Good Things by David

February was a wonderful month filled with delicious and tempting sweets for all.  I developed a chocolate cookie made to be used with a multitude of cookie cutters for any type of celebration or baking project.  The cookies in that post were cut with a nice heart cutter that I use every now and then (it comes with a stamp made to imprint messages onto the surface of the cookie), because I wanted to ship them out to my niece & nephews.  What I love about the chocolate cookie dough is that, not only does it taste chocolaty and decadent, it is also wonderful to roll out and cut.  The cookies remain perfectly shaped when they come out of the oven, so royal icing decorations can be applied with ease. Those beautiful heart cookies that were iced for my niece and nephews were such a hit with both you readers and my little ones!  I’m glad they were enjoyed all around.  Icing them was such fun over the weekend afternoon I set aside for them, but it wasn’t...

Eating meatballs marinara is something of an affair for me.  I recently cooked some  for a birthday lunch and the subject of how to actually make them came up.  Our birthday guest (aunt Marg) had just been watching a ‘meatball showdown’ on one of the cooking shows which took place between two restaurants here in Philadelphia.  I told her step by step the way I like to make mine and she agreed that that was the way to make them if you wanted the best meatballs.  Mind you, Aunt Marg and my mother-in-law have been making spaghetti & meatballs for decades now, so it’s nice to know that I make them in the same manner.   A meatball covered in delicious marinara. Beef or a mix of ground beef & ground pork and/or veal is common if you like making them with those types of meats.  At home, however, I make mine out of ground turkey.  Dark meat or a mix of dark & light is preferable to light turkey meat because it is more succulent ...

Boston Cream Pies are delicious cakes made from sponge cake layers that are filled with ultra-rich pastry cream and topped with the smoothest of chocolate ganaches.  It is thought that the cake was originally called a pie, because back in the 1800s, cakes were usually baked in pie tins (these were called Washington pie plates).  Washington Pie was another tender cake which was split and filled with a pastry cream, although some versions used jam or jelly instead of cream.  It wasn’t until the mid 20th century, however, that the idea of adding a rich ganache topping came into play. Boston Cream Pie If you’ve never had the pleasure of baking a Boston Cream Pie then I think you should treat yourself to one very soon.  The cake layers which I showed you in a previous post are perfect for this this type of cake.  Most recipes for Boston Cream Pie give you one cake layer to split and fill, but my recipe produces two wonderful layers that are thick and lig...