Pumpkin Spice Sugar Cookies

It’s been a LONG time since I last made sugar cookies.  I don’t often bake them because they always come out crisp and I prefer softer, chewier cookies.  Maybe I’m instinctively preparing for a life of toothlessness because of all the sweets I bake.  When I saw that the latest Cook’s Illustrated included a recipe for Foolproof Sugar Cookies, I nearly fell over.  You see, this recipe is meant to be mixed by hand.  Super-appealing to those of us who don’t a lot of have counter space and have to lug out the stand mixer for every mixing job.  And [...]

The Blind Baker’s Essential Kitchen–Tools

The last time I talked about my essential kitchen, I only discussed ingredients.  This time I’m looking at equipment and boy howdy, do I have a LOT! Oven thermometer As you can see, my oven thermometer has seen better days.  This is a must-have item.  It’s crucial for your oven to be the correct temperature when you’re baking, even for those of you who think your oven is calibrated perfectly.  Mine has all these fancy electronic buttons on it and it very helpfully beeps when the heating element has reached the desired temperature, but that doesn’t mean the rest of [...]

The Blind Baker’s Essential Kitchen–Ingredients

Some people want to look inside other people’s medicine cabinets.  Others want to know what someone keeps in his or her glove compartment.  I say meh to that; I wanna know what’s in their kitchen cabinets! What?  I’m nosy! I recently started a list of ingredients I must have in my kitchen when I finally move into my own place and realized it’s pretty extensive.  And it’s just stuff for baking!  If I had to really pare down my baking needs, these ingredients would be the first things I’d buy: Eggs, of course! Can’t do anything without all-purpose flour.  I [...]

Pull-Apart Onion-Cheese Bread/Biscuits

A group of friends and I get together for a potluck every couple of months, and while I had plans for the day of the last one, those plans fell through at the last minute and I found myself scrambling for a decent contribution.  I settled on rigatoni Bolognese.  Then I rediscovered a recipe for onion cheese bread I’d found ages ago and never got around to trying, mostly because I’m a big ol’ procrastinator.  I’ll have to tell you about that sometime, but not right now. As I looked over the recipe, it occurred to me that it sounded [...]

Banana Bread

Banana bread is one of those things I make with some regularity because my mom really likes bananas, though like many old-school Chinese, she thinks American baked goods are super sweet.  No matter how much I cut down on the sugar, my banana bread was always “too sweet!” and eventually, the ever-dwindling amount of sugar I was using began to affect not only the taste but the texture and structure of the bread.   So I stopped baking it and handed over the recipe for her to alter as she pleased.  She uses minute amounts of Splenda and over-mixes the batter, [...]

« Previous Page — Next Page »