sumac snickerdoodles

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Hii!!!! How are you and how was your Halloween and are you in the holiday spirit yet?? We had such a fun first Halloween with Bernie!! She had a Halloween feast of squash (cause it’s orange!) and then donned her fleece lemon costume to trick or treat at Aunt Ethel’s building where she made friends with a Twizzler, or more specifically the crunchy wrapper of the Twizzler. It fascinated her all night long. Eggboy and I split a tiny box of Milk Duds and then ate spinach salads before going to bed by 9. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Going to bed by 9 is, like, how I get my thrills these days because being well rested is such an excellent high? Also, I’m now filming (season 5!) and my call time in the morning is very early o’clock, meaning I have to wake up six minutes before very early o’clock in order to brush my teeth and then commute from my bedroom to the kitchen. 

It’s gonna be a great season! It includes:

  1. A Passover episode, complete with our new Marian Bull Seder plate that I want to stare at all day long every day

  2. An appearance by one of my all time favorite bands

  3. Hockey, hockey stars (!), broomball, curling, Alana curling, and ice skating

  4. KNOEPHLA!!!!!

I know I say this about every season but I think this season is going to be the tastiest yet. And not just because it has the best mozzarella sticks and gruyere babka rolls of all time but also because Bernie’s cheeks have reached peak deliciousness (thank you to my grandpa and dad for those). 

Enough about me, I am going to talk about my frond Michelle now!!! Her book, Weeknight Baking, came out last week and it has SPRINKLE END PAPERS. And a recipe for one (1!) chocolate chip cookie that is just plain dangerous. And billions upon gajillions of tips for how to bake things in advance or speed things up or spread the work out over the course of a few days in order to make it fit any kind of crazy busy schedule. It’s baking efficiency at its tastiest and I love it. Like she’s even making me feel like I can bake a dang wedding cake over the course of a few Bernie naps. For those of you who liked the bake-ahead tips in this post, this book takes this type of thing to the next level. And all the while it offers deeeelicious ideas like halva blondies (!!!) and excellent styling tips like how to get perfectly straight edges when you cut cheesecake bars. This book is so clever, informational, beautiful, and delicious and I’m a proud kvelling frond right now.

One thing that Michelle and I share, other than the fact that we both have quiet reserved Nordic partners, is a love of sumac. Specifically, sumac in sweets! It’s so bright and fun! I sometimes think of sumac as ground up lemony vinegar, if vinegar were a solid. So like if you’re into lemon sour patch kids, you will like sumac’d sweets. (NY Shuk makes a great sumac, by the way.) Michelle made a delicious move in her book and rolled snickerdoodle cookie dough in a sumac/raspberry magic dust and the world is a tastier place for it. These cookies are sweet, tangy bright, crisp around the edges, and soft and chewy in the middle. They’re sassier than you’re average cookie and so pretty! Look at that natural pink color! I love these. And I love Michelle and Weeknight Baking. Yay!!!

raspberry sumac snickerdoodles

makes about 20 cookies

from michelle lopez's weeknight baking: recipes to fit your schedule

ingredients

for the raspberry sumac topping

1/4 c (1.75 oz) granulated sugar

2 heaping tb freeze-dried raspberries, finely ground

2 tsp ground sumac

for the cookies

2 3/4 c (12.35 oz) all-purpose flour

2 tsp cream of tartar

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp kosher salt

1 1/2 c (10.5 oz) granulated sugar

1 c (8 oz) unsalted butter, at room temperature

2 large eggs

2 tsp pure vanilla extract

clues

position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 400ºF. line two half sheet pans with parchment paper.

in a medium bowl, combine all topping ingredients and set aside.

in a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt.

in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the sugar and butter. beat on medium-high until light, fluffy, and doubled in volume, 2 to 3 minutes, using a rubber spatula to scrape down the bottom and sides of the bowl as necessary. reduce the mixer to low and add the eggs one at a time, adding the next egg only after the previous one has bee fully incorporated. add the vanilla and beat until just combined. scrape down the bottom and sides of the bowl. with the mixer on low, gradually add the dry ingredients and beat until just combined. scrape down the bottom and sides of the bowl once more, and beat on low for an additional 30 seconds.

use a 3-tablespoon cookie dough scoop to portion the cookie dough into balls. roll each in the snickerdoodle topping, covering them completely. place the coated cookies at least 3 inches apart on the prepared sheet pans. bake one pan at a time for 10 minutes, or until the edges have set but the centers are still gooey. the cookies will look puffed when you pull them out of the oven, but will fall and crack into the perfect cookies as they cool. cool the cookies on the pan on a wire rack for 20 minutes, or until the edges and bottoms of the cookies have set and feel firm to the touch. repeat with the remaining cookie dough (or freeze it to bake later). serve warm or at room temperature. the cookies can be stored in an airtight container or zip-top bag at room temperature for up to 3 days.

Summer of Bernie!

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The summer is over! It’s quarter-zip fleece weather! But still acceptable birkenstock-with-no-socks temperature! The apples are getting their color, the sky is cloudy on the reg, wheat harvest is here, and two nights ago we ate PHO. This is my dreamscape. Good gosh geez I love being on the cusp of peak coziness sooo much, I can taste the pumpkin bread already. Bernie’s world is about to start smelling less like fresh basil and Eggboy sweat and more like cinnamon and brussels sprouts with spätzle and butter and it’s awesome. Ok but I didn’t want to zoom to the next season before documenting some of my favorite moments from this summer!

We went to the the county fair! Bernie met baby goats, baby chickens, mini ponies, and a 7-day-old alpaca! We danced to Eggboy’s big band concert and then I ate a big sausage which tasted exactly how fairs smell, smoky and meaty. And we drank a chocolate strawberry malt. A+ day.

We went on our first little family trip, to Bemidji! We stayed about two feet away from the lake in a tiny cabin with gigantic windows, so all of my nightmares about arriving at our destination to find that we had forgotten Bernie’s sound machine went out the window because we had nature's sound machine of the waves all night and it was the loveliest. During the days we hiked, ate pizza and spumoni, had wild rice in our pancakes, tried on Lester Nygaard hats, waved to Babe and Paul Bunyan, and picnic’ed on fancy cheese and ‘ndujia. It was a short but sweet trial vacation for the next time when we choose a destination that’s more than two hours away!

I went to LA for, like, a few hours because that’s all I could manage for a first trip away from Bern! It was for a little work trip and I got to get all dressed up and stand in front of a background while someone shot a fan at my hair. This is what that looked like! Thanks to Getty and Benjo for the left photo and to TV Guide and Maarten for the right photo!

Bernie met Bernbaum’s and all of our other Fargo faves, like India Palace and Twenty Below and Zandbroz and Sandy’s and Barnes and Noble. (Umm have you been the new Bernbaum’s?? It’s epic, get the black and white cookie.)

We had so many visitors! Sonja and Alex came for a pizza party, my bridesmaids came for a Girl Meets Farm episode, and Auntie Cathy even came and did her famous turkey impression :)

I forgot what TV looks like. Every time I turn it on, even just to have Savannah and Craig chatting in the background, Bernie cranes her head and only wants to look at it and not sing Baby Beluga so I stopped turning it on. What happens after they fall down the elevator in Stranger Things? Anything good?

Baby Beluga is always in my head. Always.

We went to The Lake! I don’t know what summer weekends are like where you live, but here everybody flocks to The Lake. The Lake refers to any number of lakes in the area and what I’m told from Eggboy is that the lake is a place where you eat potato chips and relax, either in the water or in a chair looking at the water. I didn’t get it when I first moved here because I thought, we already live in a very calm relaxing place and I already eat potato chips, why do I need to get more relaxed and eat more potato chips? But I’m slowly starting to get it, that’s where the weekend energy is and floating in a lake is fun and it’s acceptable to subsist on boloney on white bread (in addition to potato chips) at the lake. So even though we don’t have a Lake house we found the public access spot where we’re going to go from now on anytime we feel like chips. And next time Bernie will actually be able to go in the water!

I had my fifth summer at Unglued Camp!!! I only went for a quick second since you-know-who had bedtime and other you-know-who was harvesting but in that time we made fancy uncrustables, splatter painted cake, ate delicious ice cream sandwich sliders, and gossiped with all of my new and old fronds. Camp is the bessst.

We celebrated nephew Cliff’s first birthday! I made his cake and smash cake and wow making cakes these days takes serious nap time ninja moves but we did it and Cliff smashed it!!

We gardened, we looked at the baby in the mirror, we danced, and giggled!

Ok the end, craziest/best summer ever!! Welcome, fall!!!

-Yeh!

Rainbow Cake with Strawberry Buttercream + My Blog is Ten!

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10 years ago this week, this blog was born! I feel like I should make a speech?? I’m terrible at speeches (see: the time I officiated Stoop’s wedding and made the speech about farts), but I’ll give it a try anyway because I’ve been getting a little emotional reflecting on these past 10 years and thinking about how much fun and fulfilling it’s been to keep this blog. She’s been with me through so much! My bangs and eyeliner phase, my schnitzel eating phase, my lunch packing bike riding phase! The first layer cake I ever made is buried in these archives, as is the first recipe I ever wrote. I blogged about my first date with Eggboy, our move to the farm, our wedding, our Bernie... I’ve made so many of my closest friends through my blog and documented adventure after adventure after weeeeeeird adventure. And seriously now that I think of it, I really would have no friends here if I didn’t meet them through my blog haha. 

This blog has led to my book and my show and helped me cobble together a job that I wake up every day excited to go to and I couldn’t be more grateful for that. I am also so extremely grateful for the connections I’ve made to you. I feel like I have pen pals all over the world! The internet and social media world has changed so much in the past 10 years (can you believe that this constituted a blog post back in the day?!) and it’ll continue to change but this blog is like a roach, it’ll never die because it’s my diary and since I was 7, I haven’t been able to *not* keep a diary. I just have always had this wild urge to document, no matter how normal my week was.

Thank you for being here and reading and following along and sending over your sweet comments. You really do make the world feel like a smaller warmer cozier place. 

Ok that’s the end of my speech, I’m done being mushy, let’s celebrate with cake!!!

This is my first layer cake postpartum! Making it was a journey. it took like three days! I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to, with all of my time now spent singing Baby Beluga and changing diapers, but finally I put Bernie in the sling and committed. We walked around the house collecting ingredients and remembering where I put the measuring spoons, and the stand mixer white noise sound was like music to her ears. I stuck some cake scraps under her nose so she could smell them and I think she liked it! I also tried to make the colors good and bright so that she could appreciate them. 

I am so happy with the end result, both aesthetically and texturally. I was admittedly nervous about the texture since adding food coloring to batter requires so much extra stirring (and an over-stirred batter can lead to a gummy weird cake) but I ended up basically saving the last stir until I divided the batter between the six bowls and added the food coloring, and that kept the texture just how I like it: fluffy, dense, and moist! This cake is sooo rich, delicious, buttery, and sweet. I like adding coconut oil in addition to butter to up the richness. I typically use refined coconut oil, which doesn’t have any coconutty flavor, but this time I went with unrefined and the tiny hint of coconut flavor was so good, almost almondy. The frosting is flavored with a plop of strawberry preserves which adds a hint of sourness that balances the sweetness quite nicely. I loved eating this cake! I would have eaten way too much of it if I didn’t have the Girl Meets Farm crew here to share it with. 

The colors that I used were all Americolor and in ROYGBV order, they are: chili pepper, pumpkin, dijon, moss, wedgewood, and eggplant. In another world I would have maybe tried to go the all-natural coloring route with matcha and freeze dried berries and turmeric but there was only so much Baby Beluga singing time that I was able to give up so I figured this was an OK compromise!

Obvi you can forego the food coloring all together and just make a hella good vanilla cake with strawberry frosting and maybe even add a layer of strawberry preserves between the cake layers, ooh that’d be good. 

Happy baking!

Rainbow Cake with Strawberry Buttercream

makes one 6-layer 6” cake

ingredients

3 1/2 c (450g) all-purpose flour

1 tb baking powder

1 1/2 tsp kosher salt

1 1/4 c (300g) heavy cream, room temperature

1/2 c (120g) sour cream, room temperature

1 c (225g) unsalted butter, room temperature

1/2 c (100g) refined or unrefined coconut oil, soft but not melted

2 1/4 c (450g) sugar

4 large eggs, room temperature

1 tb vanilla bean paste or extract

1/2 tsp almond extract, optional

food coloring (see notes above for specific colors that I used)

 

strawberry buttercream:

1 c (225g) unsalted butter, room temperature

1/4 c (80g) strawberry preserves

5 c (600g) powdered sugar

1/8 tsp kosher salt

1 1/2 tsp vanilla bean paste or extract

6 tb (90g) heavy cream

a drop of pink food coloring, optional

clues

to make the cake:

preheat the oven to 350ºf. grease and line the bottoms of six 6” cake pans with parchment and set aside (if you don’t have six pans, you can bake in batches).

in a large bowl, sift together the flour and baking powder, and then lightly stir in the salt and set aside. in a large measuring cup, whisk together the heavy cream and sour cream and set aside. 

in a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream together the butter, coconut oil, and sugar on medium high for 3-4 minutes, until light and fluffy. add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each. add the vanilla and almond extract, if using. reduce the mixer to medium low and add the dry mixture and cream mixture in 3 alternating additions, stopping right after you add the last of the dry mixture and cream mixture- don’t mix them in completely because when you mix in the food coloring you’ll continue to mix and that’s when everything will get combined. (the reason for this is that you want to prevent over-mixing at all costs!) divide the batter between 6 medium bowls (using a scale is the most efficient way to do this) and stir in good big plops of food coloring until the batter is bright. distribute the batter evenly between the cake pans and spread it out evenly.

bake until the tops of the cakes are set and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with a few crumbs on it; begin checking for doneness at 22 minutes and try your darnedest not to let it overbake. let cool in the pans for 10 minutes and then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. 

to make the buttercream: 

in a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, beat together the butter and preserves until creamy. gradually add the powdered sugar, and then mix in the salt, vanilla, and heavy cream. mix until creamy.

to frost the cake, level the tops of the layers and then stack them up with a thin layer of frosting in between. frost all over and decorate as desired! enjoy!

Bernie's Nursery!

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She’s got a nursery!!! I am soooo excited about Bernie’s nursery reveal today and if I’m interpreting “Oo Goo Ehh!!” correctly, Bernie is too. So is Mr. Hippo, he loves the camera. 

Having an official nursery for Bernie feels way overdue because between my complete lack of interior design skills, the fact that Bernie’s been sleeping in our room, and the Jewish superstition that decorating a nursery before a baby is born could bring bad luck, Bernie’s room had been pretty bare bones. I did a tiny bit of zhooshing when I was 36 weeks pregnant and in major nesting mode, but the room remained a kinda boring half crib corner/half guest room and honestly the most it got used was when my mom came to visit the weekend Bernie was born.

So when Crate and Kids offered to wave their magic wand over the room we threw imaginary confetti in the air because it meant that Bernie would finally have a space of her own to grow with and love. Crate’s Scandinavian-inspired style is so beautiful and, ahem, perfect for our Scandinavian baby. Also, I grew up down the street from Crate’s headquarters outside of Chicago, so this project was a total nostalgia trip for me. 

This room in our house has been many things: Eggboy’s aunts grew up in it, Eggboy slept here when he had weekends at Grandma’s, it was the hair and makeup room for Girl Meets Farm, and it was the room that we slept in for a week when a tree outside of our bedroom was looking a little gnarly and like it could fall. If these walls could talk, I imagine they’d be patient, grandmotherly, and warm. And maybe a little high from the Girl Meets Farm hairspray fumes?! JKJKJK! From the beginning, even at times when it had very little decor at all, this room has had such good, homey energy.

In designing Bernie’s new space, Eggboy and I wanted her to feel that cozy warmth and be surrounded by her animal friends. We also wanted the history of the room to come through and for it to really feel like it was part of a farm house while also feeling fresh. Functionally, since this is the only bedroom in our house other than ours, I wanted there to still be a bed for Grandma visits and for when Bernie grows out of her crib, but for there to also be a space to sit and hang out. 

I love how Crate’s design team ran with this. They wove their vintage-inspired pieces, like their midcentury crib and brass shelving, in with the existing old paneled wall and peppered in our special personal items, like the rainbow from Lily, Alana, and Michelle, the hippo from Great Aunt Judy and Cousins, the needle pointed alphabet wall hanging that we found in the basement, Bernie’s favorite animal mobile, and the little wooden egg family from our shower. And they swapped out our big old ugly guest bed for a twin-sized daybed with a trundle (Bernie’s going to have the best sleepovers!) so it totally feels like we have a big comfy couch in here now. The muted rainbow colors, cozy layered textures, and warm lighting are so soothing. This room truly has an amazing balance of exciting and calm, modern and vintage. And just being in here feels like a hug! 

For now, the room is filled with bunnies galore because Bernie loves bunnies! The crib sheets, the pillows, the changing table cover, the wall decor, and, my personal favorite, the removable wallpaper (!!) all have bunnies. But what’s great about the large furniture pieces is that they’re sturdy, timeless, and safe enough to be able to grow with Bernie. So when she’s older and potentially over bunnies but into, I don’t know, astronomy? martial arts? the trombone? these pieces will be able to be dressed up to reflect those loves.

Ooh and the closet is a whole other wonderland! Bernie officially has the most organized closet in the house. It’s filled with bins upon bins because I find that bins are the easiest way of organizing all of the necessary baby stuff, especially stuff that requires quick access during, like, emergency wardrobe changes and sudden diaper explosions. It’s also packed with imagination-fueled toys that she can play with now (like her soft eggs and bacon set!) and when she gets older (like the prettiest wooden blocks I’ve ever seen). 

Now whenever I’m in this room, I can envision all of the blanket forts and make-believe games in Bernie’s future. It makes me so verklempt! Yes, I am soaking up all of the moments right now while she is tiny enough to cuddle up on my chest, but at the same time it fills me with so much joy to think about watching her grow in this beautiful Bernie space.