Just Baking

Like many people, I have a love/hate relationship with fast food.  I really, really want not to like it.  Even if it wasn’t terrible for you, they’re not exactly using the finest ingredients.  It’s all pretty pedestrian and uninspired.  A hamburger grilled in my back yard with a plop of homemade mayonnaise and a couple of […]

Sometimes I want to make cookies, but I don’t want to expend too much energy at any one time.  Particularly when the weather starts to get nice, I don’t want to be stuck in the house for extended periods of time, measuring out ingredients and babysitting batches in the oven.  I want to go sit […]

Sometimes it seems I need to be hit in the head with a mallet before I realize what it is Fate wants me to cook. You see, I firmly believe that sometimes there’s something out there - call it Fate, call it the powers that be, call it what you will - that is mandating me to cook a […]

Normally my husband is the peanut butter cookie maker in our house. He uses the recipe out of Joy of Cooking and makes, oh, roughly seven thousand of them every Christmas. We never had peanut butter cookies when I was a kid because my mom didn’t make cookies, and even if she had, she didn’t like peanut […]

I know I should be eating a balance of carbs and protein for breakfast to carry me through to lunch. I know that a piece of fruit and a hard-boiled egg or some yogurt would be better for me than a quick sugar-and-simple-carbs hit. Well, go ahead and sue me: I love breakfast sweet breads. I’m a total sucker for […]

In the Pacific Northwest we have all the same months that you folks in the rest of the world have, right up to May. The month that follows May here in the PNW is more commonly known as June-uary. As I sit writing this, the rain is slanting down from dusty gray clouds […]

Carolyn Gurtz, a homemaker from Gaithersburg, MD took the top prize in the 43rd Pillsubry Bake-Off in Dallas, TX on April 14.  Her Double-Delight Peanut Butter Cookies use Pillsbury cookie dough, JIF peanut butter, Fisher peanuts, and both Domino and C&H sugar.
The grand prize is $1 million.  Other winning recipes included Mascarpone-Filled Cranberry-Walnut Rolls (Breakfast & Brunches category), Salmon […]

This would probably have been a better recipe to share before Easter, since now you can’t possibly make these for breakfast on Easter morning, as we did. However, since it’s an awfully nice recipe, I would say you shouldn’t wait for next Easter to make it. Tomorrow would be fine. 
Every year for about fifteen years now, I’ve […]

 
The bucket, at last, is full again.  For the past four days my sons have been pointing to a kitchen cabinet and saying, in a tone reminiscent of Oliver asking for more, “Mommy, the bucket’s empty.”  Horrors.
The bucket, you see, is the large, deep rectangular storage container in which we keep the cookies.  I love […]

Did you ever find a recipe that you fell so in love with at first sight that you just had to make it, and then when it didn’t work out, you were determined to make it work?  I had this happen a couple of weeks ago.  I came across a recipe for Jam Crumb Cake […]