bell & basket

cooking. baking. home.

Butternut Squash, Goat Cheese and Brown Butter Sage Pizza

My pizza making obsession began after a team building pizza night in September. After successfully pulling off a two day event, my whole team and I trekked downtown to Pizza School, where we were greeted with aprons, wine, and lots of pizza dough.

It was cheesy in all the ways (yep, I went there). There’s something scary about putting twenty extremely tired adults in a room and “teaching” them how to make pizza. No one was listening, people were talking over the teacher, he was reprimanding us–at least it was exciting!

We got to make up to three pizzas each. My first was a classic margerita, my second was a riff on bacon egg and cheese with a sunny egg in the middle, and my last was a lemon zest, ricotta and blueberry dessert pie. The pizza was great but after 3 slices I was seriously craving a salad.

These were my pizza takeaways:

  1. It’s not that hard to make pizza at home (as long as you have a stone or pan in your oven that can get extremely hot).
  2. It’s all about treating your dough with care.
  3. Less toppings make for a crispier crust.

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Straight Up Pizza Dough

I’ve included this Straight Up Pizza Dough recipe so that whenever anyone feels like making pizza dough, you can find the recipe and detailed instructions right here!

I’ll also specify that this dough is particularly good for those 10 inch round, crispy crust pizzas. If making pizza today, preheat your oven to 500 to let your pizza pan/stone heat up for AT LEAST an hour. You want the pan scorching hot to get the crispiest crust.

It also helps to get the kitchen warm for your dough to rise. I let my oven preheat for at least two hours, which helps my dough rise when placed on the shelf directly above my oven.

If you aren’t making this dough to make pizza immediately, it will keep in the fridge for 3-5 days and in the freezer for up to 3 months. I’d recommend keeping a few of these containers in the freezer for whenever a pizza hankering comes around.

I’ve also included the step by step instructions below, with pictures to accompany it, so that you can’t screw this one up. I promise, it’s easier than you think.

Happy pizza making!

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Pomegranate Party Cake

I started to create this recipe in my head a few weeks ago and it began with a vision of bright pink pomegranate icing. I also happened to be going to a vegan dinner party and the idea of bringing a pink cake covered in pomegranate jewels sounded ultra festive.

In retrospect, it was a horrible idea to start building a cake recipe based on pink icing. Especially since the cake had to be vegan (it also started out as a gluten free endeavor but that quickly failed). After three tries, I finally got the vegan version right (sort of).

My friends were happy (vegan and non-vegan alike), but I kept dreaming of a moist, medium crumbed cake that didn’t have a distinguished vegan chew. Don’t get me wrong, the recipe below is GOOD for a vegan cake without lots of weird, hydrogenated oils. It’s just that if you’re not vegan, it doesn’t quite compare to a cake made with butter, eggs, sour cream, buttermilk or fill in the blank with a dairy product of your choice.

So this recipe includes not one but TWO cakes. And I’ll be fully transparent, the real star of this pomegranate cake is the icing and those little crunchy, juicy pink pearls on top. There is something so satisfying to me about a pink icing that uses ZERO food coloring and also doesn’t have that bitter food coloring taste (or any cancer causing chemicals).

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