chai-spiced almond cookies

I have a bit of a thing for cardamom. I'm a freak for chai tea and chai lattes, particularly those from the grillcheeserie, otherwise known as Le Lapin Pressé. Seriously - they are the best. They use actual teabags and not syrup a la Starbucks.  Go there and try one, then have a grilled cheese. And a cappuccino. And a little bunny rabbit cookie.

The first time I ever bought cardamom it was to make these cookies. Ever since then, I've put cardamom in everything - cheesecakes, frozen yogurt, fruit, coffee... you name it, I've eaten it with cardamom. Even more exciting are the little green cardamom pods you can get at Indian markets - often I boil them along with my water when making tea. In these cookies, however, I've used the standard ground cardamom that you can find at the grocery store. If you're near an Indian market, buy it there and save a few bucks. You can spend them on chai lattes!

rocky road pudding cake

 

A year or two ago, I never would have made this cake.  Since I was a kid, I've disliked rich chocolate desserts.  You could catch me eating junky milk chocolate bars or Reese's peanut butter cups, but I would turn my nose up at chocolate cake and eat around the chocolate chips in cookies. These days I generally stay away from junky candy (I had an epiphany when a friend of mine saw a squashed Reese's peanut butter cup on the street and thought of me - this was a shockingly recent development) though I certainly don't let Easter go by without a Cadbury Creme Egg or two, or five. 

However, my disgust for rich chocolate cakes and other desserts is still going strong, particularly for cakes made with actual chocolate and not cocoa. This cake pushed my boundaries. I did like it, kind of, but in very small quantities given its richness and sweetness. It is sweeter and more chocolatey that I care for... but hey, I'm kind of a freak like that.

almond strawberry crisp

 

I have never quite understood the difference between a cobbler, a crumble and a crisp. A quick google search tells me that I am not alone. My humble understanding has always been that the difference is in the topping. A cobbler is fruit baked with layer of biscuits on top; a crumble is a combination of butter, brown sugar and flour crumbled over fruit and baked; and a crisp, as seen above (and, in my opinion, the hands down winner of all three) is similar to a crumble, but with the addition of oats to give the topping more texture. I have no real history or facts to base this on, and it is most certainly wrong. It's just that my mom always made "crisp" and it always had oats in it. Does anybody have the definitive answer, or is it just one of those things that nobody really knows the answer to, like the chicken and the egg?