Chocolate, strawberry spice and vanilla layered cake sandwiched with vanilla buttercream and finished with a dark chocolate glaze. by MyFamilyKitchen on Thursday, April 18, 2013

When Cass and Carla renovated their 1952 home in Austin, Texas, they knew that comfort was a top priority. “We wanted to have a welcoming, well-crafted, simple house that suited our family and friends,” they told Apartment Therapy in this recent House Tour. The result is a sort of easy minimalism: lots of space, light, and personality — particularly in the kitchen! — for this vibrant family of four.

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Q: I’m hosting a burger bar party for 36 guests, including 6 kids. I’m planning on serving mushroom burgers, beef burgers, salmon burgers, grilled chicken, and grilled cheese sandwiches. How much of each burger should I make? I want to make sure I have enough!

Sent by Lucy

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For the longest time I thought entertaining meant an all-out war with my family, my kitchen, and my senses. It was something I felt I had to conquer in order to become an amazing wife and friend. But I now realize that had I taken a step back and just made a few simple things a little extra special, I could have saved myself the stress and had more time to enjoy those around me. Here are 5 things you can do so you don’t make the same mistakes I did!

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I just returned from my first trip to Lebanon, where I spent a week eating and drinking all over the country. Whether in a restaurant or someone’s home, no matter where I stopped for a drink, I was always offered a bowl or two of mixed nuts. This, I learned, was no coincidence.

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Last weekend it was one of those perfect weekends… Sunny day, spring scents in the air, bright…



Get the rest in my blog! See you there!

4.08 / 5 Stars | 12 Reviews

by Ann Hammock

“This recipe is quick and easy, and can be made with ingredients at hand. Serve it to those guests who strike unexpectedly.”

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Wine of the Week: 2011 Chêne Bleu Rosé
Region: Provence, France
Price: $28

Much like red or white wine, all rosé wines are not created equally. Unfortunately too often they are lumped together as ‘not serious’ and best enjoyed within a year of being bottled. Not so with the rosé wines from Chêne Bleu, a wine producer in the south of France.

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Chickens require a lot of work and loving attention, but with the right know-how you can raise and utilize backyard chickens quite successfully. Here are some pros and cons to consider…

• Backyard Chickens
  Apartment Therapy

Nobody could mistake me for a person who moves quickly. I “run” at a treadmill speed that would never catch a thief, and barely these days, a preschooler on the loose. It took us 3.5 years, until two weeks ago, in fact, to finally put the kid’s toys away. We’ve been “redecorating” the living room for the better part of a year — we’ll probably put the pictures back up in a week or six; please, don’t rush us. Thus, it should surprise nobody that it’s taken me nearly four years to conquer the cake you see here, which sounds even worse if you consider that it was a special request from my own mother, as this was her favorite growing up.

In my defense, in that period of time, I moved apartments, had a kid, wrote a book, and went on a 25-city book tour, all while (mostly) keeping up with this here website and spending a truly horrific amount of time staring slack-jawed social media ahem, maintaining occasional hobbies. But I know the truth, which is that I’ve been intimidated by making it because I felt like I was cooking blind. The Bee Sting Cake (Bienenstich) is a German specialty and while my mother’s parents came over in 1935 and 1936 respectively, the areas once known as German epicenters (the middle of Queens, where my mom was raised, and Yorkville, in the Upper East Side of Manhattan) have now mostly dispersed, and most of the accompanying stores have shuttered. Calls to German bakeries to see if they sold it were almost futile, until I found one in Ridgewood, Queens that sold us a whole one that was rather awful; let’s not speak of it at all. The only thing left to do was go it alone, researching obsessively along the way.

… Read the rest of bee sting cake on smittenkitchen.com

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