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#EasyRecipe: Peanut Butter Cookies

  I've been making this recipe since I was a pre-teen. I  sold them at a trailer park playground so I could score the things I thought I needed to survive, like George Michael's album Faith. Hahaha! I wrote this recipe's origin story for Bon Appetit and it was just published. You can check it out here. Made with just four ingredients, you can whip these peanut butter cookies up in a few minutes. I recommend that you rest the dough for an hour to solidify the oil in the peanut butter and help control spread as they bake. The white sugar helps create a deeper caramel color [...]

Lemon Blueberry Quesito

This easy-to-make lemon blueberry quesito ( Puerto Rico's version of the danish) is one of my favorite summer dessert recipes. OK, if I'm keeping it 100, I make it all year. But it's super awesome during the summer when I get a little crazy buying a ton of berries at the farmer's market. You can have this baby in the oven in under ten minutes and on your table in under thirty. When you choose fresh blueberries at the market, go for plump ones, dent-free, and a deep blue. Skip blueberries that have any red patches on them, as this shows they were picked before their time. Blueberries do [...]

Coconut Dark Chocolate Syrup

Coconut and dark chocolate go hand in hand like peanut butter and jelly. One of my favorite (and easiest) ways to enjoy this flavor combo is this silky coconut dark chocolate syrup. You can make it in minutes and enjoy it for days. (Or just one day if you're a bit of a glutton like me.) Truly the most complicated step in this recipe is making sure you're choosing sweetened cream of coconut. It can be confusing when you're facing rows and rows of cans that say cream of coconut, coconut cream, and coconut milk, so here's a little explainer. Coconut cream is made from coconut milk that's chilled until [...]

2021-07-13T18:58:54+00:00By |Desserts, Recipes, Sauces|0 Comments

Cool Down with Piña Colada Popsicles

Today is national Piña Colada day! Though I'm all about a silky, creamy, icy piña colada, I love Puerto Rico's national drink even more in popsicle form, especially on 100 plus degree days. I make mine virgin because I'm not much of a drinker, and I have a teenage boy in the house that eats six of everything. Of course, you can make these frozen pops with spicy rum. Just remember that alcohol doesn't freeze, so you have to be careful with your ratio of juice to alcohol. If you go heavy on the alcohol, you'll be eating piña colada slushies, which doesn't sound all that bad either. Buen [...]

Two-Ingredient Pie Dough

Nothing says summer’s here quite like a homemade fruit pie. Tangy blackberries, tart cherries, and luscious peaches are all in season and make incredibly easy fillings. It’s always a good idea to have some dough tucked away for a quick fruit pie. It’s a wonderful addition to a brunch or impromptu get-together. Drop it on the table and watch it get gobbled up. #Trust. If you’re intimidated by making your own dough, don’t be. It’s not as tricky a process as some would have you believe. My recipe calls for just two ingredients and a touch of water. The key step is to make sure all the ingredients are [...]

Easy Recipe: Peach Galette

Peach season is in full swing, my friends! This easy-to-make peach galette is my favorite way to showcase this succulent summer fruit. A galette is a rustic, free-form pie baked on a sheet pan, not in a pie pan. You can use store-bought pie dough, puff pastry, or use my simple two-ingredient pie dough recipe to get this luscious dessert on the table in under an hour.  The most important step is to make sure you taste your peaches before you add them to the dough. Not all peaches are overflowing with flavor. If they're lacking in the taste department, add a touch of honey, a few drops of [...]

PRESSURE COOKER RICE PUDDING (ARROZ CON DULCE)

My digital pressure cooker is one of my most used kitchen tools. I’m a busy mom and the ability to make a one-pot meal in half the time is something I can’t pass up. So much so that I wrote a cookbook of my favorite Caribbean recipes made easy with Quick Pot, one of my favorite brands of digital pressure cookers.  […]

#IslandFlavor: Coconut Hot Fudge Sundae

July 25th is National #HotFudgeSundaeDay. It also happens to be Danger's birthday (he's turning seven) which makes this day one of The. Biggest. Days. of the year for me. What better way to celebrate than with a tropical, coconut hot fudge sundae! My little man Danger loves sweet fried plantains (he may not have been born on the island but that kid is Puerto Rican I tell you!) and he loves chocolate, so I combined those flavors with one of our favorite things in the world: vanilla ice cream. This is a really easy quick sundae but if you don't have sweet plantain, you can substitute a ripe banana or [...]

#IslandFlavor: Limbers (Frozen Fruit Pops)

It doesn't matter where you are in Puerto Rico- your block, your school, or in a downtown plaza- someone will always be selling frozen fruit juice pops called limbers. My Abuela Alicia lived in a tenement building in Rio Piedras and had a neighbor that would sell them out of her apartment. My brother and I would hand her fifty cents through a gap in her wrought iron door and in return we would get two little dixie cups filled to the top with frozen sweetened coconut milk. It was the tastiest way to stay cool in a world with no air conditioning. These frosty, refreshing treats are named [...]

#IslandFlavor: Tropical Coconut Mug Cake

I developed this microwave coconut mug cake for Food Network's The Kitchen. If you're anything like me  (impatient, with a sweet tooth so big it rides shotgun) this is an awesome recipe to keep in your back pocket. This cake is ready so fast you can make it during a commercial break. Plus you can substitute the tropical fruit with almost anything your heart desires. (And yes, for me, that will almost always mean chocolate.) A big thanks to Katie Lee, Jeff Mauro, Geoffrey Zacharian, Marcela Valladolid and Sunny Anderson for having me on their Stove Free Summer episode! Ingredients 1/3 cup  angel flake coconut sweetened 1  egg, [...]

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