Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Skinny strawberry shortbread trifle

    Skinny strawberry shortbread trifle

    Well, hello, hello, hello. A colleague asked me the other day if I was still baking… and I had to confess that I hadn’t really baked very much since I returned to work from maternity leave in January. With a 4.5 year old and a 1.5 year old, I’m not quite at the point where…

  • Mini double-chocolate zucchini muffins

    Mini double-chocolate zucchini muffins

    Greetings, readers. It’s been a while, I know. I’ve been back to work since the beginning of January and I’m still settling into the working-mom-of-two routine. Most days I’m up around 5, before running out the door to get to work around 6:30. Then the minute I return home, it’s full steam ahead, getting dinner…

  • Donna Hay’s flourless chocolate cake

    Donna Hay’s flourless chocolate cake

    I made this flourless chocolate cake for our annual cousins’ Christmas get-together after my cousin, the host, requested a dessert that was gluten-free. I was a bit hesitant as I’d made a flourless chocolate torte before that I wasn’t too crazy about. You can read that blog post here. But the new recipe I found…

  • Chocolate, hazelnut and caramel thumbprint cookies

    I think these thumbprint cookies are among the loveliest cookies I have ever seen. I’d been holding on to this recipe for months, planning to make it for this year’s cookie swap at my good friend Jennifer’s house. The other cookies I took were the sparkle cookies I’ve blogged about recently. (I must say, here…

  • Kid-friendly Red Lobster Cheddar Bay biscuits

    Kid-friendly Red Lobster Cheddar Bay biscuits

    I don’t often blog about savoury recipes but these cheddar biscuits are so good, and so worthwhile, I decided I must tell you about them. I have a long love-hate relationship with Red Lobster biscuits. As a rotund kid I didn’t think twice about finishing off the basket before ordering my usual meal of popcorn…

  • Frosty peanut butter cup Christmas trees

    Frosty peanut butter cup Christmas trees

    These small peanut butter cup Christmas trees were one of those Pinterest projects that looked really, really easy. In fact, I thought the hardest part would be sourcing the specific sized peanut butter cups I would need to make these. That turned out to be the easy part, maybe because there were oodles of fun-sized…

  • Dare-to-dream Christmas wish list

    Dare-to-dream Christmas wish list

    I hesitated to write my foodie Christmas wish list this year as I have in years past – partly out of laziness, partly because I aim to do everything in moderation these days. And if I were to knock all of the items below off my list, I’d be a glutton. However – and this…

  • The Pioneer Woman’s French breakfast puffs

    The Pioneer Woman’s French breakfast puffs

    I keep calling these donut puffs but they are anything but. Despite their donut hole-like appearance, they are slightly larger, and these are more like a super-dense muffin, heavy and loaded with sugar and butter. Not surprising, since they come to me by way of The Pioneer Woman. I know she first learned how to…

  • The ultimate cookie swap addition: Chef Michael Smith’s Sparkle Cookies

    The ultimate cookie swap addition: Chef Michael Smith’s Sparkle Cookies

    If you’re like me and attend a holiday cookie swap every year, these sparkle cookies should be in your repertoire. I purchased Michael Smith’s latest book and when I got to the back of the book, the desserts section, I was rather somewhat taken aback to read that the sparkle cookies were among the best…

  • Cinnamon rice-pudding with cherry compote

    Cinnamon rice-pudding with cherry compote

    It all began with a recipe for Ottolenghi’s chocolate-dipped florentines I saw on another blog. My curiosity was piqued and I first purchased the Jerusalem cookbook, in which Yotam Ottolenghi teams up with his friend and co-owner of his restaurants, Sami Tamim. The flavours in that book are very, very familiar to me. As the…

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