Just Baking

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 […]

The French are charmingly smug about their devotion to red wine, Gitanes and food cooked in goose fat.  A study of 34,000 Frenchmen, conducted in 1997, indicated that a glass or two or red wine each day reduced mortality rates by a startling 30%.  This is despite heavy consumption of saturated fats, stressful working conditions, […]

Sometimes an ingredient has been sitting for so long in your cupboard that it becomes as familiar as that little spider that made its’ home in the vent in the bathroom or the pile of bricks on the draining board that have been sitting there, just waiting to be used, for months now.  You look […]

Every hobby-baker has their pantry full of baking essentials.  But if you’re new to the game and aren’t sure what to stock up on, the following is a list of items I believe are must-haves for baking, and things that if you keep on hand, will keep you from having to run to the store […]

With the holiday baking season almost upon us and with it a quest for quality ingredients, I thought that I’d sample See’s Candies’ Semi Sweet Chocolate Chips.  Also, since a chocolate chip’s destiny is often to be baked into a cookie, my teen-age son obligingly whipped up a batch of chocolate chip cookies for me.
Tasting Report
Description:  See’s […]

I’ve been cooking for years and on occasion I have been known to substitute margarine for butter (mainly during my college years when money was tight).  But since I’ve learned more about baking, and made literally hundreds of recipes, I have realized that the two are definitely not equal. 
Butter is made from the fat […]