantastic country for celiacs, with gluten-free products available everywhere. I'm excited to discover some new ones.

Before we leave I hope to post the rest of my stories from our summer European adventure - since it's now time for a new one!

Pumpkin Apple Upside-down Cake

Lately I have been finding lots of inspiration over at La Tartine Gourmande. 

Bea has a really beautiful website. She's a professional photographer and food stylist so her photos are always gorgeous. And I really like her style of food too. Very wholesome, with a focus on fresh fruit and vegetables. Since she's from France there's often a French influence in her food as well. 

Bea definitely has a dessert and baking focus, and it turns out that much of her baking is gluten-free. As far as  I know, she doesn't have celiac disease, but she seems to really enjoy experimenting with gluten-free flours. So far, all of her gluten-free recipes I've tried have been delicious. She uses a lot of nut flours and really likes quinoa and buckwheat.

She also often incorporates fruit and vegetables in her cakes and other baked goods, which I really appreciate. Sometimes it's great to be decadent, but if I want a little treat to nibble on and pack in my lunch, I like it to be somewhat good for me as well. Which is definitely the case with this fantastic pumpkin cake. 

What could be more autumn-like? An incredibly moist cake with a rich pumpkin flavour and hints of quinoa and ginger with a caramelized apple top. I would love to try this as an upside-down cranberry cake as well, and it would probably be awesome with pears. It's also great just like this ... especially with a dollop of thick yogurt.

As you can see in the photo up there, I really like using my scale to weigh flours when I bake. I think it will really help me experiment more with different kinds of gluten-free flours as well. Some of Bea's recipes have weights and some don't. This pumpkin cake doesn't, so the last time I made it I figured out what they should be. If you like baking with a scale (it is a much more accurate way to measure flours, plus you don't have to get any measuring cups dirty!), here are the flour measurements for this cake:

1/2 cup quinoa flour: 2 oz.
1/2 cup brown rice flour: 2.5 oz
1/4 cup tapioca flour: 1 oz.
1/4 cup sweet rice flour: 1.25 oz

Here are a few other recipes from La Tartine Gourmande that I've enjoyed. Go peruse Bea's site yourself, I'm sure you'll love it.

Apple and Olive Oil Cake
Multi-purpose almond crumble topping
Cinnamon tea cakes

(This cake also looks amazing!)

My sister's wedding cakes

My trip to Halifax in early July was everything I hoped it would be. Fun. relaxed. Full of wedding-ness, family and cake-baking. It felt awesome to be back there. Awesome and a bit weird. It's my home, but my home is also in Charlottetown, and now sort of in Edmonton too. It makes for a strange feeling.

I ate some great food, home-cooked and out in restaurants. Of course there were places I wanted to visit that I didn't, but I have a couple of food posts in the works about the trip.

And the cakes! Oh yes, the cakes. Well. I made eight cakes, which was not as hard as it sounds. We wanted to have layer cakes so they could be filled, but the thought of baking 16 cakes instead of eight was, frankly, terrifying. So instead we baked eight, and cut each one in two so we could fill them. The final formula was orange cakes with lemon buttercream and lemon filling with sliced strawberries.

First I baked them, split them and froze them by wrapping first in plastic wrap and then in tin foil.

Then I made the buttercream and the filling. That meant a LOT of lemons. Thank God Claire has a juicer. This used to be my parents' and I love it.



Then it was time to put the cakes together. After thawing, I spent the morning before the wedding filling, crumbing and frosting in stages. Crumbing is when you put a thin layer of icing on a cake to seal in the crumbs. Then you have to chill it before frosting.

These steps actually took less time than I thought they would - I think I really got into the zone. I made sure the decorating was simple: I just piped a single border on the bottom of each cake. I don't have a lot of experience piping, but I managed to make them all look pretty good. The frosting was super fluffy and fantastic to work with.

I definitely learned a few things through this whole process. If you are baking wedding cakes, or any large-scale baking project for a special occasion, this is my advice:

1. Make sure you have all the right equipment. I couldn't have done it without my mini palette knife to spread the frosting in straight lines, the right piping tip (in my case it was the star tip), and a turntable (or a revolving cake stand) to help ice the cakes easily.

2. Plan the transport of the cakes. We bought cardboard cake plates and cardboard cake boxes at the Bulk Barn in Halifax. The cakes were 9 inches and we bought 10-inch cake plates and 12-inch boxes. Emma, one of the other bridesmaids, helped me transport the cakes from Claire's apartment to the hall where the wedding was (thanks Emma!), and even with a little sliding around in the boxes, there was no mussing of the icing.

3. Buy extra of all ingredients. It took me about half an hour to calculate what I would need to octuple (is that a word?) these recipes, and I erred on the side of caution when I was at the grocery store (although of course I forgot a few things and had to make a few extra trips later). There's nothing more annoying than running out of lemons when you're still 2 tablespoons short of lemon juice.

4. Make sure your leavening agents are fresh. To be honest, I've never really thought much about this, but it really makes a difference. We made the first cake as a test with older baking powder and it did not rise that much. When we made the others with new baking powder they rose way more.



I would recommend all three of these recipes to anyone - and not just vegans! Not only are they all delicious, but practically they really hold up too. The cake recipe freezes well and was firm enough to cut easily without any crumbly bits. Despite the hot, muggy weather in Halifax, the buttercream (made with vegetable shortening and vegan margarine) showed zero signs of melting or separating even after the cakes sat on the display table at the reception for 12 hours (and no air conditioning in the room). Impressive, I say. The orange cake and buttercream are both from the fantastic book Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World - a solid investment if you are a vegan or if you have any vegans in your life you like to bake for. The lemon creme filling is from another vegan dessert book called Sweet Utopia.




I was very lucky to be making these for an extremely grateful and non-demanding bride and groom. It was so great to be able to do this as a gift to both of them. Since they both love food, I knew the cakes had to taste amazing (hence the four test cakes before leaving Edmonton). But they weren't very picky about appearances, which I appreciated very much. We ended up decorating the cakes with an array of fresh summer fruit - red and Rainier cherries, strawberries, and blueberries. We left the fruit whole so it wouldn't bleed onto the white icing, which meant we had to remove some of it to make the cakes easier to cut, but it was okay. The cakes were all displayed together on one table on cake stands we had borrowed from friends and family. The final effect was very pretty and summery.


I got lots of compliments on the cake from people at the reception, which felt great. I thought it was good too. Although, to be honest, I probably won't be making another citrus-flavoured cake for a long time.

After a fantastic wedding and party, Claire and Alex went to Turkey on their honeymoon. Congratulations guys!! Maybe I can bake a cake for your anniversary party in the future ...

Wedding cake: a last-minute update!

I’m flying out of Edmonton for Halifax bright and early tomorrow morning. After four test cakes, I think I’ve decided on the cake I want to make … but I’ll still need to test it before the wedding. The consensus from my testers (mostly grateful opera students in a program with J) was that the first cake I made, the orange one from the last post, was the best. So the plan right now is orange cake with lemon buttercream and a vegan lemon creme filling with sliced strawberries. The filling is made with silken tofu, and it’s delicious.

Wish me luck with the final product! We’ve also decided not to do a tiered, stacked cake but instead bake several individual layer cakes and display them all together on one table at the reception. The idea of all those dowels and huge cake pans just made me too nervous.

There are still a few details to iron out, but I think we’ll mostly decorate with fruit and some fresh flowers, plus a little piping thrown in for good measure. Buttercream won the contest against fondant, which I’m pretty happy about.

I’m hoping to update the cake results from Halifax, because when I get home I’ll be computerless for about three weeks. I’m going to take a little blogging break … not sure how long yet. I’m heading to Europe to join J in August for three weeks. I’m sure there will be lots of amazing food to blog about, but it might just have to wait until I get back in September.

So have a great summer! I’ll be enjoying Halifax, Edmonton, Vienna, Paris and Denmark … what fun!

A very important wedding cake

I have an announcement to make: I am baking a wedding cake!

Not just any wedding cake. The cake for my sister Claire’s wedding. The same sister who is as obsessed with food as I am. The same one who is a passionate vegan and baker extraordinaire. That sister.

There might be a wee bit of pressure involved in this project.

But the prospect of fun and excitement far outweigh any nerves I may have. I’m no professional baker, and most cakes I bake aren’t even frosted, but I want this to be the best. wedding. cake. ever. Which is partly why I’m sharing this news here.

First up, the details:

- the wedding is on July 10 in Halifax.
- the cake will have to serve about 175 guests (eep!). This means at least three tiers, possibly four.
- there is to be no chocolate involved (groom’s request) and also no nuts (just in case people have allergies). Flavours such as coconut and mocha have also been vetoed. For now, the flavour palette involves some kind of fruit, most likely citrus.
- of course, it must be vegan!

The fondant/buttercream debate continues. We are thinking fondant would be a neater, cleaner-looking cake (see above about not being a professional cake baker), and there is no risk of melting frosting (the reception is indoors, but you never know). The downside is it doesn’t taste so hot, and doesn’t look so natural. I’ve never worked with it and don’t remember ever eating it either.

So far I’ve baked one test cake – the one you see here in the photos. It was an orange cake with lemon buttercream (both recipes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World – a must-have book in vegan baking circles). J took it to a party where it was a huge hit. I like it too, but I’m not convinced it’s the one. I used the buttercream to fill and frost it, but I thought that made it too sweet – this was likely also because I made the filling too thick. Ideally I’d like to have a filling different from the frosting (if we end up using frosting and not fondant).

There’s a lot I need to learn about construction and decorating a cake this big, and a lot of supplies to buy – dowels, cardboard cake rounds, a turntable, tinting colours, and if the frosting option prevails, palette knives and tinting colours. For preparation, I plan on baking the cake once I get to Halifax and freezing the layers. The morning of the wedding I’ll frost and fill each tier, then transport them to the venue to assemble and add final decorations. Did I mention I’m also the maid of honour? It’s going to be quite the day.

Tomorrow I’m going to buy a vegan desserts cookbook that looks promising, and I’m hoping it has some inspiring cake and filling recipes in it. I’m thinking of testing a lemon cake or vanilla cake next, and possibly experimenting with some kind of strawberry filling. I’m planning for several more test cakes before I head to Halifax July 1st.

So now I appeal to you, dear readers. Any advice for the first-time wedding cake baker? Fondant or buttercream? Flavours, decorating techniques, words of wisdom?? I am beyond excited about this, but a little guidance would not hurt at all.

St. Lawrence Market - Toronto

Visiting food markets in new cities is something I love to do when I’m traveling. Sadly I haven’t had many opportunities. I’m hoping to take in a market or two when we visit Europe this summer – so excited! I’ve heard so much about the Pike Place market in Seattle and the Ferry Building market in San Francisco. I really hope I get a chance to visit them someday. When we were in Vancouver last March I loved the Granville Island Public Market, and it immediately reminded me of the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto.

I first visited the St. Lawrence Market about a year ago, and I went back when I was in Toronto recently. It’s a pretty cool place, and just like the one on Granville Island, makes me wish we could have a market that was open during the week in Edmonton. It’s in a big old warehouse building downtown on Front street, and covers two floors. The top floor is mostly food and some kitchen-related items. When you head downstairs there is more food but also some arts and crafts mixed in.

There is so much to see.

Tantalizing cheese – big creamy wheels of it.

Lots of meat too.

Many varieties of shellfish.

Several bakeries (my mouth is watering at that Challah…).

Fresh Montreal bagels.

There’s a store on the lower level that has an astonishing array of bulk items – nuts, beans, all kinds of weird candies I’ve never heard of. They also sell different kinds of bulk salt, like Himalayan pink salt and smoked salt. It’s a great way to try new kinds of salt without paying an arm and a leg for a whole box. Last year I bought a small container of fleur de sel that’s not quite gone, and this year I bought Maldon salt. I haven’t tested them side by side yet to see if I can taste a big difference, but they’re both fantastic for sprinkling onto your food right before you eat.

The market also has many produce stands, both organic and non. When I was there in mid-May, they already had local berries. Jealous!

I can’t wait to discover more markets on my travels. Where are your favourite markets?