Whole Wheat Almond Waffles with Blackberry Vanilla Syrup

Spring is here. It feels so wonderful to finally utter those words. After a winter that surpassed even Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter, I felt certain it would never arrive. Now that is has, it feels fantastic. The sun is rising higher in the sky, flooding me with warmth when it touches my skin. The trees may not yet have leaves, but the grass is starting to turn green and I feel like I can finally release a sigh of relief. Even though the nights have a sharp chill, the days are warm and for now that is all I need.

After a Midwest winter lasting six months, this weather feels like a gift.

When spring arrives, I am drawn to fresh fruits and berries. Even though the season for most of these fruits has not arrived, I cannot help but fill my red basket at the supermarket with them. After a long winter of apples and clementines, a burst of fresh flavor from a berry, however tart, is welcome to take up space on my counter top. After my last trip to the market, I found myself with a few cartons of blackberries. After playing around with a few desserts (and reminiscing over an old favorite), I settled on making a syrup.

Though I did not yet know what it would smother, the scent of blackberries bubbling and boiling on the stove was too much to resist.

I eventually settled on a plate of waffles. Waffles, just as pancakes, have the unique quality to fill a person up until dinner time rolls around. The heartiness of a good waffle, accompanied with a warm spring afternoon, make for a perfect combination. With these waffles, I added a few crushed almonds. While I found that they added a pleasant flavor and texture, you could certainly eliminate them if allergies are a concern.

Drenched in blackberry vanilla syrup, these waffles were taken to new heights and made for a lovely Sunday brunch shared with the ones I love.

These Whole Wheat Almond Waffles with Blackberry Vanilla Syrup are sweet and grounded. Crushed almonds are folded into a whole wheat waffle batter. The resulting waffles are fluffy and chewy. Drenched with a blackberry vanilla syrup, the waffles become fruity and bright. These are lovely for a weekend morning when you find a little time for yourself. Bonus: while cooking, the house fills with the scent of toasted almonds.

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Almond Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies {Gluten-Free}

Everyone, it seems, is on an endless search to find the perfect chocolate chip cookie. Crunchy or soft, chewy or melt-in-your-mouth, each person has a personal preference with a set of criteria to match. There is a reason why there are twelve million hits when you search for the "best chocolate chip cookies"—like a soul mate, we all want to find "the one." While the back of the Nestlé Tollhouse chocolate chip package and the New York Times' cookie recipe are among the top, most popular contenders, my cookie preferences fall into a much different camp.

Have you found your perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe?

My mother's homemade cookies consisted of store-bought frozen cookie dough, already packaged to go from bag to baking sheet without needing a single utensil. To be fair, she did make her daughters cookies from scratch occasionally, but the frozen cookies are the ones we remember and hold in our hearts. When my sister and I head home over long weekends or holidays, she always has a package in the freezer waiting for us. It does not matter that I am a proficient baker and could make a batch of cookies with my eyes closed, these are the cookies I look forward to most. Nostalgia has a sneaky way of suppressing any qualms I may have about store-bought baked goods.

Truthfully, I believe the qualities of the cookies we grow up with are the same as the cookies we prefer once when we grow older. My grandmother makes delightfully crunchy cookies that baptize the kitchen table with cookie crumbs each time a bite is taken. My dad loves these cookies, calling them "milk dunkers." My sister and I make help to make a further case for this claim.

When I set out to make a batch of cookies last weekend, I did not intend to create my boyfriend's perfect chocolate chip cookie, but somehow it happened. I had almond butter in the cupboard and, inspired by these flourless peanut butter cookies, I played around with a few ingredients. The batter is a bit oily from the almond butter, but the nut oil crafts the most delightfully chewy cookie once it bakes. After stealing two straight from the oven, my boyfriend asked me what was in them, astonished at how unexpectedly perfect he found them. When I told them they were gluten-free, he refused to believe me, claiming the texture was too similar to a traditional chocolate chip cookie.

He ate six more before the day came to an end. I have already purposely filed this recipe away for the future.

Almond Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies are fantastically chewy and, shockingly, gluten-free. Almond butter forms the base of the cookies, though it adds only a subtle flavor (if any) to the final product. While sugar sweetens the cookies, a pinch of salt really helps to bring out a contrast of flavors. I prefer to use miniature chocolate chips because they provide a little chocolate to every bite, but larger chocolate chips will work just as well. These cookies are something special, trust me.

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Almond Joy Candy Bars

Coconut never used to be a familiar word in my vocabulary nor did the fruit itself often find its way into my stomach. As landlocked as one could be, coconuts were as foreign of an idea as palm trees and tropical seas—the subject of many a daydream, but not of an everyday reality. I remember looking over the brown coconut shells in the supermarket, hard beneath my hands, and I was curious how long the coconuts had been sitting on the shelf (I had never witnessed a person purchase one before). A sign overhead asserted that the coconut could be opened best with an ice pick, pointed proof showing how far this little coconut was from home.

As I placed the coconut back on the shelf, I wondered if people in tropical climates carried around ice picks for this specific purpose. The thought struck me as silly, but I could not think of a tool better suited than the one for winter weather.

Eventually, my curiosity got the best of me and I bought a supermarket coconut of my own. I was skeptical of the coconut, as perhaps I should have been, but willing to keep an open mind. In the hot summer sun, I brought it back to my dorm room where my friends and I stared at it, wondering if we would be able to find an ice pick during this time of year. As we passed it between each other, pondering the usage of butcher knives and sharp rocks, my friend accidentally dropped it on the tile floor. Neatly splitting in two, the coconut water began to puddle around it.

A coconut, it seemed, hardly needed any motivation to open at all.

We stared at the coconut shell on the floor for a moment or two, in disbelief that the coconut was so fragile. My friend, who had lived in Hawaii the year before, took this as a bad omen. We scooped the supermarket coconut off the tile, trying to salvage as much as possible. The smell was musky and unpleasant. The taste, even worse. A bad coconut, my friend declared, as she cleanly tossed it in a nearby trash can.

Though my introduction to fresh coconut was less than ideal, it was the start of a coconut affair that would only grow and flourish. While fresh coconut may be out of the picture, dried coconut has become a pantry staple.

Homemade Almond Joy Candy Bars are much healthier and taste just as wonderful as the store-bought version. The coconut center is made with unsweetened shredded coconut, honey, and coconut oil to bind it together. With an almond on top and a chocolate coating, the candy bar is complete. While I placed almonds both inside and on top of the chocolate coating, I would suggest placing the almonds inside the chocolate coating. The almonds placed on top of the chocolate coating have a tendency to fall off during preparation. A no-bake treat, these candy bars can be ready in thirty minutes time.

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