sweet | Elena the Epicurean

Food Flashback: The Italian Salad Trifecta

As much as I love variety when it comes to food, I’m also a creature of habit like most human beings. I tend to get hooked on a certain dish and it’s so good that I just want to eat it every.single.day – and I do, for maybe a week or two. When I lived [...]

Greek Yogurt with Red Wine Infused Dates, Toasted Walnuts, and Honey…and the cathartic power of writing

Making a dessert for a crowd is often assumed to be time-consuming, difficult, and just something that adds more stress and complication to planning a meal. It does not have to be that way, and this simple dessert proves it. It can also be healthy, exotic, and impressive. In addition to being a crowd-pleaser, this [...]

Homemade Cinnamon Sugar Chips with Strawberry Kiwi Salsa

I find it very fun to turn a dish that’s normally savory into something sweet. You’d be surprised how easily and often this can be done, and how deliciously exotic the results are. I basically did that here with chips and salsa. Another thing you’d be surprised by: how easy it is to make your [...]

Whole Wheat Banana Chocolate Chip Blondies

Every once in a while (okay, more like very often), I get the urge to bake something. Anything. Even if I only have the ingredients to make something plain and simple, like chocolate chip cookies or cocoa brownies, I’ll do it just to get my baking fix. There’s just something so pleasing and comforting about [...]

Easy Fast Sweet Treat: “Baked” Apple…in the microwave!

When you want a healthy sweet treat or dessert, fresh fruit is the way to go. However, that can be difficult when it’s dead in the middle of winter. Luckily, you can always rely on apples, which are pretty much in season and readily available year-round. I actually came up with this dessert when I [...]

Holiday Biscotti

My favorite kinds of gifts to give are of the edible kind. The thought and effort that goes into it is enough to make anyone grateful and appreciative. I get just as much enjoyment out of making and giving them as others do from receiving them.

So as much as I love baking during this [...]

Peanut Butter, Nutella, and Banana Sandwich. Or as I like to call it…the European Elvis.

Nutella. Don’t even get me started. I can’t even. It was love at first taste, and our relationship has been going steady for a while now. Sometimes I call it Sex In a Bottle. Yeah, it has a lot of sugar, but it is essentially a nut butter made with all natural ingredients. It’s also [...]

Homemade Holiday Trail Mix

I love playing around with ingredients which I consider to be like a blank canvas. You can make them sweet, savory, or both, add things to them, give them a theme, and just generally use your imagination. Popcorn is definitely one of those foods. I also happen to be really into popcorn lately, ever since [...]

How to Make Real Hot Cocoa

There’s no better way to wind down at night, especially a cold night, than with a warm beverage. Tea is great, but there’s just something about winter and hot cocoa. I used to just microwave a packet of Nestle or Swiss Miss…until I read the ingredients and realized I could barely recognize what half of [...]

Hey there! I’m Elena, a 22-year-old UCLA alum living in Los Angeles. I am totally obsessed with cooking, baking, and anything food and wine related. I grew up in beautiful Sonoma County in Northern California, where some of the best food and wine on this planet can be enjoyed. I love cooking to this day because I find it extremely therapeutic, relaxing, distracting, and rewarding. Eating is something that we do three times a day, every day, so the possibilities and opportunities are endless. Read more...