According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a buckle is a one layer cake, very moist, with a streusel topping that buckles as it cooks. Recently they featured a glossary of fruit desserts, along with several recipes. I snipped the article, intending to bake a buckle, waiting for the right time. Well, that time came! Someone at work [...]
My big contribution to Thanksgiving dinner is always pies – pumpkin, pecan and mince are required to get me through the door of Julie’s house, and then I usually throw in 1-2 more, wildcard pies. The creative pies, if you must. Yesterday I took the required three, plus Apple/Cranberry with French Crumble Topping, and a [...]
With bees in the backyard, and concerns about high fructose corn syrup and other easily refined sugars in processed food items, I have been considering how to move towards healthier sweeteners in our home. Easy enough when adding syrup to waffles or honey to yogurt, but a little trickier when thinking about baked goods. Fortunately, [...]
We had a pile of pears left over last week and I needed a quick recipe to use the stash before our next box from Happy Child CSA ripened. Fortunately, there was a great recipe included in the weekly newsletter, Becky’s Pear Cake. It was easy to make, and I modified slightly with the addition [...]
When I quit my regular 9-5 job outside of the home a couple years ago, I did so because at the time, life felt short. My great aunt was 93 and moving into a retirement home. My Dad was getting older. And my kids were growing so quickly I could hardly keep up. Fast forward [...]
Today we made pudding. Bittersweet chocolate pudding. A favorite from when I was first living on my own. The recipe comes from Puddings Custards and Flans by Linda Zimmerman, and the original recipe calls for white chocolate chunks, but we are not fans of white chocolate, so we left that out. Otherwise, the recipe is [...]
Our newest family baker comes home from school today determined to make brownies. I tried to tell encourage him to make my favorite brownie recipe, a one-bowl version that my Grandmother used to make, originally off the back of the Baker’s Choice unsweetened chocolate (and is now repeated many other places, including Mark Bittman’s How [...]
Coach’s gifts for soccer were easy this year – the team name was the Whoopie Pies and once I saw the new Whoopie Pies: Dozens of Mix ‘em, Match ‘em, Eat ‘em up recipes by Sarah Billingsley and Amy Treadwell, I had my plan in place. A copy of the book for each coach, along [...]
After reading My Life in France, by Julia Child, and to a lesser degree, The Sharper Your Knife, The Less you Cry, by Kathleen Flinn, I became very interested in taking a class at the Cordon Bleu in Paris. Not a full regimen of courses to become a certified chef, just a class to see [...]
My neighbor Amy and I love to chat about baking and cooking. We both share an interest in having fun in the kitchen, and recently she shared these photos of a cake she baked for her friend’s Bat Mitzvah. I was so excited by the beauty of the cake that I wanted to post the [...]
Last year, I promised to share more persimmon recipes, following my post about Persimmon Cookies. I have also written about Steamed Persimmon Pudding and making Hoshigaki at home. With persimmons in season again, it was time to pull out the recipes. I generally use Hachiya for breads and cookies, and enjoy Fuyu in salads. The [...]
Roasting your own pumpkin for pie this Thanksgiving is not a difficult process. And you will be amazed at the difference in taste. DSC_0882 This week, in preparation for my pie baking marathon Thanksgiving week, I roasted up a Musquee de Provence pumpkin. This variety of pumpkin is huge – the small ones are over [...]
