Pride and Prejudice and sweets: Cannolis, butterscotch cupcakes and lime pie

My senior year of high school, I had to do a book report on a book on the AP list. I chose "Pride and Prejudice" because I'd always heard so much about it. I still have the copy I read; it looks like it's sprouted sticky notes. I marked all these different themes in it for my paper, but I remember I also had to read it with a dictionary in the other hand. I'd never seen the word condescend used as a verb, among many other older words. The other day, I found out my new phone has a Kindle on it, and decided to read the book again. I'd forgotten how wonderful the story is! Elizabeth kicks ass, Miss Bingley is truly despicable, Mr. Darcy grows on you, Mr. Wickham's favor recedes. It bears mentioning that "Pride and Prejudice" is one of my top 3 movies, too, and it's funny that I pick up when quotes were moved to different characters. But the feeling of the story stayed the same. But I'm proud of myself; this time I don't need a dictionary! I'd forgotten why I loved the story, but I'm happy to say it's a top 3 book as well. Very satisfying.

One of my baking goals was a cannoli. After having one with my mom in NYC, and having her say she'd never seen one before (totally not true, as proven by her friend Merilee), Aunt Betty and I decided to make them soon after I got back. For these, we used a cinnamon cannoli shell recipe that we made in my pizzelle maker. It was kind of assembly-line style, with me cooking the shells and Aunt Betty holding them in the circular shape. Inside we did a ricotta-sugar mixture, with chocolate chips and pecans. They were excellent. Also, this completed one of my baking goals for this year. Woo hoo!


Another NYC-inspired dessert, one of the best sweets I had up there was a butterscotch cupcake from Crumbs. The cake was vanilla but the icing itself was flavored with butterscotch. That can be a pretty overpowering flavor, but just in the icing was perfect. For this one I used my favorite yellow cake recipe with the butterscotch icing from this cupcake recipe. It meant making butterscotch from scratch, like browned butter plus brown sugar and cream and all that. I think I might have a new frosting! (P.S. - submitted this over at Hoosier Homemade's Cupcake Tuesday!)


Then a few days ago Aunt Betty sent me a recipe for this lime pie. It was a little different, because the crust had toasted pecans in it. The filling was super easy: lime juice, lime zest, cream cheese and sugar. Lemme tell you though, I found all my hangnails squeezing those limes. Ouch! It took a while for this to set, but it was a great citrus-y pie. Even though it's cold and rainy outside, I refuse to think it's almost spring!