Rheally into rhubarb!

Even though it is still quarantine, spring has sprung! And we're definitely doing lots of springy cooking and baking, and especially lots of rhubarb!! But we've done some other stuff too.

We're still having special breakfasts. Ferran Adria is one of the most famous chefs in the world. He is a Spanish chef and he was the head of elBulli, which had three Michelin stars and was rated as the top restaurant in the world for many years. I never got to go there because it closed before I was born. But Ferran Adria taught a class at Harvard about science and cooking that I want to take online, and my parents met him once in Spain. Recently he published a recipe for a potato chip omelet, and so my mom tried it.

Her first flip didn't exactly go so well...

But eventually she got it! Even grown-ups mess up and it's not a big deal. You just try again!

And this is what it looked like sliced.

My brother and I liked it. My dad thought that it was good, but could use a bit more flavor. Maybe next time we could add some herbs or cheese.

Remember our mini dutch babies from my last post? Well one morning we had a big one. My mom actually makes this a lot. She got the recipe from another mom when my brother was in preschool. It's easy to make and sometimes she puts slices of it in our lunch box. I can send the recipe to anybody who wants it!

It is puffy like this when you take it out of the oven, but then it collapses, sort of like a souffle.

A lot of our recent baking has involved spring fruit, rhubarb obviously, but also lots of strawberries. And actually lots of dutch babies too because we made a strawberry one! The first step of our strawberry dutch baby was to make lemon sugar by rubbing lemon zest into sugar.

The lemon sugar smelled really good!

An interesting part of this recipe is that you preheat the pan and then melt butter in it and mix the lemon sugar and strawberries right into the hot pan in the oven.

Then you roast the strawberries for a while, before pouring the batter on top. The batter has cardamom in it, which we don't use very frequently. It has a very unique, minty, herbal flavor. I loved this version of a dutch baby. I especially liked that it got crustier than our other dutch baby. And the strawberries add a lot of flavor. My sister likes the plain one more though.

This dutch baby got even puffier than our regular one!

One of my favorite quarantine breakfasts was lemon sweet rolls. These were the same idea as cinnamon rolls, except lemon flavored. I liked that this recipe was a little bit unusual. You see cinnamon rolls everywhere, but lemon sweet rolls are less common. This recipe had cardamom in it too, but you couldn't even taste it.

The lemon cream cheese frosting was excellent.

We had another strawberry breakfast one morning when my mom made crepes, and we had them filled with strawberries and whipped cream.

We had to cancel our June trip to France, but at least I still got some crepes!

We also made a good strawberry dessert. It was strawberry pretzel dessert cups. They were layered like a parfait. The bottom had pretzel crumble. My mom actually saved the extra to use as a coating on fish or chicken! Then there was a lemon cream cheese layer, then strawberries and then whipped cream. My mom said that before quarantine, she probably hadn't whipped cream since before my brother was born. But now we do it all the time! I love quarantine - ha ha!!!! We just add a little bit of sugar and vanilla and it's really good. It helps to put your bowl and beaters in the freezer for a little while first because if the cream gets too warm from the beating, then it doesn't whip up properly. We all really liked this. My mom tried to steal a bite of my sister's and my sister did not like that one little bit!!! She had whipped cream in her hair and strawberries all over her face and was a total mess, but she definitely wasn't sharing! My dad said that this dessert tasted like the start of summer.

I loved eating out of wine glasses! Very fancy!!!

Another spring dessert we made was strawberry rhubarb pudding cake. We've had a hard time getting rhubarb during quarantine. Maybe that many people don't cook with it? But you definitely should! It's one of the best parts of spring. My mom actually made this for breakfast for something special before she went to work one day. This was great warm out of the oven. It was like a soft vanilla cake with warm fruit mixed in, sort of like fruit cobbler but with cake instead of a biscuit. We had a little bit of whipped cream on top (again!), but if I were serving it for dessert, I'd serve it with ice cream.

We probably should have taken a picture with the cake still whole in the pan, but my mom was rushing out the door and we forgot!

We also made strawberry rhubarb crisp bars. These were just like a fruit crisp with a crumbly top, but they have a shortbread base and corn starch to firm them up into bars. It was fun pushing the crust into the pan.

These were soft out of the oven, but firm up in the fridge.

But my favorite rhubarb dessert that we made during quarantine was rhubarb custard bars. The recipe has the option of adding a vanilla bean to the batter, which of course we did and I highly recommend! If you've never cooked with a vanilla bean before, it's more like a long thin pod, and you scrape the seeds out of the middle.

I think that scraping out the seeds from a vanilla bean is really fun.

This is what the batter looked like, with vanilla bean seeds and pieces of rhubarb.

I frosted the bars all by myself. My mom bought a super cool cutter to help her cut bars that are perfectly even.

Basically, it's just like a bunch of attached pizza wheels!

Rachel said that this was her favorite thing that we've made in all of quarantine. They're a little bit messy and much easier to cut and eat when they're really cold, but they are EXTREMELY delicious!!!!!

You can see the specks of vanilla in the bar! These are messy to eat but totally worth it!!

Baking wasn't the only thing that we've done with rhubarb. We also made a delicious rhubarb sauce. My mom and I like this sauce served over salmon, but my dad wanted to try it with something else, so we had it with scallops. It is tart and tasted really good with the sweet scallops.

This is really more of a compote than a sauce. It is meant for fish, but would also be really good over pound cake or ice cream!

I think that's all of our rhubarb cooking for now. But stay tuned, I'm sure there will be more!

We've been getting really good scallops lately, and so we also used them to make dumplings. Do you remember Daddy Daughter Dumpling Day? Well I used what I learned and taught my mom and brother and sister how to make dumplings! This time we made shrimp and scallop dumplings.

This is what the filling looked like. It had shrimp, scallions, ginger, cilantro and serrano chile peppers.

This is me showing everyone how to fold the wrappers.

My sister might be the first person to make dumplings wearing a tutu!

We did all different kinds of shapes.

We made a spice sesame dipping sauce to go with the dumplings, and it was VERY spicy. We made it with spicy sesame oil, which we'd never heard of before. It didn't seem like it was that spicy at first. The heat was really delayed. About a minute after eating a dumpling, my mouth was suddenly on fire! My dad and I were the only ones to eat them with the sauce. But everybody loved these!! We had some extra filling and so my mom sauteed it. We thought it would be great, but when I tried it for lunch the next day, it was waaaay too salty. So I don't recommend doing that. I traded it in for some left over potato chip omelet!!!

My mom had to get the dumpling wrappers and spicy sesame oil from a specialty Asian market, and she needed to add more to her cart to spend enough money for delivery. So she came up with a really fun surprise for us! After dumplings, we got to try a bunch of different kinds of Japanese candy!!

The first kind that we tried was some sort of fruity gummy covered in chocolate. My mom and brother thought that it was really yucky, but my dad and I liked it.

I did not like the next ones though. I try to only say nice things on my blog and I just don't write very much about restaurants or dishes that I think are really bad, because I don't want to be mean to people and I wouldn't like it very much if someone else was blogging mean things about my food or my restaurant. But I just cannot be nice about these weird chocolate strawberry candies. They tasted sweet, but in a bad fake way. So I recommend not buying these.

After that we had chewy ones that were called "milk" flavor, and they were my mom's and my sister's favorite.

Then we had fruit and yogurt flavored chews. These were my favorite. They reminded me of the tart frozen yogurt that used to be really popular, but then kind of went away.

We actually also played another fun game with food recently. My mom made us all go upstairs and then had us come down one by one and blindfolded us and fed us each twelve foods and we had to guess what they were. She did raw asparagus, sunflower seeds, chopped broccoli, pretzel crumbs, dried plums, seaweed, dill, cumin seeds, cherry slices, creme fraiche, parsley and sesame seeds. My sister freaked out and cried and refused to play. She was really mad and said that this was not a fun game! But the rest of us liked it. It turned out to be way harder than you probably think. None of us did very well. My dad only got five right and my brother and I only got four each. Parsley and seaweed were the only ingredients that we all could identify!

This was my mom's plate of mystery ingredients. We couldn't see it until after though.

Of course, we've also been making tons of cookies. We made Butterfinger cookies, using chopped up candy bars. Butterfingers are one of my mom's favorite candies, after Peanut Butter Snickers. She always tells my sister to go for yellow stuff when we go trick or treating hoping for Butterfingers or Peanut Butter Snickers, but usually then she just ends up with a bunch of Starburst! My Uncle TaTa thinks that she is crazy and that 5th Avenue candy bars are way better, so I guess you could make these cookies using 5th Avenues instead if you're reading this TaTa! I thought that chopping up the candy bars to make these cookies was fun. These came out thinner than a lot of our other cookies, with crisp edges. I'd say that we all liked these cookies a lot, but maybe didn't love them.

I might try these with a mix of different candy bars next time.

A different kind of cookie that we made was lemon drop cookies. These were very soft and lemony with delicious frosting. There's a small market around the corner from us that recently re-opened and my mom brought these to them, because we were so happy that they were back.

I think that the yellow color makes these cookies look happy and sunshiny!

One of the best cookies that we have made were mocha cookies. My Grandma Linda made a cookbook of her favorite recipes for my mom when my mom started cooking after college. These cookies come from there. They are extremely soft and chocolatey. They are sort of like a cross between a cookie and a brownie. We gave them to some older neighbors and they LOVED them. I wasn't sure if we should give them cookies, because they haven't always been very nice to us, but we talked about how usually if you're debating doing something nice for someone else, the right answer is to just do it. So we gave them cookies, and they really enjoyed them, and I'm glad we did it. My mom said that I might not want to blog about that part, but I want to because I think it's a really good lesson and the world would be happier if everyone did more nice stuff for everyone else! We also gave them to our friend Grazzy and she liked them so much that she asked for the recipe and baked them herself the next weekend!

These cookies are really delicious!

This is the recipe. It is very important to use high quality chocolate. We like Scharffen Berger.

The mocha cookies are amazing, but surprisingly, my brother and sister and I all agreed that the next cookie is the best one we've baked in all of quarantine. They are cookies and cream cookies and they have white chocolate chips and Oreo pieces in them and taste like a cookie version of cookies and cream ice cream.

Don't these look delicious?!

Do you remember how at the end of my last blog post, I asked you to comment if you had suggestions for what else we should bake? Well our amazing babysitter Kelsie did! She suggested upside down cake and we listened! I'd never had upside down cake before. An upside down cake is exactly what it sounds like, a cake with the toppings on the bottom. After you bake it, you flip it, and then they're on top. My mom based ours on a recipe for plum upside down cake, but it's still a little bit early for plums. So we used nectarines and this cake is spectacular! My dad said that he had no expectations for this, but he LOVED it. Usually we give away or freeze most of what we bake, but just our family ate this entire cake in 2 days!!

It was a little bit tricky getting this out of the springform pan, so the fruit needed a bit of rearranging on top. But I still thought that it looked pretty!

We had it with whipped cream, but it would be good with ice cream too.

I hope that this post inspires you all to go bake with some spring fruit! And I'd love to hear about which of these look the best to you and take more suggestions for our baking too!