Ah, summer.

Think berries. Fresh fruits of all kinds. Bounty from your garden. Lighter flavors, like lemon, vanilla, almond…

So, what’s this ridiculously chocolate ice cream fudge brownie cake doing here? read the rest of this entry »

Fiber.

It’s just so virtuous. So healthy. So… dull.

It’s true, fiber isn’t the flashiest ingredient out there. I mean, next to chocolate, or strawberries – or the pepperoni on your pizza – fiber is an also-ran in the looks/flavor department.

But, like any wallflower, fiber can become the belle of the ball when put in the right situation.

Like these bran muffins. read the rest of this entry »

Do you remember the first time you made a marble cake? I do. I remember thinking it was the coolest thing in the world to blob the chocolate batter into the vanilla batter like the 5 pips on a die. Two at the top, two at the bottom and one right in the center, symmetry at its best. Then taking a butter knife and swirling the batters together, it was magical. Of course, being young I just had to…

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Shoe paste? Pat a shoe? What the heck are these people talking about?

Profitawho? Profitawhat? Come on now, stop speaking nonsense and tell me what I need to know. Can I make it, can I eat it, and does it taste good?  Well, I’m here to tell you …

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Did you ever notice that there are some things you can serve to your family that just send a regular weeknight dinner over the top into the realm of “Is it Sunday already?”

Like when we serve homemade chicken noodle soup, another of my husband’s fantastic recipes, everyone settles back and sighs as the weekday woes melt away. If I get to bake that night… read the rest of this entry »

One of the most common queries we get via our Bakers’ Hotline is this:

“I hate discarding a cup of sourdough starter every time I feed it. Isn’t there something else I can do with it, besides just throw it away?”

Ah, we’re all thrifty New Englanders at heart, right? And I agree – it just feels wrong to throw flour (starter) in the trash bucket. Luckily, there’s plenty you can do with excess starter besides dump it. So here goes:

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This is me and my mom, a few years ago on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts.

This is me (on the right) and my mom – and sister, brother, and dad – one long-ago Christmas.

Somewhere in between those two snapshots in time, my mom taught me to bake.

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And you thought you’d tried every cinnamon bun recipe in the world, right?

I mean, there’s no way to make cinnamon buns other than the tried-and-true, classic “make sweet dough, sprinkle with cinnamon-sugar, roll up, cut, rise, bake, glaze, YUM.”

Is there?

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So what’s with the piece of initialed masking tape on this lovely loaf of rising bread?

Well, when you have 12 bakers mixing dough, shaping loaves, and setting them on racks to rise – all at once – things can get a little hectic. In the nicest of ways, of course.

We like to call it creative energy: the energy and spirit of bakers at work, connecting and bonding with one another over bread, pie, fancy cakes, scones, sticky buns, or… read the rest of this entry »

Remember the famous Tunnel of Fudge Cake?

Clearly, this isn’t it.

And amazingly enough, there are people in this world who don’t live and die by chocolate.

The pages of whose cookbooks don’t automatically fall open to recipes for brownies and devil’s food cake and chocolate chip cookies.

You know who you are, vanilla fans. And lemon lovers.

And coconut connoisseurs.

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