Archive for the 'baking' Category
Weekend Waffles
January 18th, 2010by Lisa
birthday flowers, whipped cream, maple syrup, blueberries…
Generally speaking, I’m not in charge of breakfast, and I prefer pancakes to waffles. This is not so true of my husband, who loves waffles, and who counted a waffle maker among the very few kitchen machines in his bachelor home. He made waffles pretty regularly (from [...]
A Good Way to Start the Week
January 11th, 2010I will stop with all the cookie recipes soon, I promise, and get on to other topics, but I couldn’t resist writing about this one which I first spotted on my friend (and Mama, PhD contributor) Sheila’s blog: Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies.
Now, normally I am a big fan of flour in baked goods. You can [...]
Homemade English Muffins
January 4th, 2010by Lisa
I don’t bake nearly as frequently nor with as much passion as Caroline or finesse as my husband, but I do go on baking sprees, and this holiday vacation was no exception. Inspired by discovering my family’s love of English Muffins, and a few great blog posts, I decided to bake my own.
For one [...]
Hickory Puffs
December 30th, 2009My dad and sons added a new cookie to their repertoire this year, one I grew up with thanks to the nut-gathering efforts of my dad: hickory puffs. Now, most Californians don’t know about hickory nuts; the trees grow in New England and Wisconsin, and the nut shells are so hard and the nutmeat so [...]
Chocolate Hazlenut Roulade
December 30th, 2009By Lisa
My Christmas table wouldn’t be complete without a chocolate roulade, which my sister calls a giant ho ho, or giant yodel, and she’s right. But it’s delicious, and deceptively easy to make. I’ve been making this recipe for about 8 years, though the recipe has morphed into its current incarnation.
I start with Jacques Pepin’s [...]
Cooking with Granddad
December 30th, 2009by Caroline
We don’t have quite as many holiday food traditions as Lisa’s family — the meals always vary depending on whether we stay in California or travel east to my parents’ home — but one tradition that reaches back generations is, as in many families, cookie baking. My grandmother and mother kept tallies of [...]
Mrs. Bean’s Famous Nutmeg Ginger Apple Snaps
December 23rd, 2009by Caroline
We are all about Fantastic Mr. Fox these days. Ben just finished reading the book in school, we loved the movie, we are singing the song and now — eating the cookies! It was Tony who recognized the familiar voice of Rabbit (Mario Batali) in the movie, Ben who kept talking about Mrs. [...]
Peppermint Bark
December 22nd, 2009by Lisa
The highly successful chocolate-tempering experiment gave me courage, and fueled by my family’s expensive addiction to peppermint bark, I scrapped the plans for the chocolate-peppermint cookies and decided to make my own peppermint bark.
It’s a simple, if time consuming process, only because I made so darn much (as in, close to 3 lbs, but [...]
Bittersweet Chocolate Fleur de Sel Caramels
December 22nd, 2009By Lisa
Christmas baking around here is more seat-of-the-pants and less ambitious than at Caroline’s, but we do bake some things every season to give as gifts to our children’s beloved teachers, principle, and school staff. Also, we live in a really lovely, diverse neighborhood, with many childless couples, older couples, older single people, and young [...]
Making Cookies, Making a Mess
December 22nd, 2009by Caroline
I was sharing some of my food writing with a friend recently — mostly stories of cooking with my kids — and she started shaking her head in wonder. “This is just so foreign to me,” she said, “All of your kitchen stories are so. . . happy.”
I reminded her I do have it [...]