Category: Food
Your place to find food reviews on popular restaurants, cafes and bakeries, as well as easy recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert, including pop culture-inspired menu ideas you won’t find anywhere else.
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Cake Mix Brownies with a Cheesecake Swirl
I’m a sucker for a good cake mix hack, be it adding instant pudding mix to make a cake moister, turning it into an extra-pillowy banana bread or making over-the-top monster cookies. So, when I saw Tasty’s cake mix brownie recipe, I had to try it out. With a slight adaptation (ahem, cheesecake) and minor…
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The Top Brown Sugar Substitutes for Baking, Ranked
Ah, brown sugar—you’re crucial for making the best chocolate chip cookies out there (and plenty of other desserts too), but you can be a pain to restock. For one, keeping large quantities on hand can be hard to justify, especially since it’s all too easy to forget to seal it up tight and wind up…
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Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Frosting
When the world feels uncertain, we seek comfort in everything: cozy blankets, heart-to-heart conversations, even snacks. And when you really want to just eat your feelings, there’s no better treat than this chocolate chip cookie dough frosting. It’s based on Baked By Melissa’s recipe, found in Cakes by Melissa (aka my go-to for every birthday…
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Pastelitos, aka the Best Super Bowl Dessert for Buccaneers Fans
Certain foods are synonymous with Tampa Bay: Cubanos, Bloomin’ Onions (Tampa is the birthplace of Outback, after all), grouper sandwiches, strawberry shortcake straight from Plant City. They’re must-haves when you’re in the Bay, but there’s one treat that doesn’t get nearly enough attention, and it really, truly should. I’m talking about pastelitos de guayaba y…
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Chick-Fil-A’s Chicken Parm Meal Kits: An Honest Review
Chick-Fil-A sells meal kits?! Yes, I had the same reaction. I mean, why would you make a meal offered by a fast food chain…when you could have a meal ready immediately from said chain? But then I saw the sign for the brand’s lemony-kale twist on chicken parmesan (something you won’t find on restaurant menus),…
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Slow Cooker Chicken Pot Pie Soup
When it’s cold outside, I want to make everything in a slow cooker, especially soup. Especially soups that are based on even heartier dishes that were never intended to be soup, like lasagna. Or, you know, chicken pot pie. I shared the recipe for a stovetop version a couple years ago, but this fall—especially with…
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How to Make Baby Yoda-inspired Cupcakes
Wait, so you’re not hosting a watch party for one and making all kinds of Grogu-inspired treats every Friday, when a new episode of The Mandalorian hits Disney+? Huh. Strange. Well, these Baby Yoda cupcakes may just convince you to start. They’re ridiculously cute—and also ridiculously easy to make (like maybe even easier than the…
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Hot Chocuterie Boards Are a Thing (& They’re Wonderful)
I can’t resist a play on words, yet some are a real struggle for me to get behind. Hot Chocuterie Boards was a big one. I loved the concept—hot cocoa fixings, toppings and snacks, all arranged on a platter—but the name? It’s brilliantly close to charcuterie. So much so that I kept thinking of…hot meat…
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How Quarantine Life Inspired One Couple to Launch a Bakery
While every meme touts what a terrible year 2020 has been, there have been a few bright spots, and Ampersand Cookies is one of them. Melissa and Andrew Jones launched their company just a few months ago, and their massive, chewy-yet-still-gooey treats are already earning them a cult following on Instagram and throughout Tampa Bay.…
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How to Make Fruity Pebbles Pancakes
You could use a little moment of levity in your day. We all could. And there’s something undeniably gleeful about staring at a shortstack of flapjacks studded with rainbow cereal. These Fruity Pebbles pancakes are so easy to make that you have no excuse not to try them, really, so give it a go and…
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Gideon’s Bakehouse: A Peek Inside Orlando’s Most Epic Bakery
Enchanting. That’s the word I’d use to describe Gideon’s Bakehouse, the bustling little bakery tucked inside Orlando’s East End Market. The shop seems like something out of a Harry Potter movie: Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covered in old books line one wall, with wrought-iron lights and rustic wood tables contributing to a sense of old-world charm you…
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How to Make Candice Kumai’s ‘Selena and Chef’ Recipes
Just when it seemed like we’d all binged every show created on the planet during quarantine (doesn’t Tiger King seem like a lifetime ago?), HBOMax debuted the gem that is Selena and Chef. The series, filmed during isolation, features singer/actress Selena Gomez learning to cook via video chat with a different chef each week. Only…
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