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A Teaspoon of Tips: Best Apples for Baking
Hello and welcome to my new feature, “A Teaspoon of Tips.” In these posts, I’ll offer general tips and advice on baking that I’ve learned from my adventures in the kitchen. I hope these will help bakers of all skill levels achieve the best results in their bakes! First up, a somewhat hot topic in baking during autumn: the “best” apples for baking. When you decide to go to the market with the intention of making a pie, tart, crisp, or cake, it can be overwhelming to decide which apples to get. There are often several varieties to choose from and little information on how they are different. There are…
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Lemon Verbena Ice Cream
Happy Labor Day weekend! I hope you are all enjoying a day off from work as we unofficially say goodbye to summer. In keeping with last week’s theme, I am still trying to get through the abundance that is my summer garden harvest. This was the first year I have a dedicated bed just for herbs, and I went a bit crazy at the nursery. I had so much room that I wanted to plant everything! One new herb I tried is called lemon verbena. The plant grows like a small shrub, with leaves that release a sweet lemon/citrus flavor when touched. It seemed like a great way to get…
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Chocolate Zucchini Bread
Well, I guess now it really has been a while since I posted. Sometimes, life gets in the way of our best intentions. A few things happened in my personal life that unintentionally amounted to a summer blog break. Happy to be back! One of the many things I did this summer was work on my backyard urban garden. I am lucky to live in an area of the city where houses have yards, and even luckier to have one the larger yards on the block. When we moved in, I put in several raised beds that I use for a vegetable and herb garden each spring and summer. As…
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Black and White Blondies
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here. Don’t worry, I have been baking (I’m sure you were). This recipe was made an enjoyed several weeks ago; I’m playing catch-up with getting it posted. My paying job was taking up a lot more of my time. We were nearing a project deadline and an already stressful job got even more so. Some staff were visiting from other branches. One of them is a friend who normally hears about my baking but doesn’t get to try it. So I asked her what she might like me to make and bring in. She said something chocolate. Of course! I’m pretty sure chocolate…
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Raspberry Rose Scones
Some co-workers are visiting this week from an office branch in Ireland. For one of their first nights here, they were invited to a dinner a local Mexican restaurant. Someone told them it was “authentic”, which made some of us from the area laugh. We explained that in America, Mexican restaurants almost always actually serve Tex-Mex food. We all agreed that if a place is described as “authentic”, that’s generally a sign it won’t be very authentic at all. When I decided to make scones for a family brunch, I first thought I wanted to make authentic scones. But then I realized I probably have never had a properly authentic scone. Scones originated in the…
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Meyer Lemon Pound Cake
Spring has really arrived now. When it isn’t windy and rainy, the weather has been perfectly mild and sunny. I guess it might be spring fever, but I got it into my head that I needed to make lemon pound cake. In particular, I wanted to make one like the one sold at Starbucks, with a thick drizzle of lemon icing. But I’ve always thought that cake looked better than it tasted. Mine would look pretty, but it would also have a perfectly tender crumb and a bold lemon flavor.
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Coconut Macaroons
Happy Easter and Happy Passover! Actually, I really like to say Hoppy Easter and all the other cheesy egg themed puns, but I’ll spare you all my Dad humor (for now). I hope you all had a wonderful holiday weekend with your friends and family. I know I did, which is one reason why I’m so late posting this!
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Chocolate Caramel Shortbread
Have you ever had a serious kitchen disaster? Not just something you baked or cooked that didn’t turn out how you hoped, I mean a true catastrophe. I’ve heard of people accidentally using salt instead of sugar in a cake, or trying to brown something under a broiler and instead setting it on fire. Until recently, I was pretty lucky. I had experienced plenty of minor mishaps, but nothing major. I had probably gotten a little cocky and lazy. This recipe put me back in my place!
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Cherry Blossom Cupcakes
It’s officially the first day of spring! March 20 is the Spring Equinox, and while that doesn’t mean an instant season change, its a nice milestone to celebrate. It means we are at least on our way to warm weather and beautiful gardens. And the weather even cooperated and warmed up a bit today, which made me happy. Sometimes it’s the little things, right? But we have had some strange weather this year in much of the country, including my home of Washington, DC. In February, it briefly seemed Spring had already arrived. We had several weeks of warm enough weather that plants starting blooming, setting off seasonal allergies. The National Park…
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S’more Pie
Pi Day is March 14 – the day dedicated to celebrating pi (π), the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. The number of digits in pi are infinite, but it starts with 3.14, hence the March 14 celebration. (And yes, I did have to do a Google search to remember all that. All I could recall was that it had something to do with geometry and circles. Math was not my favorite subject). The obvious way to celebrate pi day is with pie. The words are pronounced the same, and pies are (generally) circles. It’s a perfect match between math and food. To celebrate, I decided to create a pie…
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