
Pumpkin Spice Creme Brulee
Looking for that perfect 🦃Thanksgiving party dessert that is both impressive and easy to make? This pumpkin creme brulee recipe will transform your Fall parties forever!
Continue ReadingLooking for that perfect 🦃Thanksgiving party dessert that is both impressive and easy to make? This pumpkin creme brulee recipe will transform your Fall parties forever!
Continue ReadingThis easy recipe creates an impressive Earl Grey Panna Cotta complimented by a delicious Blueberry Compote! Make ahead to impress your date or for a house party!
Continue ReadingTen years ago, if you told me that I would be making my own delicious Blueberry Vanilla Jam for breakfast, I would have thought you were crazy.
Continue ReadingMes amis, this is it, my hands are trembling in anticipation as I type this. A lot of pumpkin puree and eggs were sacrificed in the search for this recipe but nevertheless here it is—the perfect combination of Pumpkin cake and Graham Cracker Cream Cheese Buttercream (GCCCB) frosting. It is abso-freaking-lutely delicious.
Continue ReadingThis easy Pumpkin Spice Creme Brulee recipe will transform your fall parties forever. It’s both impressive and easy to make!
We live in this world of PSL that sneaks up on us in the fall and has us in its grasp until sometime after winter starts. And then it happens all over again the next year, and the year after that, and the year after that.
Once upon a time I spurned the pumpkin spice thrall that Starbucks had over society but I’ve come to accept and rejoice it (If you’re wondering when this switch happened, it was after my third PSL). This affection of pumpkin spice eventually led me to thinking about the various ways I could PSL my current recipes.
This Pumpkin Spice Crême Brûlée recipe has a 1:1 ratio of pumpkin and cream, so if a silky dense creme brulee with only a slight pumpkin flavour is what you’re looking for, this isn’t it.
I’ve tried this recipe with whole eggs and less cream and it just wasn’t the same as using egg yolks and a 1:1 cream to pumpkin ratio. Egg yolks made it richer, which is neccesary becasue the pumpkin puree has a lot of liquid in it to begin with.
Cheers to a good culinary therapy session,
-Frances
Hi! It’s been a minute. How are you?
Despite my absence from this blog for the past 4 years, I never stopped thinking about it, and all of you who keep subscribing everyday. I never stopped working on my love for food. It didn’t feel right for me to jump into a new recipe without giving you an update on what’s changed and how deeply my relationship with food runs now.
A lot has happened since the last blog post: going back to school (baking and pastry arts), moving into a new career (food photography), traveling, moving into my own space, gaining new skills, new relationships, new friends, finishing school, moving into yet another career (marketing/project management), and this COVID lockdown. I consider myself lucky to have the opportunity to chase my dreams and experience so much—I look back at who I was 4 years ago, and I realize I am far cry from that young girl who felt awkward around people and unable to communicate my feelings.
It has been a wild roller coaster ride of putting myself out there, being unafraid to fail with the love and support of family and friends. Honestly I would not have been able to do it without the community around me, lifting me up to where I’m at today. Sometimes I complain about my day to day, but if I actually think about it, I am in my dream industry, and I had no idea I was going to end up here 10 years ago starting off as a young graphic designer.
If there’s anything I learned, it is that you need to fail to succeed. Success looks different to every person and everyone around you is only human. Be kind to one another and learn how to talk to people and navigate disagreements in a respectful manner. Don’t run away from your problems, tackle them straight on and tackle them with the grit that people around you deserve!
Enough about me and my preaching, without further ado, here is a Panna Cotta recipe that you can make ahead of time for your party prep!
What is Panna Cotta you ask? It’s classically an Italian dessert of sweetened cream set with gelatin in some sort of mold (no cooking required despite the name meaning ‘cooked cream’ in Italian). I see it as a jello made of milk/cream that stands up on its own. Having gone through 4 semesters of school for Baking and Pastry Arts, I can tell you, it’s what chefs make at restaurants for an impressive but easy and delicious gluten-free dessert option. Panna Cotta can be flavoured in many different ways and Earl Grey is just one of my favourite! So scale down for date night or scale up for a house party.
In an endeavor to bring more consistency to my recipe results (and also partially because this is the way we did things in baking school), I’ve started to include the measurement in weight for ingredients. Measuring in weight is much more accurate than the use of cups and teaspoons (volume) because everyone packs a cup differently. For example, a cup of brown sugar can vary from 200 to 300 grams depending on how tightly you pack it! Hopefully you can use a scale to try out these recipes but just in case you don’t, I’ve left the volume measurements in as well.
Cheers to a good culinary therapy session,
-Frances
Ten years ago, if you told me that I would be making my own delicious Blueberry Vanilla Jam for breakfast, I would have thought you were crazy. I had zero cooking experience and even less motivation to step into the kitchen. Just this past summer, I made 40 jars of this easy Blueberry Vanilla Jam recipe as favours for a friend’s baby shower and couldn’t be happier with the result!
This recipe is super easy and if I could, I would tell my past self to get off my lazy behind and follow it for some super impressive homemade jam. They are a wonderful compliment to scones, toast or tea-time biscuits. If you’re looking for a unique do-it-yourself gift idea, fill some 125ml Bernardin canning jars with this jam and hand them out!
In this recipe I use an ingredient called ‘vanilla bean paste’ which can be explained as a sweet liquid containing vanilla bean seeds. Since it is pre-bottled and available with the scoop of a spoon, it saves me the time and trouble of cutting open a vanilla pod and scraping out the seeds. The result is arguably identical as it still produces that wonderful flavour and speckled look in desserts and baked goods.
Another reason I use vanilla bean paste rather than vanilla pods because it is much cheaper, at least here in Canada. Generally, 1 tbsp of vanilla bean paste can substitute 1 vanilla bean pod, although this might be further clarified by the labeling on the jar. I use Madagascar Bourbon Vanilla Bean Paste from PC Black Label which is available at Loblaws.
I hope you enjoy this Blueberry Vanilla Jam recipe as much as I do and remember to share your results with me using #francesmenu on instagram, twitter and Facebook!
Here’s some food for thought: When effort is put into the food styling, it cuts down time spent on photographing and post-editing. So even if it takes that extra 5 – 10 minutes to style your food, do it, because it may save you 40 minutes later on in the process. If you don’t know how, then research, look at other work and try out different styles to gain more experience. Try different ways to create contrast, repetition, emphasis and other principles of design in your styling. This is something I am constantly learning and it can be incredibly challenging.
For this shoot, a 60-in umbrella was placed to the back-left of the photography area and a white foam core board on the opposite side to reflect the light and fill in shadows. For the marble tabletop, 3 floor tiles were pushed next to each other, using the rough side of the tile to create a non-reflective surface. To make it look like one seamless table, I used photoshop to remove the lines in between each tile.
Reviewing the photos from this particular shoot, I learned two things. The first thing I learned was that a shallow depth of field can bring a sense of ‘a-pro-did-this’ feeling to the untrained eye. However, pushing it too far (making it too shallow) can make a photo look unplanned, unprofessional and distract from the focal point. The second thing I learned was that having extremely reflective copper items in the shoot can disturb the ‘natural window light’ style. The copper colour is much warmer to the neutral light temperature that was used and its warm colour had a far reach to the other items on the table. This made it seem as if light sources with different temperatures were being used, making it look messy at times. Please note that this is only undesirable in the ‘natural window light’ style that I was going for and maybe useful in other styles.
In hindsight, I should have probably done something to dull the reflective surface of the teapot to avoid the bright hotspots that compete with the focal point for attention. Vaseline maybe? If I used a dulling spray it probably wouldn’t be food safe to use afterwards. Will experiment further.