Double Chocolate-Peppermint Crunch Cookies

These cookies are basically chocolate cookies with chocolate chips and a hint of espresso and peppermint. They have a chocolate topping and are sprinkled with crushed peppermint candy for a festive touch. They're very similar to a brownie in texture. Available for $7 per dozen.

Holiday Menu

After a short post-Thanksgiving break, I'm back and working on all kinds of holiday treats! In the next couple of weeks, I'll be posting about what new items are available. I can be contacted for orders at yourbusybeebakery@gmail.com .

Coming up this week:
Double Chocolate-Peppermint Crunch Cookies

Chocolate Almond and Raspberry Tart

Glazed Chocolate Cake with Sprinkles

Chocolate Dipped Hazelnut Caramel Squares

Angel Slices



Here's the Latest

We're just under the wire here and getting ready for Thanksgiving. We've added a few new yummy dishes before it's too late.

We've added an Apple Crostata.  It is the more rustic appearing of the various apple options. We also have the apple and grape pie and the apple pie with oat streusel that have appeared earlier on this site.

Next up, I put together a Pecan, Bourbon, Butterscotch Bread Pudding for an office potluck Thanksgiving. Yes. It is as good as it sounds. I was told that some of the ladies wanted to "divorce their husbands so that they could marry the bread pudding."

Lastly, it a Buttermilk Lemon Chess Pie.  The lemon flavor is subtle and the filling is a kind of custard.

 I will be taking orders until 5 pm Tuesday evening. Wednesday will be a busy baking day and deliveries will be made on Wednesday night and Thursday morning. Nice and fresh!

Kolacky

Kolacky is a Central European cookie.  There are tons of options for fillings including prune, poppy seed, nut/honey, apricot, peach and raspberry. The most distinguisihing feature of this cookie is the dough. It is simple and includes only cream cheese, butter, sugar and flour. The dough isn't especially sweet but it works when countered with the filling and the powdered sugar dusting.  Think of it as a soft pillow for the filling to rest on!

Banana Upside-Down Cake

Where is the rum?  It's in the cake and it's in the bananas. It's bananas!  I know!

So why should the pineapples have all of the fun? Why can't the bananas be happy?  How better to make bananas happy that to give them some butter, brown sugar and rum! 

Once they've had their fill, I can just tuck them in under a nice blanket of cake with cinnamon, nutmeg vanilla and more rum and you can have a little slice of paradise.

Here's to happy bananas!  Cheers!

Apple Pie with Oat Streusel

This could easily be called The Great Deflating Pie.  That's probably a good thing. Apples get soft when they get baked, so when the filling first gets added to the crust, it is an eye-popping  mountain of apple. While baking, the apple softens, the voids between slices are filled and the mountain of apple lowers into an even, dense, layer of apple goodness (with some golden brown sugar, cinnamon and allspice mixed in).

Oats are rolled into the outside of the crust and the topping (thankfully tolerant of all of these volume shifts) is a streusel of golden brown sugar, cinnamon, allspice, butter and oats.

It's a wholesome, homey comfort dessert perfect for this time of the year.

Vanilla-Spiced Caramel and Pear Tart

Sometimes you bake something and you know it's special. This is one of those times. This tart is made with a puff pastry and the filling includes butter, vanilla bean, cinnamon, star anise, cloves, sugar and egg. There isn't that much filling because I needed to leave a lot of room for the pears! Believe me, these were some happy pears. Before swimming in the filling, they had already spent some quality time in butter and sugar, with cinnamon, star anise, cloves and vanilla bean.

Yum!