Baking

The days when you allow the farmers market to dictate what you make for dinner are kind of awesome days. To be quite honest, they’ve become rarer and rarer around our house as we’ve become busier during the weekends. But there’s something quite sweet about ambling around the market and chatting about what you could make with certain ingredients. This weekend, we had time to visit our local farmers market and found some beautiful looking sorrel, leeks, and farm eggs.

Pie It Forward by Gesine Bullock-Prado is a pretty, educational, and thorough collection of pie recipes and baking tips. Bullock-Prado owns the Vermont Pastry shop Gesine Confectionary and felt it was time to write a solid, complete pie book using many of the recipes she’s become known for in the shop.Now I bake a lot of pies, and I have to admit that I was struck by how much I learned after just a few minutes flipping through Pie It Forward.

Fair warning: You should only make these bread sticks when surrounded by plenty of people to help you eat them. Otherwise, there is a very serious danger of proceeding directly from the last bite of one bread stick to the first bite of the next. Especially if there’s a little bowl of tomato sauce for dipping and no one to stop you. I embarked on this mission of stuffing cheese inside bread thinking this would be easy-peasy. Wrap cheese in dough, bake, devour. Repeat.

Homemade macaroni and cheese is almost always a Good Thing, but is Martha Stewart’s recipe perhaps the best of all? Food52 has declared it a “genius recipe” One of the key elements is the mornay sauce that surrounds and permeates the pasta as it bakes. Flour, butter and milk are cooked into a béchamel to which grated sharp cheddar and Gruyere are added, resulting in a rich, creamy sauce that won’t break down during baking.

The boyfriend adores waffles. They come second only to pancakes in his favorite food department. So when I bought a waffle iron a couple of years ago, it was a sure sign that I was in the relationship to win it. But purchasing the device was the easy part. It was finding the perfect recipe to accompany it that was so hard.So the search began. I pored over cookbooks, food blogs, and magazines, all in search of a great waffle. And you know what? I found it.

There are hundreds of different pies in the Southern arsenal (and almost as many cookbooks on the subject), so choosing a pie to make for National Pi Day proved to be quite difficult. When I finally narrowed it down to chocolate, my decision didn’t exactly become easier. There’s chocolate fudge pie, chocolate cream pie, chocolate pudding pie, chocolate chip pecan pie… Well, you get the drift.

Look! It’s a cake baked in an orange peel — in a campfire! See what’s inside, and what it looks like after baking…Emily of the blog Today’s Letters sent us this clever cake recipe — she and her husband tried it out on their last camping trip. Take a cake mix, some oil and water, and some oranges, then add campfire and bake! Ta-da! Baked orange cakes. Move on over, S’Mores.

Cake PopsBakerella has been creating cake pops, cupcake pops, and other sweetly amazing treats for a long time now. Her beautifully detailed treats and lovely photos quickly earned her a huge following, some TV appearances, and a book deal. And the book itself really does not disappoint. Even if you have been following Bakerella for a long time, you may want this book. It presents all the basics of cake pops along with fun decorating tips in one hardback, spiral-bound book.

Pi Day is Sunday! (It’s March 14, which is 3.14, or pi. Get it?) This mathematically-significant date has a sweet and serendipitous homophone, and we’re glad to take any excuse to eat extra pie. Are you making a pie this weekend? Let us suggest one possible candidate: One with a silky, melt-in-your-mouth filling, and a sweet tang at the end.Have you ever made a vinegar pie?

We have been thinking a lot about muffins this week; we often neglect to make muffins, and we wonder why! They are quick, easy, and simple to clean up. They are great little snacks during the day, and they are awesome for grab-and-go breakfasts too. So we were really pleased when reader Elise sent us this tip about a pumpkin chocolate chip muffin recipe.Elise says: I found this delicious recipe for Pumpkin Bread/Muffins at thefreshloaf.com that I wanted to share! They have such a great texture.

Take a look at these peaches! Are ripe, sweet peaches in season already? Well, not exactly, but these look just as good… These are actually peach sandwich cookies (breskvice), a traditional Yugoslavian recipe. Medena of Cafe Chocolada says that she has tried many different versions of these cookies — some from Croatian sources, and some from friends.

Sixty-seven years of amazing cookies — 1941-2008. That’s what Gourmet Magazine is featuring on their website right now. They went back through every year of their magazine’s history and chose a favorite cookie from each year.It’s like a time capsule back to their early days inthe 40s and 50s and all through the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. They give a quick recap of each decade and some of the new influences in each.The real stars of course are the cookies.

We focus a lot on the dough and crust when we talk about pies, since this is often the most intimidating part for new pie-bakers. And yet if your filling isn’t delicious as well, then what’s the point? Fruit filling is what makes us love pie. The opportunity to use fresh, seasonal fruit with a minimum of preparation or fuss, letting the fruit’s flavors shine out clearly – it’s one of the best things about baking.

Have you heard of the vodka pie crust recipe? It made big news in the baking world when Cook’s Illustrated first published it last fall. Half of the pie dough’s moisture comes from vodka, which is 40% pure alcohol. The alcohol doesn’t promote gluten formation, so it helps the crust stay much flakier and more tender – a foolproof help to those of us who tend to overwork our pie dough.So, how does this pie dough work? Is the unconventional addition of vodka worth it?

We recently linked to a gingerbread-pear cake in our daily Delicious Links, and lo and behold, we found ourselves with that very same cake in the oven a few nights later. We wanted, you see, to give you a personal opinion.I have a Thing for gingerbread. Gingerbread cookies and gingerbread men – crispy, soft, and chewy – all kinds. Gingerbread lattes, gingerbread bread pudding – mmm, sometimes.

Like an ant to the picnic, we couldn’t resist trying out another bread recipe from Daniel Leader’s book, Local Breads, this past weekend.We had such success making baguettes last time, so we thought we’d try another straight dough recipe. We decided on Ricotta Bread, a basic yeast bread–no sourdoughs or starters–enriched with milk and ricotta cheese. Yum!The dough was pretty sticky at first and difficult to work with.