Just Baking

Baking cookies is the best way to placate yourself and your kids, and for me, it’s also a favorite pastime! What I love about cookies is that they can be simple and festive at the same time. I had thumbprint cookies on my mind for a long time. The name “thumbprint” comes from the fact […]

Impressive centerpiece for dinner parties. Quick and simple to make, this is the perfect recipe for beginners. This is a dish often suggested for pre-Christmas parties, but served with a fresh green salad, we could almost imagine that spring has arrived. In fact, this dish is all about tremors of excitement and anticipation. At […]

As sorely tempted as I was to bake my heart out in the form of holiday cookies, time simply slipped away while I wasn’t looking, leaving me to watch on in green-eyed envy as everyone else I knew pull tray after tray of golden dough from their ovens. Besides the time commitment involved, I […]

Are you done with your Christmas cookies yet? I hope your answer is no. Because I’m not either. Although I have baked some cookies earlier to send to a special friend, and test baked a few batches of various recipes to see if they were good, I haven’t really made any progress on the […]

I love traditions. My husband cracks up at me because if we do something once, and enjoy it, then I make it a tradition to do that same thing every year! It seems like this time of year we have my made up traditions coming out of the woodwork. One tradition that got its start […]

Flipping through the pages of innumerable baking catalogs that all feature the same immaculately clean kitchens, state-of-the-art appliances, and flawlessly decorated cookies, even a five-year old could tell you that these images are all fake. Staged, meticulously constructed down to the very last crumb; Those cookies that look so incredible on the page could […]

The Christmas Pearl is a Christmas book with which to get you into the Holiday Spirit, complete with many family heirloom recipes, many of which the titles simply pique your curiosity. Among my most interested, were the recipe called Sands. A simple recipe (as most were, when a wooden spoon and your hands were the […]

The holiday season would not be complete without sugar cookies on the dessert menu. They’re one of the most versatile cookies out there - they can be shaped into anything you desire or simply rolled in sugar or decorated with icing.
The sugar cookie recipe I used is from BHG and I liked it because there […]

It’s that time of year when many of us find ourselves thinking about how to create festive dishes for our holiday gatherings. For bread bakers, creative shaping is one way to add that extra flair that can elevate a loaf from the everyday to the celebration-worthy.
This rosette looks complicated to make, but in fact it […]

Kipferl is an almond vanilla cookie hailing from Germany. From what I’ve managed to find out, it is a Christmas cookie shaped like a crescent that is eaten with tea and jam but I think you could eat these little delicacies anytime morning, noon and night.The dough is similar to a sugar cookie with the […]