A month or so ago, when I posted the recipe for the Cardamom Half-Dips, I mentioned the bakery that was across the street from the church I went to before I... well, stopped going to church.  This bakery was the Prolific Oven, and aside from the half-dipped cookies, the other two pastries that I particularly remember getting there were sticky buns ( Read more... )

 After I posted Sunday's sketch, I immediately got to work baking.  Purportedly, my reason for doing this was that I had promised to bring a decadent chocolate cake to my friend Sarah's going-away party that evening, but I kind of got diverted into other baking adventures as well.

You might remember that when my mom came to visit two months ago, we ( Read more... )

 I made these nearly a week ago, but as some of you may have gathered, I've been putting in incredibly long hours at work this week, and didn't actually get around to copying the photos to my computer until this afternoon.  And it's kind of fitting for me to post happy yummy (cup)cakes today anyway, so here you go:


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One of my go-to cookie recipes is the Rolo cookie recipe, which has a dense chocolate dough wrapped around a Rolo candy (caramel coated in milk chocolate), with chopped pecans or walnuts on top.  This particular cookie is always a crowd-pleaser (particularly when the crowd was the freshmen I TA'd for last year!).

They do have their drawbacks, ( Read more... )

Last summer, a very good friend of mine gave me a stash of Valrhona baking chocolate. In a moment of brilliance, we decided that we ought to "test" it out by making chocolate lava cakes. And...

... they were pretty much a disaster. Some of the butter separated out and floated on top; the cake baked all the way through and did not so much have any ( Read more... )

When my mom and I went to my favorite tea shop last weekend, they offered us a small pile of cardamom cookies with our tea (also some excellent basil cookies, but that's for another day).  That,combined with our trip to an Indian restaurant two days earlier, got me into a cardamom sort of mood, and when I googled "cardamom cupcakes", several ( Read more... )