Despite my self-assuredness (and great relief) that I’d never again have need to enter a science class upon graduation from college, I’ve found myself in quite the experimental mood lately. A few weeks ago, my friend April suggested here on the blog that I try adding some brown sugar loveliness to my pumpkin cake recipe,…
Sometimes love is sweet: Valentine linzer cookies
Valentine’s Day is Monday, and love is most certainly in the air. My good friends welcomed their new baby last night (love, love, love!) and Ella has met a new puppy friend that she seems quite smitten with. There’s all sorts of happy going on these days, and nothing says “I love life,” or “Love…
Delicious distractions
Wednesday afternoon was a first for me. As I sat at my desk and typed away on work-related odds and ends, I clicked on my Twitter feed just as @food52 tweeted about this week’s wildcard winner on their site. Normally I don’t have any trouble clicking back and forth between Twitter updates and the task…
Feeling cold, tasting spring: Lemon olive oil cake
Yesterday felt like the coldest day of the year. I think the high hovered somewhere near 16, and the wind chill prompted atypical alerts about dangerously cold winds and frostbite possibilities on my trusty Weather Channel app. Normally, this sort of bone-chilling weather would lead me toward the soup section of a cookbook, or at…
Project NYT: Spice krinkles
I’ve spent most of my adult life as a bake-by-photos kind of girl. No, I don’t mean that I ignore textual instructions and base my cooking exclusively on what I see (though that could be a mighty fun and/or terrible idea), but when it comes to wooing my culinary curiosity with winning recipes, delicious photos…
Project NYT: Molasses cupcakes with lemon icing
Like most people, I definitely have my favorite flavors. Cinnamon, vanilla, anything citrusy: I always tend to gravitate toward recipes that incorporate the tastes that I love. More often than not, those recipes call for expected combinations: cinnamon with nutmeg and vanilla, lemon with fresh berries, rolled oats with brown sugar. They’re classic combos because…
A belated celebration: Chocolate chip pancakes
So yesterday was National Chocolate Cake Day, and somehow I missed the memo until mid-afternoon when it was too late and I was too busy to partake in the sugar-filled euphoria. Sad, I know. And I do so love a good holiday. Anyway, I spent the better half of yesterday thinking about cake (which is…
Project NYT: Baking from honey-dipped memories
Food is a funny thing. On the one hand, it comes equipped with so many quantifiable qualities: vitamins, nutrients, calories and ingredients. On the other hand, so much of what we eat and how we eat is tied to much less tangible traits: what we know, whom we know and what we remember. Food has…
Project NYT: Nostalgia and the 67-year-old brownie
My quest for the perfect homemade brownie continued last night, and I dare say I might have found a winner. Hidden nearly 700 pages deep, in the “Cookies and Candy” section of my NYT Cookbook, there lies an incredibly simple, back-to-basics type of recipe that sounded like just the kind of the thing I was…
Let’s talk about truffles
Yesterday, Jared brought home lunch from Hoss’s Market & Rotisserrie, one of our fave little sandwich joints in town (they really sell a lot more than sandwiches, but I discovered a mega-delicious BLT there a few years ago and have yet to order anything else). Along with our regular order, which almost always consists of…