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I don’t even recall how long ago I clipped this recipe from a Cooking Light magazine. I just knew I’d file it under “will bake someday”. I was never one to play with yeast recipes. But as much as I love Cinnabon, I thought I’d give this one a try.

Dough

1 package of yeast

1/4 cup warm water (100-110degrees)

1/2 cup warm milk (100-110degrees)

1/3 cup sugar

1/4 cup softened butter

1 teaspoon vanilla

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 large egg, beaten

3 1/2 cups flour, divided

Filling

3/4 cup raisins (preferably golden)

3/4 cup brown sugar (original calls for 2/3)

1/2 stick melted butter

Glaze

1 cup powdered sugar

2 tablespoons milk

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Dissolve yeast in warm water in large bowl. Let stand 5 minutes. Add the milk, sugar, butter, vanilla, salt and egg and stir until combined. Place in stand mixer with the dough hook, add 3 cups of flour and mix on speed 2 until dough pulls away from the side. Place in large bowl coated with cooking spray and place in a warm location (85 degrees is ideal) for an hour or until doubled in size.

To prepare filling – combine raisins, brown sugar and cinnamon. Roll dough into a 10×15 rectangle. Brush dough with melted butter, and sprinkle the brown sugar mixture. Roll up and pinch seam to seal. Wrap and chill for 20 minutes.

Unwrap and cut into 20 1/2 inch slices or 10 1 inch slices! Arrange cut side up on a cookie sheet lined with either parchment or a silicone mat, 1 inch apart and let rest on the sheet, covered, to rise again, about an hour.

Then bake at 350 for 15-20 minutes, until just very lightly browned. To prepare glaze, combine the ingredients with a whisk and drizzle over warm cinnamon rolls.

Don’t worry about the calories. Eveything in moderation. And BON APPETIT!

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This dish started with my attempt to perfect the art of a beautifully poached egg. When I was at the Harvest Brunch at The Danforth Inn in Portland, Maine, and saw the poached egg that Chef Carmen Gonzales served us, I thought to myself, I must make a poached egg like that! Add leftover polenta from dinner the previous night, some roasted tomatoes and voila, breakfast was born!

The Polenta was simple – bring 5 cups of water, chicken or vegetable stock to a slow rolling boil, slowly add in 1 cup of polenta, making sure to whisk it in to prevent lumps. Continue stirring for about 20-30 minutes until it pulls away from the sides and has thickened. Add 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 cup grated Parmesan. Pour into a buttered 9×13 glass dish and refrigerate until firm, a couple hours.

Next, cut several Roma tomatoes in half, sprinkle with salt, pepper and a dash of sugar and roast at 350 for about 45 minutes. Add thinly sliced smoked Swiss cheese and keep in a warm oven while you work on the polenta.

Cut the polenta into triangles and pan fry in butter, a few minutes on each side, until browned. Keep warm in the oven with the tomatoes.

Now for the poached eggs. Bring a couple inches of water and a couple tablespoons of white vinegar to a boil in a sauce pan. Crack one egg per bowl and have ready to drop into the water. Lower the heat to barely a slow boil and with a whisk, stir very quickly to create a vortex, remove the whisk and carefully lower the egg into the center of the vortex. This helps keep the egg white from spreading and losing shape. Cook until desired doneness.

And the plating – always using a warmed plate, top with baby spinach (or other baby greens) a couple pieces of the polenta, top with roasted tomatoes and a poached egg on top. Salt and cracked pepper to taste. And you have a wonderful Italian inspired breakfast.

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I arrived to show Kenniston Hill Inn in Boothbay, Maine and the innkeeper just made a loaf of Amish Cinnamon Bread. If you haven’t heard of that before, it’s a starter that apparently only the Amish can create. It’s a chain letter of sorts but with food. It’s passed on and on… It was similar to a cinnamon coffee cake and felt heavy but didn’t taste heavy. It’s a great cake to go with tea or coffee. And my favorite coffee has long been Rock City Roasters in Rockland, Maine. I now have a second favorite, Bard Coffee in Portland, Maine.

So I left there with a starter batch and instructions on caring for it for the following 9 days before turning it into a sweet bread with a texture similar to banana bread. And because it’s my nature to take a recipe and change it to make it my own, that’s what I did. I’ll give you both the original recipe and my recipe.

So you’ve been given a starter bag… Here are your instructions:

Note: Do not use wood or metal spoon, bowl or pan, glass or plastic only; do NOT refrigerate, it’s normal for the batter to bubble, rise and ferment, just let the air out and zip the bag again.

• Day 1 you receive your bag, just let it sit and label it Day 1
• Day 2 mush the  bag, let the air out
• Day 3 repeat
• Day 4 repeat
• Day 5 repeat
• Day 6 add to the bag: 1 cup flour, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup milk, mix well
• Day 7 mush the bag, let the air out
• Day 8 repeat
• Day 9 repeat
• Day 10 follow the instructions below:

1. Pour the contents of the bag into a large glass or plastic bowl.
2. Add 1.5 cups flour, 1.5 cups sugar, 1.5 cups milk, whisk well.
3. Label four 1 gallon Ziploc bags with “Day 1″ and date. Fill each bag with 1 cup of the starter mixture. Pass three along to others and keep one for yourself.
4. Preheat oven to 325
5. To the remaining batter (the one you’ve kept):

• 3 eggs
• 1 cup oil
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 1.5 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 cups flour
• 1 large box instant vanilla pudding

Grease two large loaf pans. Sprinkle cinnamon sugar in the pan to dust the inside. Pour batter evenly into the pans and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar. Bake for about an hour, until a toothpick comes out clean.

NOW, for MY variation:

I substituted chocolate pudding for vanilla pudding; I omitted the baking soda and the cinnamon in the batter and I put the batter into two 10 inch round scalloped edge baking dishes. I added a ring of chocolate chips, cranberries, pecans and several dollops of cinnamon filling to the center. Then baked them for about 50 minutes and cut into wedges. I tasted it warm and cool and both were very good. I suspect that by leaving out the baking soda, the baking powder alone allowed the cake to be a bit more airy and rise more than it would with baking soda as well. The texture of this cake was a cross between a coffee cake and a devils food cake.

ENJOY!

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I recently had an office party to attend and the criteria for our Yankee Gift Swap was that it had to be edible and/or consumable. Immediately I thought CHOCOLATE TRUFFLES. I make mine with dark rum (preferably Captain Morgan but I didn’t have any on hand so I used regular dark rum), and espresso. And I love to roll them in a variety of things, from the standard cocoa or confectioner’s sugar, to toasted coconut, almonds, nonpareils and chocolate jimmies. By the way, a Dirt Devil does a great job on those nonpareils when they fall all over the place.

I had been thinking of ways to create a chocolate box to hold the truffles but it didn’t take long before I decided a chocolate bowl would be much easier and less time consuming. I dipped small balloons in chocolate and set them aside to cool. One I rolled completely in nonpareils, the other I only rimmed the top portion of the bowl. As they were cooling, I thought I’d use one to hold a variety of the rolled truffles, the other I filled with truffle mixture as if it were a giant, solid truffle half.

My husband came up with a fantastic idea of a chocolate hand to hold the bowl of truffles. I was on it STAT! First I tried a pink dishwashing glove (for the photo op I added a diamond – you know, girl’s best friend!) but realized I wouldn’t be able to let it harden with my hand in it. So I filled it with sugar, assuming that once firm, I’d simply pour the sugar out of the glove and the glove would slip right out of the chocolate. WRONG. And I even sprayed with vegetable oil. Chocolate hand failure #1…you see where I’m headed? Hubby said to use a latex glove that I could blow up, you know, like Howie Mandel? So I did. It wasn’t the most shapely hand, but it would suffice. When I dipped the latex balloons, one I sprayed and one I did not, both came out fine. However, I think where there is pressure, spray wouldn’t matter. So I chose not to spray the hand (it’s difficult to get chocolate to stick to a greased piece of latex) and dipped away. I set it on a wax lined sheet pan to cool in the fridge.

In the meantime, I made my truffles while the chocolate hand and bowl were cooling.

CHOCOLATE TRUFFLES:

12 oz bittersweet chocolate chips (I prefer Sharffenberger chocolate) set aside in a large mixing bowl

2/3 cup heavy cream

1 tablespoon dark rum

1 teaspoon espresso powder (instant)

Heat the cream and espresso in a heavy saucepan until just boiling. Add the rum and remove from heat. Pour over chocolate chips and stir until completely melted and combined (should appear shiny). Refrigerate for a few hours until firm enough to roll. I use a very small Oxo cookie scoop for easy release. Roll quickly (to avoid warming the chocolate too much) and roll in your choice of coatings. Let chill in the refrigerator until ready to serve. Truffles can sit at room temperature, but they will soften quite a bit.

So, back to the chocolate hand. The second one. I knew something wasn’t right when I pulled it out of the fridge and saw that some of the air had escaped the glove. When I cut the knot, there was no depressurization therefore the glove didn’t immediately pull away from the chocolate as I had hoped. Hmmm….I tried to gently pull that glove out of the hand. But it wouldn’t budge. Chocolate hand failure #2. But I stopped there, I ran out of time.

So one chocolate bowl held a variety of truffles, the other was filled with solid truffle. But to that mixture I added almonds, cranberries and toasted coconut and filled the bowl. But I still had melted chocolate left…what else could I dip? I dipped pretzels. I dipped apples in caramel and then in chocolate (and rolled them in toasted almonds). And still I had melted chocolate. I poured the chocolate into a squeeze bottle and piped out some table decorations for the party. Naturally I had to do a chocolate swan for The Swan Agency Sotheby’s International Realty for throwing the party! And for fun, I added a REALTOR symbol along with $ and a Happy Holidays! Can you tell I love chocolate?

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The inspiration for the recipes in this post came from my friend, John, who handed me a bag full of apples from the tree in his yard. There must have been 20 pounds of apples in the bag. First thing I did was make an apple crisp since John’s birthday was coming up (besides he told me he’d trade freshly dug clams from his waterfront property for a homemade apple crisp – a no brainer for me!).

Then after I made the Apple Crisp for John, I wasn’t able to taste it (I should have made another small crisp for myself but didn’t) so I decided to make Applesauce. I was determined to use all of these fresh apples. So now the apples just keep on giving. I though I’d make a coffee cake with an applesauce streusel layer, thus a similar Drakes Coffee Cake (my mother’s recipe) for our little Thanksgiving.  After making the coffee cake and having leftovers (trying to avoid eating EVERYTHING I make), we were having friends over for dinner the next night so I decided to use the cake in a Banana’s Foster Trifle with Vanilla Rum.

The first order of business was to make a big batch of my favorite recipe for the crisp topping. This is a versatile recipe that can be used to make fruit crumb bars, crumb cake or fruit crisps. So I make a double batch and freeze it. I used to make this recipe at the inn and serve it for a fruit course on a savory egg dish morning.

CRISP TOPPING (SINGLE BATCH) INGREDIENTS:

1 1/2 cups thick cut oats (not instant)

1 cup dark brown sugar

1 cup flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

dash of vanilla

1 1/2 sticks of butter, softened

Blend all ingredients on low speed with a paddle attachment on the stand mixer until crumbly.

THE APPLES

8 apples, peeled (I left half unpeeled) and cut into small chunks – a mix of a tart and sweet would be ideal (green and red)

a big squeeze of a lemon half

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 cup flour

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

Mix well and pour into baking dish. Cover with crisp topping and bake at 350 for about 50 minutes.

APPLESAUCE

Ok I must admit, I don’t use a recipe for applesauce. I just fill a large stockpot full of peeled apple chunks, toss in a cup or two of water, a cup or two of brown sugar, the juice of half a lemon, some lemon zest and cinnamon. But not ground cinnamon, cinnamon sticks – this keeps the applesauce from looking muddy (although it will still end up a shade of brown). My friend Carol uses red apples and leaves the skin on, creating this beautiful shade of light pink applesauce. When I get her recipe I will be certain to make it, photograph it and blog it!

I cook the apples, covered, on a medium flame stirring occasionally, until the apples are very tender. Then I remove the cinnamon sticks and puree with a hand held stick blender (be sure to let it cool a bit before this step). If you need to add some tartness, squeeze in more fresh lemon juice.

COFFEE CAKE

My mother has been making this coffee cake for years. It’s very similar to a pound cake because it’s dense. It has a streusel layer in the center and is topped with a cinnamon nut mixture. She makes it in a beautiful, decorative bundt pan and it comes out perfect every time. For some reason, mine does not. Mine sticks in the sharp crevices so I decided to make mine with a twist. I used applesauce in my streusel layer and topped it with a crumb topping. And I baked it in a square baking dish, no crevice issues.

Cream:

1 cup sour cream

2 eggs 1 cup softened butter

2 cups sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

Grease deep 8 or 9″ baking dish and layer half of batter. Then add a layer of applesauce, top with a mixture of finely chopped pecans/walnuts tossed with ground cinnamon, then top with remaining batter. Cover the top with the crisp topping and bake at 350 for about 50 minutes or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

Serve warm with ice cream or room temperature. Great for breakfast or dessert!

BANANAS FOSTER TRIFLE

This is one of the easiest desserts you can ever throw together in very little time. And that’s what I faced the day I needed to make it. I showed property to an aspiring innkeeper that day at 10am. We didn’t finish up until 2pm. I ran to the grocery store to figure out what I would make for dinner for friends coming over that night. I thought I would use my leftover coffee cake to make this trifle. You can even use store bought cake. You can throw this together in no time.

You will need:

coffee cake leftovers (use just the cake and set aside the crumb topping)

3 large ripe bananas

ground cinnamon

vanilla pudding (you can make instant – 2 boxes to which you just add cold milk)

whipped cream (you can use Cool Whip if you don’t want to make your own)

vanilla flavored rum

banana liquor

caramel sauce (I buy mine from DaVinci Gourmet)

To assemble:

In a large glass bowl (a classic Trifle bowl looks like a large scale, tall, footed sorbet dish) layer pieces of coffee cake. Mix together a cup of the vanilla rum and a cup of banana liquor.  Pour some of the liquor mixture over the cake. Spread half of the pudding, then add a layer of whipped cream, spread a layer of sliced bananas, sprinkle with cinnamon, drizzle with caramel sauce. Repeat the layers. The top should be covered with whipped cream and then using the reserved crumb topping – crumble the topping over the top of the whipped cream, and drizzle the caramel sauce. Chill until ready to serve. This could easily serve 8-10 people.

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The idea began when suddenly I found myself amongst a number of other foodie friends on Twitter. The word foodie needs no further explanation. Foodies understand one another; we’re obsessed with all things culinary. Foodies don’t eat to live, we live to eat. We plan activities around food. We plan vacations around foodie towns. At breakfast we talk about where to eat dinner. At dinner we talk about and photograph our food. In the morning we chat online about the food we ate for dinner. We post photos of our meals. Our partners and spouses often ask “can I eat now?” waiting for the end of the photo session. And not just photos, beautiful, artful photos. Food is art. Edible art.

And with my constant food-teasing habits, some Twitter friends would regularly ask when I was cooking for them. Thus our brunch tweetup was born. @kimswan decided she’d offer the venue and I (@danamoos) offered to cook (being a former innkeeper and present wannabe food writer/photographer). It was not long after our Harvest Brunch with Chef Carmen Gonzalez (who much prefers preparing dinner) that I said I’d do brunch, since it’s my favorite meal to prepare for entertaining. The hashtag #DanforthMaineTweetup was created. Realizing I could use the expertise of  event and party planner @LeslieCottrell and wonderful foodie friend and Cabot Creamery’s Consumer Lifestyle Commentator, @CandaceKaru, the “Danforth Divas” began planning. Hmmm, that could have been the hashtag…

We decided on a date – November 23, 2009.  We tweeted it, posted it on Facebook and ended up with a very nice turnout. It was a chance to meet new friends, face to face (or IRL, in real life). It’s also a way for Innkeepers to leverage the power of Social Media. Restaurants and bars host tweetups, why not inns? @RSHotel in New York has been uber-successful at it. Why not Danforth Inn with the Danforth Divas? And days later, we’re still talking about those Gorgonzola stuffed dates wrapped in bacon…

Our menu:

–Fabulous Horseradish-Heavy Bloody Marys

–Pomegranate Sparkling Punch

–Mango, Papaya and Strawberries with Basil and Lemon

–Grapefruit Brûlé with Vanilla Bean Creme

–Pumpkin Spice Bundt Cake

–Egg Roulade filled with Leeks and Parmesan topped with Lobster in Sherry Butter

–Steamed, Chilled Asparagus served with a Curry Aioli

–Cabot Clothbound Aged Cheddar, French Bread

–Potato Gratin Dauphinios “Danforth” with Cabot Private Stock Cheddar

–Gorgonzola Stuffed Dates wrapped in Bacon

–Chocolate Truffles

–Earl Grey Tea Cookies

–Coffee, Tea

Thanks so much to all of you who attended, it was great fun and wonderful to meet you in person, or I should say IRL or F2F. And @Sarah_Wallace, nice job on the video

Enjoy the eye candy tour…

p.s. Here’s a snapshot of the Twitter hashtag stream #danforthmainetweetup. Click on it to get all the search results!!

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Innkeepers are constantly looking for innovative ways to serve the same basic ingredients for breakfast. This dish was inspired by Scot Fuller, the innkeeper at Pomegranate Inn. Our Historic Homes of Maine course was held there a few weeks ago and those of us who stayed the night prior to class were awakened to wonderful aromas wafting from the kitchen. Sometimes the most successful breakfast entrees are the ones with the simplest of ingredients. This is a beautifully delicious example of that.

Here’s my adaptation:

2 slices thick cut bread (I prefer Challah but I didn’t have any so I used white bread) buttered and lightly browned in a saute pan

2 eggs (crack 1 each into a small ramekin) and set aside

Top each slice of browned toast with 2 tablespoons of  shredded Gruyere and Swiss cheese, then 2 slices Canadian Bacon (Prosciutto would be wonderful as well)

Add 1 thick slice of a ripe tomato (preferably heirloom or Ugly Ripe) and salt to taste

Top each with 2 more tablespoons grated Gruyere followed by freshly cracked black pepper.

Place in a 375 degree oven until the cheese is melted and begins to bubble. While waiting, heat some butter in a pan and gently place the eggs to cook, sunny side up. When the egg is cooked to your liking, remove the bread, cheese and tomato croute and place the egg atop, add a dash of salt and more pepper and enjoy!

I prefer to serve my egg dishes on a small bed of baby spinach. The warmth of the egg softens the tender spinach leaves nicely.

I often garnish my plates with steamed asparagus and sliced cucumbers (I use the cucumber peel as a garnish as well). Fan an apple wedge and you’ve got a very satisfying and simply elegant meal, for breakfast, lunch or a light dinner (paired with a nice Pouilly-Fuisse ).

Bon Appetit!

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For those of you who have me figured out, you realize I’m all about the images. I try not to get too wordy in my posts. I like to let the photos speak for themselves. But this post has a story to it, one that has to be told in its long version to be appreciated.

I started with this toffee recipe back before I bought a bed and breakfast in Maine in 2004. It fact, made it several times, successfully. So when we bought the inn, I thought I’d make it as my thing, to put in the candy dishes in the rooms every day. It would become my signature candy, no commercial candies for me, it had to be homemade. So one day I got out my trusty candy thermometer (the same one I used before when making the toffee) along with the other ingredients and started making toffee. Let me first preface the rest of the story by saying DO NOT MAKE TOFFEE AT CHECK-IN TIME. Repeat, DO NOT MAKE TOFFEE AT CHECK-IN TIME. My kitchen was open to the guest entrance (which I loved) so in walk some guests to check in. I’m standing over my pot of melted butter and sugar in its light golden stage of yumminess. I tell my guests that I’ll just leave the mixture on low while I give them the tour and show them to their room. They even offer to wait until I’m done (maybe they had more sense than I did given that I was using a candy thermometer- pretty serious stuff). But NO, DON’T WORRY, THE CARAMEL IS STILL IN THE VERY EARLY STAGES AND NOT EVEN READING 200 YET (it needed to reach 290)…so off we go. You can see where this is going. After a few minutes upstairs I begin to smell smoke. I run downstairs to the kitchen and the caramel in the pan is as BLACK as ASPHALT and smoking the house up. Thankfully the smoke alarms didn’t go off (my guess is that because Summer in Maine is gorgeous we leave all windows open almost all Spring/Summer/and part of Fall. I ran outside with the pan so that it could continue to smoke OUTSIDE and not INSIDE. Baking  is supposed to make the inn smell good, right? The rest of the checkins that day heard my “don’t assume the smell of burned food will be what’s to come in the morning, please!!!!” and they all laughed.

Over the next year I attempted to make toffee again, promising NEVER to leave the pan unattended again. I followed the recipe exactly. Removed the mixture from the heat when the thermometer read 290. But it still looked too pale to be done. But I followed the recipe. After a handful of attempts and trashed toffee, I bought a new thermometer. This time, a fancy digital thermometer.

So it had been a while before I decided to try making toffee again. But now that I have a new thermometer, I was confident. But this time I had just been given a gift of a box of See’s Peanut Brittle, I think it was just before the holidays, and we happened to have a little snow on the ground. If you haven’t tasted See’s brittle, GO ONLINE and BUY IT NOW, it’s just amazing. Or maybe you shouldn’t because you could become addicted and be in my predicament of trying to create it at home…So the primary difference between brittle and toffee is baking soda and/or cream of tartar, it some how changes the texture just slightly.

I get all of my ingredients out, new candy thermometer and I decide to make brittle. I follow the recipe (except I used too small a saucepan but couldn’t have imagined that would matter)…WRONG. Candy making tip: DO NOT ASSUME WHEN MAKING CANDY. Repeat: DO NOT ASSUME WHEN MAKING CANDY. When it comes time to add the baking soda at just the precise moment, I add it and am prepared to stir quickly as the recipe reads, but I wasn’t prepared for a big VOLCANIC ERUPTION from my 3 quart saucepan. Fortunately my kitchen door was only 15 feet from the stove, I ran with the erupting saucepan outside and leaned over the porch rail JUST IN TIME for the blobby bubbly brown mess to pour over the edge of the pan and plop onto the beautiful WHITE SNOW. This brown blobby mess hardened in the once white snow immediately, AT OUR INN’S FRONT ENTRANCE, looking like someone had a bad case of the stomach flu (oh dear what if our guests thought it was from my breakfast? Oh the horror!) My husband tried to remove the hardened candy from the snow but it wasn’t as easy as he thought. So he covered the mess up with more snow. Out of sight, out of mind…so the blobby mess sat beneath a winter’s worth of snow. By spring there was no sign of it. That was my FIRST and LAST attempt at making brittle.

So YEARS LATER we’ve sold our inn…I decide to get the almonds out of the pantry a couple weeks ago and right away my husband knew where I was going with this. He said “uh oh”, but right away I said “no, you know what, I’m making my original toffee and I’m NOT going to rely on the thermometer. I know what color it should be.” And that’s exactly what I did. I used both thermometers just to verify what I thought all along, that my eye knew what would be right. The thermometers gave an inaccurate reading. And many chefs do things the same way, by touch, taste, appearance, smell, using the senses. MY TOFFEE TURNED OUT PERFECTLY DELICIOUS WITH JUST THE RIGHT TEXTURE.

SO HERE’S THE RECIPE with my coconut twist:

3 cups whole raw almonds (you can buy them already roasted but I prefer to roast my own)

2 cups shredded coconut

2 sticks butter

1 tablespoon water

1 cup white sugar

6 tablespoons corn syrup

1. roast almonds and coconut on sheet pan in oven on 300 degrees for about 15-20 minutes. Let them cool.

2. chop the nuts in a processor – stopping halfway to reserve about half the mixture leaving some larger pieces, then continue to pulse into small pieces.

3. put butter in 3 quart saucepan (we’re not adding baking soda so this size is adequate!) and add the water, corn syrup and sugar and heat to melt over medium heat.

4. Once melted, bring mixture to a boil over medium high heat, stirring with heatproof spatula occasionally for about 10 minutes (here is where the recipe calls for heating to 290 degrees) but I say heat it until it JUST gets to the right color of toffee (camel brown) and then remove from heat.

5. immediately add the large chop nuts and half of the small chop nuts and quickly fold to combine. The mixture will harden quickly.

6. spread onto parchment lined sheet pan with an offset spatula or heatproof spatula to the desired thickness.

7. top with 2 cups of chocolate chips (I prefer semi-sweet but you can use milk chocolate or a combination), let sit for a couple minutes, then spread the melting chips over the toffee.

8. top the melted chocolate with the remaining finely chopped nuts and let sit at least a few hours at room temperature. When completely set, break into pieces and store in an airtight container. Freezes beautifully!

If you can manage to part with some, it makes a great gift wrapped in a nice gift box with tissue…

Sunday September 25, 2009 was Harvest Brunch at Portland, Maine’s Danforth Inn.

Harvest on the Harbor is Maine’s preimer food and wine experience; a weekend event showcasing chefs and sustainable ingredients from Maine’s farmers, food artisans and fisherman, pulled together by talented chefs.

Chef Carmen Gonzalez of New York was sponsored by Danforth Inn and headlined Saturday evening’s Harvest on the Harbor’s Harvest Uncorked. Chef Carmen is known for her award winning Latin cuisine. Here for Harvest on the Harbor, she combined her love of Maine seafood with her Latin style, sending our taste buds off to cha cha cha.

At Harvest Brunch on Sunday, Chef Carmen started the event with a local Maine sparkling wine paired with her Lobster and Avocado Relish on Tostones and a Guisado of Crab and Plantain. We then sat down at individual tables with baskets of a trio of fried root chips served with a smoked haddock spread. Then the apple and mango fritters…can I please have two dozen of these sweet and airy morsels of fried dough?

Next we were treated to three delectable dishes: Maine Cod Eggs Benedict, Sausage, Oyster and Roasted Tomato Casserole and Pulled Pork and Braised Pork Belly with Quail Egg, (to be honest, I was too quick to eat the oyster and tomato dish that I forgot to photograph it!). Each course was paired with a wine.

And to finish, we indulged in a trio of sweets: Silver Dollar Pancakes with Warm Green Papaya, Crispy Churros dusted with Cinnamon Sugar and a Warm Chocolate Drizzle and Torrejas (similar to French Toast) with Fresh Maine Pears and Requeson (a type of cheese).

This was an epicurean event that I was fortunate enough to attend. Thank you, Chef Carmen.

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These are a decadent cookie inspired by a Good Morning America Christmas cookie contest winner many years back. I’ve put my spin on it by adding Nutella to the recipe! Don’t omit the malted milk powder; if you don’t have it, wait until you can buy some to make these cookies. King Arthur Flour is a good source.

Cream the following:

13 oz jar Nutella

1 C butter, softened

3 T sweetened condensed milk

3/4 C white sugar

1/2 C brown sugar

1 T vanilla

Add 2 eggs once fluffy and mix until smooth

Then add and mix well:

1 C malted milk powder

1/4 t salt

1/2 t baking soda

2 3/4 C flour

Fold in:

2 cups chocolate chips

Bake 350 for 10 minutes, allowing only the edges to lightly brown. Then let sit on cooling rack 4-5 minutes before moving. These cookies will come out soft but will become a bit harder when cool. They should have a little crunch on the outside with a chewy inside. They do soften in an airtight container. They were a huge hit when we had the inn…but make sure there are no nut allergies – Nutella contains ground hazelnuts.

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