I’ll keep things short and sweet for this post. This Olive Oil + Cherry Coffee Cake is a cinch to pull together once you pit your cherries, which takes forever and makes a huge mess. I wouldn’t be mad at you if you used frozen pitted cherries, even though fresh are way better tasting.

The reason it’s so effortless if because I used baking mix. Specifically Trader Joe’s Multigrain Baking & Pancake Mix. It makes terrible pancakes, but awesome coffee cake and biscuits. I suggest picking some up, or another brand if you don’t have Trader Joe’s where you live.

Olive Oil + Cherry Coffee Cake

1 egg
1 cup almond milk
1 tsp vinegar
4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2.5 cups baking mix (I used Trader Joe’s Multigrain Baking Mix)
1/4 cup + 2tbsp granulated sugar
1 1/2 cups fresh cherries, stemmed, pitted, and sliced in half

Preheat your oven to 350. Lightly spray an 8×8 baking dish with olive oil or nonstick spray. Set aside.

Measure the milk in a glass measuring cup and add the vinegar. Stir briefly and set aside to “sour.” The milk will curdle slightly, that’s what you want to happen.

In a mixing bowl lightly beat the egg. Add the oil and the milk. Mix well.

Add the sugar and baking mix. Stir until just combined. Fold in the cherries.

Pour into the prepared pan and bake for 45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean. Let cool slightly and then cut into squares and serve!

I found this cute popsicle mold at the grocery store the other day for only $3 and had to pick it up. I love frozen treats in the summer and I’m sad to say that I have never really made my own. I knew that I could play around with ingredients to make fancy popsicles, but I figured I would start out with a mixture I was pretty sure would work out: creamsicles.

The instructions on the popsicle molds suggested trying a smoothie mixture in the popsicles, which I thought sounded great. So I simply mixed together fruit juice and plain yogurt, with a little maple syrup for sweetness and added some diced fruit. The results were great! I can’t wait to play around with other combinations. I’m thinking peach + mint would be pretty awesome!

Strawberry-Orange Creamsicle Popsicles

Makes 4 popsicles. My popsicle molds each hold a little less than 1/2 cup.

• 1/2 cup plain yogurt
• 1/2 cup orange juice
• 1 tbsp maple syrup
• 4 strawberries, diced

Whisk together the yogurt, orange juice, and maple syrup in a bowl. Place 1 diced strawberry in each of 4 popsicle molds. Pour 1/4 of the yogurt mixture into each mold. Insert the sticks and caps, and freeze until completely firm, at least several hours.

I grew up eating Nutella sandwiches. My dad had some friends from Spain who introduced us to the chocolate hazelnut spread at a picnic when I was a kid and we were hooked immediately.  My mom would even make us peanut butter and Nutella sandwiches to take with us to school.  This was before Nutella was widely available and therefore my sister and I were the only lucky kids who got to eat chocolate for lunch.

Neener neener neener.  No, I won’t trade half of my sandwich for your baggie of crushed Doritos.

Anyway, when I was in Paris a few years ago (I will never get over how posh that sounds) I, like everyone else that has ever visited Paris, fell madly in love with strawberry and Nutella crepes.  I was traveling with my best gal pal from college, Erica, and we both ate way more than our fair share of Nutella that trip.  At our hostel in London they had the generic brand available for slathering on stale toast as part of a complimentary “breakfast,” there were snack-sized containers that came with little breadsticks (genius!) that we bought in Nice, and there were those crepes bought from a street vendor in Paris that I can still taste looking at this picture.

I think you can see a bit of nutella on my chin. Classy.

There was also the time we accidentally got drunk before noon in Dublin.

Travel Tip: if you go to the Jameson distillery, take the tour and volunteer to do the taste test, but 11am is probably not the best time to go.

Or the time some French dudes and one guy from Texas got us free champagne at a club and then bought us hot chocolate and greasy cheap pizza at an absurd hour of the night morning.

I love that most of my travel memories revolve around the food I ate.

Anyway.  Back to Nutella.

If you’ve never had Nutella, stop reading and get yourself to a grocery store and buy yourself a jar.  If you don’t see the Nutella brand, I’m sure you can find something labeled “chocolate hazelnut spread” which is likely the same thing.  It has the consistency of melted chocolate and tastes like a Ferrero Rocher.

I’ve seen a recipe for a strawberry and Nutella panini floating around the internet that involves pound cake and sounds pretty awesome, but I don’t know about you, but I don’t usually have pound cake lying around when the craving for chocolate strikes.

I’m here to tell you that you can make a killer dessert with just 4 ingredients, and one of those ingredients is butter, so I don’t even know if that counts.  The recipe goes something like this:

Pardon my less than stellar photos, I was hungry.

Toasted Nutella and Strawberry Sandwich
Makes 1 sandwich.  Double as necessary. The method for making this is the same as making a grilled cheese sandwich, so if you have a different way of assembling the sandwich, by all means use your method. Also, while I’m calling this a dessert, I wouldn’t judge you if you ate it for breakfast, dusted with a bit of powdered sugar.

• 2 slices of bread (any kind will do)
• 2 tbsp Nutella or any brand of chocolate hazelnut spread
• 2-3 strawberries, thinly sliced
• 1 tsp butter

Heat a small frying pan over medium high heat.  Spread the Nutella over each slice of bread.  Arrange the strawberry slices on top of the Nutella, and place one slice of bread on top of the other, creating the sandwich.  Butter the top slice of bread. Place the sandwich butter-side down in the skillet, and then carefully butter the other slice of bread.  Cook for just a few minutes on each side, until golden brown.  Serve hot.

Strawberry shortcake was my favorite character from when I was a kid.  Perhaps that’s why I love the dessert so much!  I made a really simple version to highlight some local strawberries that I picked up at the farmers market.

Local Strawberries

I made vegan biscuits from scratch, using a recipe from Vegan Explosion (I made half of a batch).  Homemade biscuits are essential for good strawberry shortcake, and they are so so easy to make.  You don’t even have to measure most of the ingredients, which is my favorite part   To make biscuits vegan really the only substitute you need to make in any recipe is to use Earth Balance margarine instead of butter.  I use Earth Balance anyway, so this was an easy sub.  You can use any biscuit recipe you like

Vegan Biscuits

The strawberries were hulled and macerated with a wee bit of granulated sugar and some maple syrup.   I tasted them after 45 minutes or so and they were still a little too tart, so I added some more maple syrup.

Macerating Strawberries

I topped the cakes with sweetened soy yogurt instead of whipped cream.  They probably would have been tastier with the whipped cream, but I didn’t miss it, and Philip seemed pretty content without it!

Strawberry Shortcake!