Gluten-Free Apple Oven Cake + Recipe

This delicious oven cake is like a giant, puffy pancake!  It comes together very quickly and is the easiest baked good I make.  It's fantastic for breakfast or dessert! 

Historic Palm House - Franklin Park

This awesome photo is on display in the Palm House Gallery at Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens.  It's cool to see how the Palm House looked many years ago!  It was built in 1895 and now is home to over forty different species of palm trees from all around the world.

Gluten-Free Research

I'm teaching a gluten-free baking class in a few months and am looking for some good gluten-free cookbooks to recommend to my class. Usually I use the internet to search for gluten-free recipes, or I modify wheat-containing recipes to be gluten-free. I only own a few gluten-free cookbooks, my favorite is Blackbird Bakery Gluten-Free: 75 Recipes for Irresistible Gluten-Free Desserts and Pastries by Karen Morgan! I expect to find some new favorites in this giant stack of books!

Do you have a favorite cookbook, gluten-free or otherwise?

The Bather

This looks nothing like the painting, The Bather, by my favorite artist, Paul Cézanne.  This is however, a photograph which captures a fleeting moment in time.  Amelia's raspy, dry cat tongue, poised and ready to clean her arm... 

She does do this every few hours though, so I might be romanticising the idea a bit!

Foxy Cider!

I tried a new gluten-free cider tonight: Fox Barrel Pear Cider.  It was delicious and now I want to try all of their other flavors - the fox on the bottle is pretty cool too!

Little Lady Apples

These are the cutest little apples! They are called Lady Apples (not to be confused with crabapples, which are also small, but are pretty tart!) and are tasty enough to eat fresh. They're only about an inch and a half to two inches in diameter (about the size of a ping pong ball!).  I saw these cuties at Whole Foods last week and had to have them. I later researched Lady Apples and found some fun recipes to make with them, if I don't eat them all first!

The Fall Mantle

A Very 1950s Holiday with the Ohio Historical Society at Whole Foods - Upper Arlington

On Saturday this weekend, Kenneth and I went back in time at our local Whole Foods!  The Ohio Historical Society was celebrating a 1950s Thanksgiving at Whole Foods, complete with costumed characters, 1950s recipes and crafts for kids. After Halloween, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  I love visiting with my family (without the chaos of Christmas shopping) and Thanksgiving food is the best!  I also really enjoy learning about the past, local history and my own genealogy are my favorite historical subjects.  When I read about this event I was pretty excited to attend! 

A Very Whovian Dinner

Author's Note: I apologize if, dear reader, you are not a fan of the British sci-fi series called Doctor Who, which is what this post was inspired by.  It's a fantastic show I highly recommend about an alien (who looks human, but has two hearts) who goes on adventures saving our planet and others, usually with the help of a human companion (or two). He's a very old alien and when he's badly hurt, instead of dying, he regenerates (and they get a new actor to play him). The most recent regeneration of the Doctor (played by Matt Smith), was hungry after regenerating but didn't know what he liked to eat:

"New mouth. New rules. It's like eating after cleaning your teeth. Everything tastes wrong." - the Doctor 

So he tries many 'new' foods, hating all of them, until deciding what he really wanted was fish fingers and custard, not just eaten at the same meal, mind you, he dipped the fish fingers in the custard and thoroughly enjoyed it! 

Ohio Love

Saw this lovely necklace today at the Celebrate Local store today.  I will post a review of one of the coolest stores at Easton very soon!  

Gluten-Free Ginger Pear Pumpkin Muffins + Recipe

These pumpkin muffins really make me wish I had a jumbo muffin pan (kind of like this one by Lodge).  When I was a college student at Ohio University I would eagerly wait for Fall every year so I could buy a gigantic pumpkin muffin from Perk's Coffee House & Roastery.  Those muffins were amazing!  They signaled that Fall had arrived just as much as the changing leaves and cool temperatures did.  Eating one of those muffins made me feel better after a rough day, once I even bought Kenneth a giant pumpkin muffin as a way to say "I'm sorry" after a fight (that's how good these muffins were, they could serve as a food apology) only to find out he had bought me one too!  They were pretty powerful pumpkin muffins...

Dance With Me

A fairy tale themed collage I made several years ago. It's one of several hanging together over our dining room table.

Fuzzy

How-To: Make Your Own Bobblehead Cat

How-To: Make Your Own Bobblehead Cat

Materials:
1 camera
1 magnifying glass
1+ cats (it's a good idea to have extras in case anyone gets tired, or someone refuses to cooperate)
Patience (infinite amount)

Simple Gluten-Free Chicken Noodle Soup + Recipe

Fall is the time of year for soups and stews!  Kenneth and I made a really simple gluten-free chicken noodle soup this afternoon and paired it with some gluten-free crackers and ginger ale for dinner.  A perfect meal if you're feeling under the weather, or if you're feeling perfectly healthy!

Emma Fox: Shadow Chaser

Kadu Bouranee (Sweet Pumpkin with Yogurt Sauce) + Recipe

Kadu bouranee is one of my favorite pumpkin dishes!  You can make it with pumpkin or squash (this time I used butternut squash that was pre-cut to save some time).  I've made this dish a few times for Kenneth and I's anniversary - but it took my so long to cut and peel the squash I only felt like making it once a year!  Now that I've successfully made it with the short-cut pre-cut butternut squash, it may become a more regular Fall dish in our house. Today I served it with the Brazilian Pão de Queijo (gluten-free cheese rolls) and it was delicious!

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!  I hope you did something fun to celebrate!  Yesterday Kenneth took photos of me in both of my costumes for this year (I worked two days of a Halloween event for kids at work which meant two costumes!).  Today I found my mini playing cards that I meant to use as props with my Alice costume and took some photos of those for my photo of the day.

Main Library - Columbus Metropolitan Library

I think libraries are awesome!  I have fond memories of the Flesh Public Library in my hometown (the library was named after Leo Flesh, who made a large donation when the library needed a larger building in the 1930s, the name only sounds weird to me now, it didn’t seem weird growing up because we didn’t know the names of any other libraries!).  My parents used to read to me and my sister when we were little and we always participated in the summer reading program.  Every summer the the whole children’s area in the library was transformed into a new fantastic land, like a medieval castle or fairy tale woods.   

I’m a nerd and a bookworm so whenever I move to a new area, even if it’s just for short period of time, I get a library card.  As a college student I spent a lot of time in Ohio University’s Alden Library, studying, drinking coffee and eating addictive sugar cookies with white frosting and green sprinkles (OU has so much school spirit, the baked goods get involved).

Gluten-Free Cheese Rolls

These delicious cheese rolls are naturally gluten-free! The recipe is from Brazil and although there are a lot of variations of the recipe for these cheese rolls (Brazilian Pão de Queijo), I prefer the recipe from Kids World Citizen. Even if you don't have to eat gluten-free, you should try this recipe! I made them this summer in camp and the kids loved them!

The cheese rolls are made from tapioca flour, oil, milk, eggs and parmesan and mozzarella cheeses. They taste best fresh from the oven, but the recipe makes a lot! You can roll all of the cheese rolls and freeze what you don't want to eat right away, then whenever you have a craving you can pop a few in the oven.  Simple and delicious!