Tomato & Goat Cheese Tart

The flavor of this tart blew me away! While Adam just kept wishing it was pizza (this is NOT supposed to taste like pizza...), I savored every buttery, flaky bite. A tart without the need for a fancy pan - I love it!

With a summer of fresh, ripe tomatoes just around the corner, I think I'll be making this again. Though with all those calories in the all-butter crust, next time I'll make it when there will be more than just of the two of us eating it!

The recipe was from David Lebovitz's Living the Sweet Life in Paris blog. The story behind this tart is fantastic, so I will just direct you to his site, rather than reposting the recipe.

I did change up the herbs to what I had on hand - dried parsley and oregano and I don't think the flavor suffered a bit. Though feel free to disagree with me on that point.

Make this and enjoy!

Chicken Tacos & More

There nothing better than a little pollo asado for Cinco de Mayo. I can eat Mexican anytime of year. For a stellar grilled chicken recipe with endless variations for use in Mexican-style cooking here is a Food & Wine magazine favorite straight from the cookbook of Dos Toros, a restaurant in New York City.

I toasted corn tortillas on the griddle, spiked a couple avocados with lime and salt, and added diced tomatoes and some freshly grated monterey jack cheese. Simply delicioso.

The food was so good I had to make quesadillas with the leftover chicken the next day. Needless to say, there wasn't much left to fill these tortillas!

Banana Cupcakes

For some reason, in the past few weeks when I've wanted to bake it's been all about cupcakes. Maybe it has to do with the pounds of powdered sugar in my cabinets (leftover from dh's Cupcake Birthday Extravaganza) or maybe it's because I'm a bit cookied-out. Either way, when I signed up to bring a dessert to our church's potluck dinner cupcakes it would be!

And not just any cupcakes -- banana cupcakes with cream cheese frosting.

I feel I have the making of *my* favorite banana bread (see previous TastyKate post) down pat. But cupcakes are another beast. It's not easy to get light and fluffy from a recipe that is deliciously dense and moist. So I was on the search for the best banana cupcake recipe!

During my cupcake baking extravaganza I realized the density of my cupcakes mostly has to do with the amount of flour you add...duh! So for 12 cupcakes I usually aim for about 1 cup of flour and for 24 cupcakes it's around 1 3/4 depending on the amount of liquid the recipe calls for.

A recipe that fit the bill and had rave reviews was not hard to find. Martha Stewart has an incredible cupcake selection. You can get the recipe here.

Rather than using the honey-cinnamon frosting, which sounds amazing, I had to pair these cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. I LOVE cream cheese frosting -- and I can't imagine banana or carrot cake without it!  You can get the frosting recipe I used here (I scaled the measurements back quite a bit).

So, next time you have ripe bananas, pass up the bread and make these cupcakes!!