Just Baking

Most times when I make a recipe, I have spent a good deal of time looking for one with something specific, whether it be an idea I have or just an ingredient I have on hand. If I’m wanting brownies, for instance, I may look through ten cookbooks, my Yep files, and dozens of […]

A few days prior to Thanksgiving, I was tasked this week with baking something that Quinn’s parents could take with them to St. Louis for a family gathering. I started thinking about what kind of baked good would be most likely to survive an airplane ride, and decided that biscotti would be just the […]

A few years ago, Quinn came up with this recipe as a special treat for me. I love, love, love all things cream cheese. Somehow, the recipe got buried among the countless recipes I’ve collected. Then, the other morning, I woke up to find that Quinn had not only unearthed the recipe […]

This lovely cake is from one of my favorite cookbooks, How to Be a Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson. She is very reassuring in her description of this cake that the strange main ingredient, zucchini, does indeed make for good cake. I believed her. After all, I am a big fan of […]

For years, I have been anti-bread-machine. From my knowledge of them, I thought they were a cop-out way of making bread. However, thanks to one of my culinary heroes, Alton Brown, I have come to realize that bread machines are quite handy for kneading and proofing dough. So, in light of my […]

I am a loyal reader of King Arthur Flour’s The Baking Sheet newsletter. In the summer edition, one of the recipes that grabbed my attention was for this chocolate-caramel cookie. I am actually not a huge fan of caramel, but Quinn definitely is. Always aiming to please, I added it to the […]

Recently, when Quinn and I were craving something chocolate, I pulled out one of my favorite cookbooks, Chocolate by Nick Malgieri. Obvious choice for a chocolate recipe, right? And there are so, so many tempting ones within its pages.
After flipping through the recipes, I decided it was high time I tried out his […]

I have been drooling over The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion: The Essential Cookie Cookbook for ages. It’s a bit hard to justify buying a new cookbook when I have stacks of them with recipes tagged that I’ve not gotten around to trying yet. Recently, though, I found it at a very good […]

My friend Tonya sent this recipe to me ages ago, and I put it in my embarrassingly enormous and ever-growing “to try” collection. One obstacle that has detained me in making these muffins is finding spelt flour in my area. I finally resigned myself to ordering some from King Arthur. That usually gets me in […]

Recently, while visiting our friends in North Carolina, we were privileged to have dinner at Magnolia Grill, one of Gourmet magazine’s top restaurants of 2006. After appetizers, entrees, and desserts, we can now all enthusiastically attest to its goodness. As an added bonus, I was treated by our friends to a signed copy of […]