The End of Summer is a Bummer

Welcome back blog friends! I had an amazing summer and I hope you did too!! I hate the end of summer, but hopefully writing this will remind me of some good memories. And we probably have a few more weeks of good summer produce, so hopefully you can still make some of these recipes if you feel inspired.

We tend to go through phases where we're excited about an ingredient and use it a lot and we definitely had a few rounds of that this summer. We did a lot with cornmeal, starting with this Cornflake Corn Cake We try to take notes on what we bake and for this recipe our note just says "A++++++" which pretty much tells you everything you need to know!

This recipe has both cornflakes mixed into the batter and pressed into the top, which I liked a lot.

We paired the cake with this Easy 4 Ingredient Berry Sauce and the sauce ended up being a huge summer hit. It's a great use for berries that aren't quite perfect and you can use any mix of berries that you happen to have on hand. Alec brought us blueberries that he had picked in Michigan and some of them got a bit squished traveling and so this sauce was a great use of those. Another good thing about this recipe is that we made it a few times and kept reducing the sugar and it still turned out really well. My brother and I especially liked mixing some of the leftover sauce into oatmeal.

Alec liked how the warm sauce complemented the grittiness of the cornmeal and I totally agree with that.

We also made Cornmeal Plum Scones, and the recipe has you make a plum jam, but we just used the berry sauce that we already had in the fridge instead. I'd like to try this recipe the way it is written next time, but this also worked well using berry sauce. I just wish that the berry sauce had been all over the scone because some bites had berry sauce and other parts didn't at all.

I think that it would be cool to expirement with different types of jam and serve the scones all together on a platter.

We also made Cornmeal Waffles and they were SO good!! They were tender and fluffy. Rachel loved them. I liked how they were crispy on the outside and soft on the inside.

And of course we served them with our new favorite berry sauce!

Our next cornmeal recipe was Cornmeal Popovers. I liked these a lot, but they're definitely denser than your typical popover. The bottom had more of a muffin-like consistency and the top was light and airy, but the middle was dense, almost like a dutch baby. So there's a lot going on with these!

These end up with melted butter on the top. They'd be a great addition to a fall meal and would pair especially well with soup!

We also tried Sweet Corn Scones with Lime and Cinnamon. We served these plain, but my dad thought that they needed some jam and I agreed with him. There isn't much lime flavor either, so if you make these and are expecting to really taste lime, then you should probably add some more lime zest and could try adding more lime juice too. But if you add more juice, then you should take out the same amount of buttermilk so that your liquid amount is the same and your dough doesn't get too sticky.

This dough was actually probably the stickiest scone dough we've ever made already. The recipe says you should pat out your dough and cut rounds with a biscuit cutter, but we just made drop scones because our dough was too sticky to cut out.

We tried another Kuchen recipe (in case you don't remember, Kuchen is a German cake that usually has fruit!) and used more of Alec's fruit from Michigan to make Blueberry Kuchen. I absolutely loved this.

The cake ends up with a crispy sugary top that is almost like a toned down version of crème brûlée, which was my favorite part.

Another berry recipe that we tried was Raspberry Breakfast Bars. We originally made these for breakfast, but then had them on other days for dessert at the beach. Everyone liked these a lot.

This recipe uses the same mixture for the crust and the topping, which is a nice time-saver.

Another nice thing about these bars is that they cut cleanly. Fruit bars can be messy to cut. The only downside of these is that they're quite thin, which makes it harder to cut small squares and have them not fall apart. I might try cooking them for a bit longer in a smaller pan next time, to end up with thicker bars.

We also made Raspberry Streusel Muffins. An interesting thing about this recipe is that is says that it's better to use frozen raspberries, so this is definitely a recipe that you can make in the fall! It also took us longer to get these baked through than the recipe said, so you should keep that in mind too.

I took this picture from above to show off the crumb top, which was my favorite part.

We made a LOT of zucchini recipes, so if you have any leftover zucchini from your garden or want to experiment with zucchini breads, this section is for you! Years ago, Rachel made us this Gluten-Free Zucchini Cake for Christmas. It was a huge hit and we've been making it ever since. It's a great recipe if you're gluten-free, but we make it with regular flour which also works. We do the variation that uses less sugar for a zucchini bread, and we love it.

This is one of our simpler zucchini recipes because it doesn't have mix-ins added, but it doesn't need them because the flavor is amazing!

We have made Ultimate Zucchini Bread more times than I can count, but somehow we've always forgotten to take a picture, so we've never blogged about it before. We love this recipe because you make it the day before and so it's great to make over the summer when we have guests.

This is another recipe with a crunchy sugar top. And because of that, the recommendation is that you just serve it straight out of the pan and cover the end with saran or foil. You don't want to cover the top because it would make the sugar topping soggy.

And this is what it looks like sliced.

One of my mom's favorite zucchini recipes was Easy Zucchini Bread. This recipe has you use raisins or dried cranberries and pecans or walnuts. We used currants instead and walnuts, but I think maybe I would have liked it better with pecans. My mom really loved the flavor of this. The rest of us liked the recipes with chocolate more, but my mom felt like those recipes just ended up tasting like chocolate, where as this recipe has a more delicate flavor.

A few of these recipes make two loaves which is nice because you can eat one and freeze one for another time.

This is the only zucchini recipe that we tried with dried fruits and nuts, so if you like those things in a quick bread, you should definitely make this recipe.

A very chocolatey zucchini bread recipe that we tried was Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread. I liked this, but I actually felt as if it maybe had too much chocolate. It was a very good chocolate chip bread. It just didn't have any real zucchini bread flavors.

This loaf was one our prettier zucchini breads though.

You can see how chocolatey this is.

Our next version sunk in the middle, but in terms of flavor, it was the Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread that I preferred. I thought that it had a good balance between zucchini bread flavors and chocolate.

We're not sure why this bread sunk. Often when something sinks, it's because your butter is too warm, but this recipe doesn't even use butter!

You can really see how it collapsed in the middle in the slices!

A very successful muffin version was Zucchini Muffins with Chocolate Chips. These were excellent.

We used extra large baking chips, which meant that we had fewer pieces of bigger chocolate. I like the larger size, but that means fewer chips distributed throughout, so I think I'd try smaller chips next time.

We also used a recipe for Double Chocolate Zucchini Bread but followed the directions that are also provided for muffins. I loved these, but again, they're super chocolatey and so the zucchini adds moisture and a nice texture, but the flavor gets overpowered by the chocolate.

These are so chocolatey that they were hard to photograph!

We tried a very good basic recipe for Zucchini Muffins that was simple, but still a hit. These are just a solid classic zucchini muffin.

These have turbinado sugar sprinkled on top which adds nice crunch.

A very different variation that we tried was Lemon Zucchini Muffins. These sound a little weird, but were really great. They had a super soft texture. My big-little sister thought that they would even be great frosted as cupcakes.

These look lighter in color from your typical zucchini muffin, because they don't have the usual brown sugar, cinnamon and spices that zucchini muffins usually do.

We tried three plum cakes this summer. My dad really likes warm fruit breakfasts and I especially like baking with plums. The first one was Olive Oil Ricotta Cake with Plums. It was great.

I like how you can fully see the plums on top of this one.

I absolutely loved German Plum Cake. This has a cake layer and then a plum layer and then a streusel layer. Most plum cake recipes suggest Italian Prune Plums, but we can never find those, so we use regular ones and they always work out fine.

We usually have plum cakes for breakfast, but they'd be great for a brunch or tea time or even dessert with whipped cream.

This recipe has bigger pieces of plum, so they do require a little bit of effort to cut through while eating.

We made September Summer Fresh Plum and Lemon Curd Cake on September 1st because it seemed appropriate! This was a huge hit. We had extra Lemon Curd that we'd made to make our friend Sophie her favorite Lemon Curd Stuffed Cookies that we've already told you about. So we used the extra curd to make this cake.

This recipe has you swirl the lemon curd into the top, but it means that you can't really see the plums on top.

You can see the plums better once you cut it. This cake was very good with whipped cream and my little-little sister loved licking the whipped cream beaters!

Another big phase that we went through was sour cherries! This is another ingredient that we've always been curious about, so we ordered six pounds from Michigan. We should actually try ordering the Italian Prune Plums next summer! Sour Cherry Muffins combined our recent interests in sour cherries and cornmeal because they have both! I liked these a lot, but they definitely weren't our best looking muffins.

These muffins really spread and didn't rise well.

You can see how super flat these are! They seriously couldn't be any flatter!!

We live near a farm in the summer and August is ALLLLLL about tomatoes!! An awesome recipe to take to the beach is Tomato Sandwiches. My mom was never very interested in these, but even she became a convert this summer!

This recipe is a bit intensive for a tomato sandwich, but it's totally worth it. First you marinate the tomatoes. And then you mix the marinade with mayonnaise for a spread.

This is me holding one on the beach. Heaven!

We often do lobster roll sliders for the beach, but Rachel can't eat lobster, so we tried making a salmon salad for her and we all loved it! We used our basic template for tuna salad using a little bit of mayonnaise, a lot of whole grain mustard, celery and dill. I highly recommend trying it!

Looking at this picture, I think that we threw some red onion in there too. We usually make our beach sandwiches on toasted brioche slider rolls, which I really like.

A super unusual recipe that we tried was Creamy Dill Pickle Chickpea Salad. This was a recipe that my dad found on Instagram and we've had very mixed results from recipes there, but this one was awesome. It has a creamy tahini dressing that adds a ton of flavor. Just let me know if you're interested in this recipe and I'll have my mom pass it along.

This recipe looks very nice too.

We make lots of grain and pasta salads in the summer because they're good to have around to bring to the beach for lunch and Lemony Farro Pasta Salad with Goat Cheese and Mint was a combination of both!

This recipe has dried apricots in it and I was surprised by how much they added.

We almost always have a jar of roasted grape tomatoes in the fridge in the summer. We cook them at low temperature with garlic and salt and pepper and thyme and they're great to add to salads or pasta or spread on sandwiches. We also usually keep pesto in the freezer and then have it to put on pasta or potatoes or fish. So when we needed a last minute dish one day, we decided to use both and made orzo and mixed it with pesto, roasted tomatoes, caramelized onions and grilled zucchini. This was awesome!

We also made a good quinoa salad loosely based on this Mediterranean Chickpea Quinoa Bowl. The recipe has you make a sauce out of roasted red peppers and my mom was worried that it would be messy for the beach and might not keep well, so we just kept all of the same flavors, but chopped up our roasted red peppers. The recipe suggests jarred roasted red peppers, but we just roasted our own on the grill. It's very easy and they taste better fresher and homemade (like most things do!).

We'll make the dish the way that the recipe is written and report back to you, but our version is very versatile. I'd like to try it topped with grilled shrimp or fish for dinner.

Another recipe that we grilled red peppers for was Chickpea Salad with Roasted Red Peppers. My big-little sister loved this one and I really liked the dressing.

You can see it in the middle jar here. We bring salads to the beach in jars like this. They're just regular canning jars, but we replace the two-piece metal lids because they rust and are a hassle to have at the beach. The salad on the left is my Grandma Linda's Black Bean, Corn and Tomato salad and that one was my brother's favorite beach salad of the summer!

One of my mom's favorite sides of the summer was Simple French-Style Potato Salad. This is a potato salad that uses mustard as its base instead of mayonnaise. We were inspired by all the delicious mustard we ate in France and this potato salad is amazing!

I liked how much dill there was in this too.

Another dish that we made that came from our Europe trip was focaccia. We took a cooking class on Lake Como and learned to make this. You have to buy fresh yeast, which we'd never used before. There was a bit of a language barrier and at first my mom thought that the women teaching us just meant to use yeast that wasn't old! But she actually meant fresh yeast, which is different from the yeast that we usually use that comes in packets. It's more like a block of cream cheese, but since we only needed 16g for the recipe, we cut it into portions and froze them individually. Then whenever we made focaccia (which has been more times than I can count!) we'd just defrost an individual piece. We also had to buy special Italian flour online. But once you have the right ingredients, making focaccia is actually very easy and it's delicious! I can send anyone the recipe who is interested!

We topped our focaccia with marinated roasted tomatoes and fresh herbs, but you could use whatever you want!

In continuation of our French mustard theme, my dad made this Parisienne Style Butter Lettuce Salad. The dressing on this is one of the best things we ate all summer. We all loved it and so did Alec and Rachel. Alec said that it reminded him how simple but still really good a salad could be.

We tried this on butter lettuce and hearts of romaine. It's delicious on anything, but I think that the romaine pictured here held up to the dressing a little bit better.

All August, we make a version of a grilled vegetable and tomato salad. We use a mix of tomatoes from our local farm and then grill whatever vegetables we have on hand, but most often corn and zucchini, and sometimes we throw in some onions or peppers. Then we just top it with our basic balsamic dressing (also from Grandma Linda!) breadcrumbs and torn burrata. We usually have the brioche slider rolls that we use for sandwiches lying around and so we just throw a slider roll in the toaster and get it really crisp and then crush it over the salad.

Rachel says that this is one of her favorite salads ever!

Another fun summery salad that we made was a nectarine and beet salad. This was one of our more successful instagram recipe attempts. We just sliced nectarines and roasted beets with feta, basil, parsley, sherry vinegar, olive oil and salt and pepper.

This is very easy to make and I think that it turned out looking so beautiful!

All of the amazing August tomatoes definitely lead us to make a lot of pasta dishes. We had a lot of hits. Summer Garden Pasta is a great recipe for making ahead because you mix up most of your ingredients in advance and set them aside for a few hours.

These ingredients marinate and then get mixed with hot pasta. They really do look like summer in a bowl!

This recipe is simple, but the end result has incredible flavor. You have to like garlic though. Because it isn't cooked other than with the hot pasta, the garlic flavor is strong.

Another great pasta recipe with components that can be made in advance is Summer Tomato and Basil Pasta with Pine Nut Sauce. The sauce for this can be made up to a month ahead and the tomatoes can be prepped a few hours before cooking the pasta, which my mom really appreciates!

We made this pasta for Rachel and Alec and they both really liked it. The gemelli was a really good shape for catching the sauce. And I really like pasta that you can stab more than noodles that you have to twirl.

A huge hit that everyone loved was One-Pot Tomato Pasta with Basil and Spinach. This sauce is made with a base of tomato paste, which makes it extremely flavorful. Then you just add water to your tomato paste base and cook the pasta in it, which is how you do everything in one pot!

This pasta shape is called busiate, and I've mentioned it before because it's one of my favorites.

My mom's friend Liz came to visit with her kids and we'd planned on going out to dinner, but everyone was having fun swimming and hanging out at home, so we ended up staying in and making this Brown Butter Lobster Pasta with Burst Cherry Tomatoes. I love burst cherry tomatoes in pasta and seafood dishes and this recipe combined all of it together, although really we actually use grape tomatoes more than cherry tomatoes most of the time!

The lobster in this dish makes it very filling!

For Yes Day this year, we requested making a seafood carbonara pasta for dinner. We like a version at Topper's, which is one of our favorite restaurants, and so we wanted to try making it ourselves. We wanted to use an authentic carbonara recipe, and all of the seafood carbonara recipes that we could find included cream or butter. Carbonara is supposed to be made just with eggs and cheese, and so we based ours on this traditional Spaghetti Carbonara recipe and just added seafood instead of guanciale. We tried using smoked scallops, to add a flavor similar to what you usually get from the guanciale, but I actually thought that maybe they were a bit too smoky. We also added, shrimp, crab and clams. The jumbo lump crabmeat and chopped clams were my favorite!

We used spaghetti because we couldn't find bucatini, but I definitely think that bucatini would be preferable because of the hole down the middle to capture sauce!

My brother's friend Ollie came to visit us while his dad competed in a fishing tournament and when it was over, he brought us a freshly caught tuna! My siblings and I aren't allowed to eat tuna because of the mercury in it, which is bad for growing brains, but my parents let me have a bite because it was so fresh and special and it was amazing! My dad just seared it in a pan and we served it with a dipping sauce.

For our dipping sauce we just mixed ponzu, soy, garlic, ginger, sesame seeds and scallions. It was very simple to make but would be great to use as a dipping sauce for other seafood too.

One of my favorite things that we did this summer was have a Barbie party and then go see the Barbie movie at the drive-in theatre! We don't have Barbies to play with and it's not something that we're generally into, but we went all out for our party! The coolest thing that we made was pink lemonade rose glitter ice cubes! We just mixed pink lemonade and edible pink glitter and froze the mixture in molds.

We used silicon molds to make these, so they popped out really easily. The grownups drank rosé, but we put these in pink lemonade cocktails for the kids and served them in pink cups with pink umbrellas of course!.

We served shrimp cocktail and had lots of pink candy, but we also made Pink Bean Dip, which sounds weird but was fantastic. It is made with white beans and lemon and gets its pink color from beets, but you can't taste them. This was actually the surprise hit of the party!

We forgot to take a picture of the dip, but if you look carefully, you can see it in a bowl at the very left of this picture!

Then for dessert we made Pink Sugar Cookies. We had never even heard of them, but apparently these are a huge thing in Utah. Alec said that people bring them to the Emergency Department where he works all the time! They are very soft and are supposed to be served cold. I really liked the frosting on these. They're very rich though, so we cut them into pieces.

These were definitely the perfect dessert for a Barbie party!

In case you're looking for more news on Rachel's Wedding Cake, which you can read all about here, we made it again as a birthday cake version for my mom's friend Liz. This time we added a drip, with a white chocolate ganache!

The last time we made a drip on a birthday cake, we did polka dots on the top, but I like just covering the entire top like this more.

Chelsea suggested that we try a frangipane tart after my last blog post and so we did! We made this Cherry Frangipane Tart. Frangipane is a creamy almond filling that is often paired with fruit in tarts. This was delicious. And I'd like to try it with raspberries too!

I thought that this looked very elegant. It would be beautiful to serve at a dinner party.

Our sour cherry muffin phase involved lots of sour cherry desserts of course! My mom's favorite was these Sour-Cherry Crumble Bars. Rachel loved them too. The crust on these was absolutely amazing.

Cutting fruit bars is usually tricky, and these weren't perfect, but because they have a thicker crust, they cut reasonably well.

My favorite sour cherry recipe was The Best Sour Cherry Galette. Of all the sour cherry recipes, this was the one where you could actually see the cherries the best. Rachel really liked this too.

The crust for this gets sprinkled with raw sugar which adds a nice bit of crunch.

We served this with vanilla ice cream and I thought that the vanilla complemented the cherries perfectly.

Our last sour cherry recipe was Summertime Sour Cherry Crisp. This one was my second favorite and my mom really loved this one too. I like crisps more than tarts, I think because I prefer crisp topping to crust.

Tarts photograph better than crisps, but this was really fantastic!

We definitely tend to serve desserts using seasonal fruit when we entertain in the summer and a great recipe for that is this Fruit Galette recipe because it lets you use whatever fruit you want. We used peaches and blueberries for this. Usually though I'd recommend using nectarines instead because you don't need to bother peeling them!

The fruit juices leaked onto the crust a bit and got sticky and caramelized, which I thought was the best part!

Our last big phase of the summer was a s'mores extravaganza! S'mores Bites were one of our simplest recipes, but one of our biggest hits. They're so simple that it's hard to even call it a recipe. You just spread fluff on graham crackers and then dip the sandwiches in dark chocolate and sprinkle them with sea salt. But our friend Jennie said it's one of her favorite things we've ever made.

These were a nice treat to serve by the pool when friends came over. Adults like the combination of dark chocolate and salt and kids seem to like s'mores of any kind!

Of all the variations of s'mores bars that we made, Six Layer Peanut Butter S'mores Bars were my favorite and my mom's favorite. Rachel really loved these too and so did our friend Christina. These are very rich, but so so good. The combination of peanut butter and marshmallow and chocolate covers pretty much everything that I want in a bar!

You can really see how gooey these are!

Another variation that we tried was called Best S'mores Bars. We didn't think that these were the best. Actually they were our least favorite of the s'mores bars that we tried, but they were still good. This recipe uses an interesting method which is that it has you make your dough base and push it into your pan lined with parchment. You lift that out and push the rest of your dough into the plain pan to form your base. Then you layer in your chocolate, peanut butter and marshmallow cream and top all of that with the square of dough that you originally pushed out onto your parchment.

You can see here how you make your two dough squares. And of course you can see my big-little sister's feet!

This is what it looks like layered.

And this is what they look like cut. This recipe is extremely similar to the six layer bars, but these have a harder center. I think that mostly we preferred the texture of the six layer bars more.

My big-little sister's favorite s'mores bar was Caramel S'mores Bars. These have a cookie base and then are topped with Ghiradelli caramel squares and whole marshmallows. These don't have peanut butter, which obviously makes them a better option for people with peanut allergies. And the whole roasted marshmallows make them more similar to traditional s'mores.

I like the way that you cut these so that each bar has its own whole marshmallow on top.

A huge surprise success was S'mores on a Stick. This is another extremely easy recipe that we pulled together quickly one night when my parents were going out and we had other kids coming over. You just microwave marshmallows with chocolate chips and sweetened condensed milk and then spread that mixture between graham crackers. Then you also use sweetened condensed milk to make a topping. The surprising part about these is that while they set, the graham crackers soften and become cakey. Alec thought that he would have liked these more if the graham crackers stayed crunchy and the chocolate was harder, but the rest of us thought that the cakey texture of the grahams and the soft chocolate was the best part!!

The recipe says to drizzle the chocolate topping over the grahams and so we tried that the first time we made them, but it was really too thick to drizzle nicely. These were still delicious, but I thought they looked kind of messy.

So when me made these again, we piped the topping and I thought these looked much cuter. I loved the chocolate sprinkle circle on top of the square graham. I think it would be fun to try doing a heart next time!

We actually had too many summer recipes to include them all in a single post, so there is more coming soon. But these recipes are the ones that have the most seasonal produce and so I wanted to get them to you while stores and farm stands still have some of it in stock. Our local farm is still selling fresh tomatoes and summer fruit, so hopefully you can find some of these ingredients and get cooking!