pistachio & rosewater cookies.

We’re three months into the year and a week into Spring, and I think it’s safe to say I’m finally past the post-holiday season slump that haunts me for apparently an entire quarter of the year. New year’s day has long passed (along with every resolution I’ve never once followed through on), but the Persian new year has just begun. The Persian new year, Nowruz, marks the vernal equinox, aka the first day of Spring. My Pakistani side of the family originates from Afghanistan, so this has been a holiday celebrated for many generations, bringing an onslaught of ancestral dishes and traditions.

Here in the states, there isn’t as much excitement and fervor surrounding Nowruz as there is with my family back in Pakistan, so I thought I could at least partially make up for it by bringing in some Afghan influences into my kitchen.

Pistachio, rosewater, and cardamom are classic and thoroughly loved flavors in Afghan and other central/south asian cuisines, so I experimented around and ended up with these buttery, shortbread-like pistachio & rosewater cookies. They came out to be wonderful tea cookies, carrying hints of cardamom and nostalgia from my trips to Pakistan as a child.

pumpkin pecan cake.

Thanksgiving in the Abbas household consists of many traditions; family ping pong tournaments, way-too-intense games of scrabble, jazz music (which I’m still not exactly sure how it became tradition), watching football & cricket, and of course food. So Much Food.

The obvious main part of Thanksgiving is forgetting you’re on a diet and proceeding to eat the whole dining table, but in my family, it’s a little bit different. Every year we attempt (mostly successfully) to create a weird Pakistani-Indian-Also Partly Vegan-American fusion of our Thanksgiving dinner which somehow results in more food then we can devour at once. The hardest part hands down is stopping ourselves from eating too much so we have room for dessert.

Which leads to my (shocker) favorite part, dessert.

Desserts sometimes vary from year to year, but most of the time we stick to at least two different types of pies, three different types of ice cream, and a cake that I take responsibility every year.

This year I opted for my favorite pumpkin cake with roasted pecans and cinnamon cream cheese frosting. It’s a bit of a handful to say, but it sure was good.

This was three layers of crunchy pecans, creamy icing, and soft, spiced cake. Everyone knows that eating anything pumpkin flavored is basically a crime before the holiday season so this was basically what I dreamt about for the ten months before Fall started.

Whole Wheat Chocolate Strawberry Crepes

Crepes have always been a favorite dish of mine whether it was eaten savory or sweet. Although I enjoy both, I think I’d prefer the sweet to the savory (surprise, surprise), so today I have brought to you my favorite whole wheat chocolate strawberry crepes!

Whenever I would go out to have a crepe, chocolate strawberry was always my go to. I just can’t resist chocolate strawberry anything, so I decided to try it out for myself and see how it turned out.

Molten Lava Cakes (Gluten & Refined Sugar Free) {Picture Tutorial}

Valentine’s Day is here and you can’t spend the day without making these wonderfully chocolatey lava cakes.

Molten lava cakes have been a favorite dessert of mine ever since I was little. I clearly remember the first time I ate one; I was on vacation in Whistler (a beautiful town in British Colombia), with my family and the four of us had to share one little lava cake. I remember the hot chocolate oozing out with vanilla ice cream melting into the warm cake, my nine year old self wondering how in the world did they get the center of the cake all melty and yummy.

Vanilla Bean Coconut Cake

Finals were a thing all last week for me, so what better way to end it with a vanilla bean coconut cake?

Is it not the most heavenly thing you’ve ever seen?

Brown Sugar Oatmeal Cookies

Cookies are really popular this time of year. There are sugar cookies, chocolate chip cookies, snickerdoodles, gingerbread men, and so many more holiday cookies. I wanted to try something a bit different using two of my favorite ingredients in cookies- oatmeal and brown sugar!

I’m sure there are many recipes out there for brown sugar oatmeal cookies, but it’s usually not the first thing you think of when holiday desserts come up. Well, let me tell you that it should be cause these cookies are absolutely amazing. 

Peppermint Marshmallows

What’s soft, fluffy, festive, and basically the best thing ever?? Peppermint marshmallows of course! 

Homemade marshmallows are officially my favorite thing in the world. They taste so much better than regular store bought marshmallows and they have none of those nasty chemicals and preservatives either.

Cinnamon Roll Breakfast Muffins

You all should know about my obsession with cinnamon rolls by now. I’ve made cinnamon rolls so many times this past couple months, it’s not even funny. Last weekend I craved some buttery, sweet cinnamon rolls (as I do almost every weekend) and I usually make them at night so that I could just pop them in the oven the next morning, but unfortunately I didn’t have the time to make them that night.

My wanting for cinnamon rolls was still there the next morning and I was inspired by this blogpost to somehow make a muffin form of a cinnamon roll. And in almost no time at all, the most amazingly tasty thing ever was created. Cinnamon roll muffins. 

Is there really anything else to say?