It’s summer! Not officially, we know, but secretly it is. Here’s are some clues:

1. No school. 2. We saw fresh corn. 3. There’s light at 8:30 p.m. and (as if we weren’t already suspicious of the season’s arrival) 4. The asparagus we cooked yesterday tasted like summer asparagus — lightly charred and smoky, with kosher salt and freshly ground pepper bits clinging to them.

Luckily, we planned to incorporate the asparagus into a salad, because otherwise I fear we would have been overwhelmed by their pure summer-ness (summerosity? summersion?) It’s only May, for goodness sake — give a girl some time to adjust! So we placed our summer asparagus over greens with tomatoes, goat cheese and a lemon vinaigrette, and found them just right.

For our dressing, we were extremely excited to use special olive oil that a friend brought us from Spain. With our limited knowledge of Spanish, we’ve discerned that it’s from Sierra de Cazorla, where one-third of the municipal land contains olive trees. It’s amazing for vinaigrettes and drizzling, less so for cooking hot food. We can’t wait to use it for the rest of summer, which we plan to embrace both emotionally and through food in the coming weeks.

Ingredients (serves 6):
1 bunch asparagus
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1/3 cup olive oil
kosher salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
6 oz. grape tomatoes
3 oz. goat cheese
6-8 oz. mixed greens

(dressing)
3/4 cup olive oil
juice of 2 lemons
1 tbsp white vinegar
1 tbsp sugar
salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:
Whisk together balsamic vinegar, the 1/3 cup olive oil, and the kosher salt and freshly ground pepper. Pour over asparagus in a baking dish, and let sit for about 15 minutes while you preheat the grill. (If you don’t have a grill, you can preheat your oven to 375 and roast them for about 20-30 minutes). Grill asparagus for about 5 minutes, until lightly charred. Arrange mixed greens on a plate, and divide asparagus, tomatoes and goat cheese among plates. Whisk together dressing ingredients, pour dressing over the salad plates, and serve.

Here’s something that you may not know about Alex: he’s a sandwich snob. For him, there are sandwiches — turkey wraps or quick meals that we throw together for lunch — and then there are sandwiches. The latter requires careful planning and ingredient selection, and precise execution. If I had a nickel for every time I heard him say, “there’s nothing worse than a bad sandwich, and nothing better than a great one,” I’d have at least 50 cents by now.

This week we’re cooking for a real vegetarian (not the cheese and sometimes fish-eating type that we’ve been spoiled by), so we decided to try to create the best vegetable sandwich we could possibly imagine. It needed to be filling enough to serve as a main course, yet also beautiful and tasty. We ended up assembling roasted vegetables over a walnut pesto on toasted bread, and topping it with cheese for the non-vegetarians. After a moment under the broiler, they looked so pretty and melty.

If you have a grill on hand, feel free to grill the vegetables. Otherwise, it can take a while to cycle all of the vegetables through the oven. Feel free to use store-bought pesto if you have it on hand, and to throw in any other vegetables that you love.

Ingredients:
(serves 6)
1/3 cup balsamic vineagar
2/3 cup olive oil
1 tsp sugar
salt and pepper to taste
3 bell peppers, sliced
2 medium-sized eggplants, sliced
3 portabello mushrooms, sliced
2 onions, sliced
6 slices thick bread (we used multi-grain)
gruyere cheese (optional)

(walnut balsamic pesto)
1/4 cup walnuts
1 cup chopped basil leaves
1/2 cup olive oil (or less)
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar (or less)
salt and pepper

Instructions:
Salt the both sides of sliced eggplants well. Place them on a pan lined with paper towels, and cover with additional paper towels. Let sit for 20 minutes. Whisk together oil, vinegar and sugar, and add salt and pepper to taste. Preheat oven to 400. Rinse and dry eggplants, then toss all vegetables in vinaigrette. Place vegetables on a baking sheet, and roast in the oven for about 25-30 minutes. The mushrooms will likely cook in about 20 minutes, so feel free to remove them. To make the pesto, combine walnuts and basil leaves in a food processor with olive oil and vinegar. Process until smooth, salt and pepper to taste. Toast slices of bread if you like, then spread pesto over it. Top with roasted vegetables (there may be extras). If you like, sprinkle cheese on top, or assemble thin strips in a cross-hatch design. Broil for about 2 minutes, until cheese melts.

After a few days spent recovering from graduation festivities, we’re finally ready to post the final component of our goodbye brunch – a delicious and mildly alcoholic baked French toast that we’re proud to have come up with ourselves (mostly!). The inspiration comes from Smitten Kitchen’s boozy baked French toast, but since we already doused our sorbet in kahlua (Smitten Kitchen’s booze of choice), we decided to try ours with almonds and apricot brandy.

You may be unfamiliar with apricot brandy, but we know it from such things as the apricot brandy sour, a drink that’s quite popular among friends. Apricot brandy is actually very tasty and light, perfect for fluffy, soft French toast. Since baked French toast soaks overnight and cooks in the oven in the morning, we just added a bit of the brandy to our soaking mixture and let the flavor seep through. We added layers of almond slivers between the layers of toast, and served it with (your choice of) powdered sugar or berry topping.

Ingredients:
1 loaf Challah, brioche, or thick Italian bread, cut int0 1-inch slices,
3 cups whole milk
3 eggs
3 tbsp apricot brandy
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup almonds
powdered sugar (optional)

(for berry topping)
2 cups frozen berries of your choice (we chose mixed)
1/2 cup granulated sugar (or to taste)

Instructions:
Grease a 9×13-inch baking dish. Arrange one layer of bread tightly in the pan, sprinkle with half of the almonds. Arrange the second layer on top, and sprinkle with remaining almonds.
Whisk together milk, eggs, sugar, salt, brandy and vanilla, and pour over the bread. Wrap the baking dish tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight. In the morning, bake at 425 for 30 minutes, or until puffed and golden. To make berry topping, combine berries and sugar in a saucepan. Bring to a soft boil, then simmer for an additional 5-10 minutes. You can mash the berries to your desired consistency. Serve toast with powdered sugar, berry topping, or both.

We graduate today. I should probably be packing my room right now, but I think I’m trying to evade the reality of leaving Penn by sitting on my couch, playing on my computer. It’s my default mode. Of course, I’m excited! It’s just that moving and saying goodbye can be so overwhelming! To relax, I’ve decided to blog the most smoothly calming dish that we made for our brunch (I promised there would be more to come): White Russian Sorbet.

Sorbet (!?) — you might be thinking. How did they make sorbet without an ice cream machine? Well, we didn’t! We got one! Well, Alex got one as a graduation present. And though we haven’t fawned over it on the blog, it doesn’t mean that we aren’t extremely happy — it’s just been a bit busy around here. I’m slightly ashamed to confess that while this is the first ice-cream machine-made dish we are posting, it is not first dish we tried to make with it. On our first day with the machine, we attempted to make a lemon sorbet, but neglected to realize that you have to freeze the machine’s container before making ice cream. We ended up with some very sweet and delicious slushies.

Once we figured out how to use it, however, we were pumped to try out this White Russian Sorbet recipe from Epicurious. The recipe called just enough alcohol to give the dessert a great kick, but not enough to be too noticeable. I feel like it may have just been beginner’s luck, but it turned out incredibly well — smooth, creamy, and calming like you’d eat some out of a martini glass on the beach. I’m not sure if you can really call it a sorbet since there’s a bit of cream involved, but honestly, I’m not too concerned about technicalities when the taste is this good.

Happy graduation to all of our wonderful friends here! Please come eat our food in New York.

Ingredients:
1 3/4 cups water
1/2 cup sugar
3 1/2 tsp instant coffe
1 tbsp dark corn syrup
1/2 cup whipping cream
1/4 cup vodka
1/4 cup Kahlúa

Instructions:
Stir water and sugar in medium sauce pan over medium heat until sugar dissolves. Increase heat and bring to boil. Remove from heat. Add coffee powder and stir to dissolve. Pour into medium bowl. Mix in corn syrup, then whipping cream, vodka and Kahlúa. Refrigerate until cold, about 2 hours. Transfer sorbet mixture to ice cream maker; process according to machine’s instructions. Transfer sorbet to container; cover and freeze until firm, about 2 hours.

Yesterday, Penn sponsored an event for Senior Week called Walnut Walk, an eight-hour bar crawl across Philadelphia. There were 18 stops, and all offered drink specials for those of us graduating (and some offered drink specials for everyone, which made for severe crowding). There are about 2500 seniors in our class, so the event was inevitably a hot, hot mess.

But if there’s anything that we’ve learned from our four years here, it’s that days like yesterday go much more smoothly when everyone is stuffed with food before they begin. We’d been meaning to serve one final brunch after we had so much fun cooking for Homecoming, and yesterday gave us the perfect opportunity. It’s amazing how much you can do without homework.

We knew that we had to do cinnamon buns, as we’ve been meaning to do them forever (along with bagels, which we have yet to accomplish). Both of us love the mall-bought variety, but there’s an artificialness to them that we thought we could avoid. We chose a recipe from Epicurious for Ultimate Sticky Buns that reviewers raved were easy and out of this world — our two criteria. We modified it slightly by increasing the filling, so I’ll post what we did below. In the end, they turned out ridiculously delicious. The dough was so sweet and thick, and the filling was gooey and sticky and wonderful. It seeped throughout the buns so that every single bite was dreamy.

Don’t touch that dial, more brunch recipes to come in the next few days!

Ingredients:
(dough)
1 cup warm water
4 tsp dry yeast
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1/2 cup dry nonfat milk powder
1 1/4 tsp salt
2 large eggs
4 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

(glaze)
2 1/2 cups light brown sugar
1 1/4 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup dark corn syrup
1/2 cup water
3 cups pecan halves

4 teaspoons sugar
4 teaspoons ground cinnamon

Instructions:
To make dough, mix 1/4 cup warm water, yeast, and pinch of sugar in small bowl. Let rest until foamy, about 8 minutes. Beat remaining sugar, butter, milk powder, and salt in large bowl. Beat in eggs 1 at a time. Mix in remaining 3/4 cup warm water and yeast mixture, then 3 cups flour (1 cup at a time.) Using rubber spatula, mix in 1 cup flour, scraping down sides of bowl frequently (dough will be soft and sticky). Sprinkle 1/4 cup flour onto work surface and knead until smooth and elastic, adding more flour if sticky, about 8 minutes. Butter another large bowl. Add dough; turn to coat. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and let dough rise in warm area until doubled, about 2 1/2 hours.

To make glaze, grease one large pizza pan (or two 10-inch round cake pans) Beat brown sugar, 1 cup butter, honey, corn syrup, and 1/4 cup water in medium bowl to blend. Spread half of glaze in bottom the pan. Sprinkle pecans over.

Punch down dough, and divide in half. Roll each dough piece out on floured work surface to 12×9-inch rectangle. Brush any excess flour off dough. Grease dough rectangles with remaining 1/4 cup butter. Mix sugar and cinnamon in small bowl. Sprinkle cinnamon sugar over rectangles. Starting at 1 long side, tightly roll up each rectangle into log. Cut each log into 12 rounds. Place rounds, cut side down, prepared pan, spacing evenly. Cover with plastic wrap. (Can be made 1 day ahead; refrigerate.) Let buns rise in warm area until almost doubled, about 1 hour (or 1 hour 25 minutes if refrigerated).

Preheat oven to 375°F. Bake buns until deep golden brown, about 30 minutes. Run small knife around pan sides to loosen sticky buns. Turn hot buns out onto platter. Cool about 30 minutes and serve.

It occurred to me yesterday that I have to empty my kitchen before I move out in one week, so we decided to poke around for items to use up. Unfortunately, using up the items in my cabinet meant shopping for more items to cook them with, so I’m not sure if we really succeeded in our mission. The food that resulted from the mission, however, was a huge success. We decided to do a dessert so that we could use these amazing little star-shaped tins that my mom recently gave to us, and also because we invited friends to bring their leftovers for dinner and one can only eat so many frozen vegetable dishes in one meal. You can bake almost anything in the star tins — brownies, cookies, muffins, cakes — but we wanted something simple and delicate, something deserving of such a lovely shape.

We chose a recipe from Epicurious for mini almond cupcakes because, though it isn’t apparent from this blog, almond is pretty much my favorite flavor ever. I’ve been a marzipan addict for years, and for a while I wouldn’t drink a Starbucks drink without a shot of almond syrup. Anything with that sweet, exotic flavor completely floors me. This recipe looked simple and fit our “get these in and out of the oven in 30 minutes” time constraint.

So not only was this one of the easiest baking recipes we’ve tried, but it was without doubt one of my favorites. If you like almond, you’ll love this, and maybe even if you don’t. The cakes were spongy and moist, but still light and fluffy. The recipe calls for the perfect amount of almond, and there are still hints of vanilla. We served with them with powdered sugar, which worked out wonderfully. These would be perfect with tea, or even alongside heavier desserts. I don’t say this about many baked goods, but I know we’ll be making this exact recipe again. The cakes were really, truly so so so good.

The recipe on Epicurious makes only enough for 12 mini cupcakes. We tripled the recipe and it made enough for 9 individual cakes, probably about 12 regular-sized cupcakes.

Ingredients:
1 stick plus 1 tbsp unsalted butter, softened
9 tbsp all-purpose flour plus additional for dusting molds
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 cup granulated sugar
6 tbsp almond paste
1/4 tsp pure vanilla extract
3 large eggs
confectioners sugar for dusting

Instructions:
Preheat oven to 400°F. Brush cupcake tin or cake tins with melted butter and lightly dust with flour, knocking out excess flour. In a small bowl, stir together flour and salt in a small bowl. Beat softened butter and granulated sugar in a bowl until pale and fluffy. Beat in almond paste and vanilla until combined, then beat in egg until combined. Add flour mixture gradually, mixing until just combined. Divide batter among tins or muffin cups, spreading evenly, then transfer to a baking sheet (not necessary if using muffin pan). Bake cakes until just firm and edges are golden, about 15 minutes. Cool, and dust tops with confectioners sugar just before serving.