This month's edition of the food blogging event Sugar High Friday - an event that is sweet-centric - was hosted by Alanna at A Veggie Venture. Most of the themes for this event revolve around a single ingredient or one type of dish. The theme for this round was "a surprise inside," which was variously interpreted to mean surprise ingredients in otherwise regular dishes, surprise fillings and add-ins in some recipes and just plain surprises in others. There were over 65 participants from around the world and they submitted recipes that included:

• Fortune Cookies (pictured)
• Bavarian fig pastries with fig and pomegranate compote
• Creme brulee egg cups
• Curried chocolate brownies
• Cocoa surprise muffins
• Chocolate caramel pocket cookies

Need more of a sugar fix, or just want to check out a few new blogs? Take a look at the whole roundup!

Last month, the worldwide food blogging event Sugar High Friday took it to the extreme with frozen and chilled desserts. This month, host Delicious Days chose the theme of Jams and Jellies, just in time for preserving the fruity (and veggie) goodness of summer's produce. There were almost 60 participants, with recipes, stories, and best of all, photos, of jams and jellies made with everything from apricots to jalapeno peppers. If you're trying to figure out what to do with that basket of late-season peaches you picked up at the farmers' market, take a peek!

Something I have never attempted is making jam or other forms of preserving the summer bounty. But if you have all the gubbins and are a dab hand at getting the temperature to the correct level for setting or just fancy giving it a go then head over to Delicious Days and get your creations listed for Sugar High Friday.

SHF is one of the longer running and most popular blog-events and has reached round 22 with this jam making theme. The host is the superbly designed and entertaining read that is Delicious Days. Full details of how to enter are on the website.

Those of us who have not attempted to make jam before might need a pointer to some decent instructions. Anyone recommend a decent recipe/instruction book or blog post on the subject; I'll be most greatful.

So maybe you weren't so tempted by desserts made with soy. Or maybe you were and you're still on a Sugar High.

Well, for the month of July, Sugar High Friday is letting those of us in the northern hemisphere cool off in the high heat of summer with the theme of Ice Ice Baby. Sugar High Friday is a worldwide food blogging event created by the Domestic Goddess in which food bloggers create a dessert or other sweet treat with a given theme as a guide. For this 21st edition, food bloggers will be making sweet treats that are chilled or frozen, and posting them on Friday, July 28, 2006.

I'm beginning to think I should have gotten that ice cream maker attachment for my stand mixer...

Oh yes indeedee, my friends, the top wine blog event WBW (Wine Blogging Wednesday) and the premier food bloggers event IMBB (Is My Blog Burning) are combining in May to create perhaps the largest food blog event EVER!

To be called the Fabulous Favorites Festival this exciting event will occur on Friday May 19. Combining the food and the wine FFF is a food and wine pairing event that the organisers hope "will attract the largest group of participants ever for any culinary blog event."

The concept is simple, with two plans of attack you can choose from.

1. Pick a favorite bottle of wine from your cellar and create/cook a dish that goes with it.
2. Pick a favorite dish in your culinary repertoire and seek out a wine that will pair will it.

Or, if you're feeling really ambitious, create an entire wine-pairing menu of favorites.

While we here at Slashfood seem to be too busy to join in (or in my case too forgetful) the biggest food bloggers' event might just spur a few of us to join in this time.

[Nick had a great post the other day for Sugar High Friday] 

Chandra over at Lick The Spoon has posted links to all of the entries of last Friday's Sugar High Friday event, "Candy is Dandy...But Liquor is Quicker." The idea, as you can probably guess, was to create and blog about a sweet recipe that involves alcohol. According to Chandra, there were 40 entries in this, the 18th round, of SHF. As some of you may remember, I submitted a sweet potato pie with bourbon, pecans and maple syrup. Some of my favorites were the gelled sparkling wine from Pint and Fork, the Frangelico honey panna cotta from A Blithe Palate, and the chocolate sake cakes (right) and raspberry spumante spoons from a belly in the wind.

The 18th (I think) round of Sugar High Friday is being hosted by Chandra of Lick The Spoon. The theme is one not unfamiliar to us here at Slashfood: cooking with booze. The official title is "Candy is Dandy...But Liquor is Quicker." My contribution is a sweet potato pie with bourbon, topped with pecans and maple syrup. The recipe comes from Alton Brown and his episode of Good Eats dedicated to sweet potatoes. A transcript of the episode, including the pie recipe, is available through the Good Eats Fan Page. That recipe doesn't include bourbon, but I happened to have a bottle of Baker's on the shelf, and, well, you know, it seemed like a good idea. Since this was the first time I made this recipe (or sweet potato pie, for that matter), I didn't want to tinker with it too much, so I only used two tablespoons of bourbon, around half a shot. It could probably have used a little more, as the bourbon flavor is rather faint. Still, it's one of the best sweet potato pies I've tasted. I'm not ashamed to say that the crust was store-bought. I'm still an amateur in the baking department, and, since I always manage to make a huge mess anyway, I figured I'd make it easier on myself. Truth be told, I still managed to scorch a pot and dirty an extra pie pan. But that's all in the past now. What I'm left with is my favorite type of pie, and a killer version at that.

[Photo: Nick Vagnoni]

Sugar High Friday is one of the most enduring of the food blog events. This month Sam of Becks and Posh has set the day as Sugar Low - after the excesses of the Holidays, this is most welcome. And most welcome to me following my excess of cookies, sweets and doughnuts recently.

Fruit Salad in a Passion Fruit infused non-sugar sugar-syrup may not be the most inventive of ideas but with half my stuff packed away in boxes (I mean just HOW long does it take to move?) I am really not in the mood for too much creativity. Still, chilled slices of Clementine and Sharon Fruit combined with yellow plum and sugar syrup were delicious. The syrup, incidentally, was made by dissolving 200g of the sugar replacement in 300ml water, brought to a boil with a large squeeze of lemon juice and then allowed to cool after the addition of the passion fruit.

[Photo Andrew Barrow]

When I read Andrew's post on Sugar High Friday I chuckled to myself. Mwa ha ha, I said evilly. I've been practicing for this event for over a year!

Yes. You see, last August when I became pregnant, I consulted with a midwife about how to reduce the possibility of having a second c-section. Her advice, given my particular situation, was to try to keep the baby's weight down by switching to a very low-carb, almost no-sugar diet during the last few months of the pregnancy.

I was completely unsuccessful in my attempt to either (a) keep the baby's weight down or (b) avoid a c-section. So this will NOT be a post about pregnancy diet strategies. It is, however, a post on how to bake delicious things with no, or very little, refined sugar. Because I'm a bit of a sugar freak. I adore baking, and there's nothing that makes me happier than curling up at the end of (every) meal with something sweet. I thought, at first, that it was impossible to go without sugar.

Happily, I was wrong.