Good morning, Bella Christiez’s readers – and thanks for stopping by!

We don’t know about you, but summer is one of our favorite seasons. We love sitting poolside, sunning our faces, and cooling off with refreshing seasonally themed #sweettreats! Have you ever wondered how we go about selecting summer flavors or making a batch of fruit compote? Well, here in this post, you’re about to find out.

What’s the first thing we ask ourselves when selecting the seasons #sweettreats menus? Well, as a matter a fact, we question “what’s trending?”. We have to think about the season in question. Summer is a season filled with picnics, outdoor get togethers, and July 4th celebrations.

Since this post centers around summer – and summer = tropical… right now, we’re using a lot of fresh fruits in our daily recipes. We have pina coloda and pink lemonade cupcakes to go with the tropical theme we just mentioned. To represent those fun picnic adventures – we’ve created watermelon and peach cobbler flavors, and to be quite patriotic, we’ve crafted red, white & blue cheesecakes for Forth of July and Memorial Day.

We also serve buttercream cookies based upon the season or whatever maybe happening – for instance, right now – we have ocean animal cookie cutouts for summer, and a few weeks ago we had ties for Fathers Day; plus Graduation Caps for our most recent grads. Take a look at our Summer Menu, here.

Before we go… we have one specialty summer recipe technique we’d like to share with you – Fresh Fruit Compote. Mmm doesn’t that sound amazing? Here at the Sweet Boutique, we create compote recipes, each and everyday during the summer to include into our sweet treats… parfaits and crostatas get dressed in it, all the time 😉

Follow the recipe here:

Head to a local farmers market or grocer, pick up a few of your favorite summer fruit flavors – for example, blueberries and raspberries. Add a pint of raspberries, 1 cup of blueberries; factor in 2 TSBP of sugar, 1 zest of lemon (can you say summer is here?!), 1 tsp of lemon juice, and 1 tsp of vanilla …and if you’re feeling sweet – 1 tsp of maple syrup.

Combine all ingredients in a sizable saucepan, bring it up to a medium heat and then, lower the heat to let simmer for about 10 minutes, wait until the fruit begins to caramelize and break down a bit, then remove and let cool!

With your own, at-home compote, add this delicious concoction to anything! On top of ice cream, for breakfast in yogurt with granola or alongside pancakes; as a singular side dish or include it as a layer in a yummy summer desert.

…and don’t forget to enjoy!

Sweetly Yours,

Bella Christiez