Cooking with Joe and Valerie - crumb cake!

I’ve been enjoying the new kitchen layout, and though we aren’t finished yet I have to make sure everything works. We now have the counters in, the real quartz ones that replace the temporary plywood we’ve had for several months. We put up a small tile backsplash and finished grouting it last night, now there is just the trim and flooring.

We put in some nice big convection ovens, something I have wanted for a long time. Especially useful at Thanksgiving when there always seem to be more oven items than oven space, and at Christmas when I make a bajillion assorted cookies. (Yes, it seems like that many). Between then I like to try different things. One of the blogs that I like looking at is Valerie’s over there on the right – she has interesting stories and some great baking recipes. I’ve got a bag of cherries at home so I can try the latest, and I’ve already tried several that came out pretty good. Unfortunately I can’t take photographs as nicely as hers, but one of the recent things I made was a marvelously crumby crumb cake:


I like a lot of crumbs on my crumb cakes, and for this one more than half the height is in crumbs. I’ll not list the recipe here, but go on over to her place for the recipe for Cinnamon Orange Crumb Cake . It’s really good.

Last month was strawberry season, and she had a different way to prepare them, as little hand pies:


These too were pretty good. You could use other fillings, but they were tasty, and in a zip lock traveled well to be snacks at work. Again, recipe for Strawberry Hand Pies on her site.

It’s interesting clicking over there, I never know what I find but it all looks marvelous, and I wish I had the time (and lack of waistline) to try them all. Last week was her key lime pie, photos of that whenever I pull them off of the camera, but this weekend will probably be the cherry thing. Thanks Valerie.