Just Baking

I’ve got wedding on the brain.  I’m hearing strains of Canon in D in my sleep and brushing up on my waltz around the house.  Is it perhaps because it’s Spring and love is in bloom at every turn?  Could be.  More likely though, it’s because my own sashay down the aisle will commence in […]

Rhubarb, when it sets its mind to it, can be a thing of beauty.  Red satin ribbons of seductive flavor – teasing first with tartness and then appealing to you with a mellow finish.  But it’s also a fickle food, sometimes showing up in defiant shades of green and pink and only half-heartedly delivering on […]

Another holiday season has come and gone; another boozy New Year’s Eve nothing but a memory of the fading chords of Auld Lang Syne; and peering into the looking glass at a glum and dreary winter ahead can be downright depressing.  The carols have been turned off.  Presents all unwrapped.  Turkey leftovers recycled into as […]

I’m competitive.  And baking is my sport.  I take to the kitchen like an Olympian to a gym, knowing that I must challenge myself each time if I want to sustain that culinary endorphin rush.  So each holiday season, I strive to find a new recipe that will wow and vavoom the dessert socks off […]

Chocolate is growing up.  In its youth, it presented itself to cooks and candymakers in three simple notes:  milk, dark, and white.  But now, with the advent of epicurean refinement (or snobbery) and the growing foodie obsession with variety (or perfection), chocolate has matured into a veritable Crayola box of choices.
For a baker, the choices […]

Ah, Holiday Season, we know ye well.  Like an old friend we haven’t seen in a while and beg for more time to catch up with.  Though more and more it feels like a game of musical chairs where the music keeps getting faster and faster until…oops, times up.
Not that I have such a cynical […]

It surrendered when the knife hit it.
The fine crumbs were disastrously fragile, struggling in vain to hold onto one another.  It collapsed against the weight of cream cheese; likewise even to a smear of jelly.  The product of my bread-baking effort was, by all accounts, a sad little loaf.
I was thirteen years old.
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