These days it’s pretty rare for me to cook from a cookbook. There are tons of great food blogs out there and with more than 550 recipes pinned to my Treats board, baking from a book rarely enters my mind. I do use my Joy of Cooking and America’s Test Kitchen cookbooks on a regularRead more
I think I finally cracked the caramel code. After successfully making caramel from scratch four times, I now have the recipe memorized and the technique down. Let’s just not talk about the two times I burned the dickens out of the sugar or nearly set the house on fire when the cream boiled over, mmm-kay?Read more
The temperature was 45 degrees this morning when Chester and I walked Doug to the train station. I had to put on a sweater! I think autumn is officially here. And with autumn comes pumpkin recipes! It’s a little hard for me to want pumpkin in the middle of summer. With the cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves andRead more
For the past three years, there has been a woman at our local farmer’s market who made these bar cookies called “Carmelitas”. Unfortunately this year she didn’t return to the market so I have been missing what I have often described to friends as the best cookie I’ve ever had. I resisted looking for aRead more
What does an inveterate baker do when life hands her five peaches that need to be used like NOW and half a box of cake mix? Well, she makes peach cobbler. Only because she never uses cake mix, she’s not quite sure it will work. #spoileralert #itdid What happened was that I saw this yummyRead more
Last Friday, Doug had the day off so we hopped in the car and drove into downtown Washington, DC to have lunch and stop in at an art gallery. After wandering up and down 8th Street, we settled on Ted’s Bulletin as a likely-looking place, primarily for the all day breakfast and homemade pop tartsRead more
On Monday night, Doug and I went to a feast held at our local Turkish mosque to break the evening fast since it’s Ramadan. We’re Christian, but our pastor has befriended the local imam in the spirit of interfaith dialogue and so we were invited to observe evening prayers and enjoy a meal with them.Read more
Last weekend I made marshmallows. It started as these things usually start – with Pinterest. I found this pin for bourbon-flavored marshmallows, and upon discovering that I had all the ingredients to make said marshmallows, five hours later we were eating marshmallows. There’s only one problem: we don’t really like marshmallows. I mean, we do,Read more
I was cruising Pinterest a few weeks ago while Doug was sitting next to me on the sofa. When I came to this Salted Caramel Six Layer Chocolate Cake, he said, “Um, could that be my birthday cake?” Why of course, darling! So last week I acquired some delicious semi-sweet Scharffenberger chocolate, a whole heck of aRead more
I wasn’t even going to blog this recipe for pumpkin cookies with brown butter frosting. I’d seen it repeated over and over by different bloggers on my blog feeds and on Pinterest and so I was just going to make the cookies I needed for a church function tonight and go on about my day. ThenRead more