De Baking Psychopath

I have discovered bread pudding! For whatever reason, I always thought it would be heavy and dense and like a rock in your stomach. Then I thought about it. It's basically bread soaked in custard and baked. Sounds like baked French toast. How bad could that be? I asked an American co-worker, has he ever eaten bread pudding? What is it like? His answer ("It's moist and custardy, like French toast!") gave me the encouragement I needed to try this recipe. The source of this recipe is the same as the Jewish Honey Cake featured a few posts ago: Kathleen King (of Tate's Bake Shop) via her monthly recipe newsletter. I usually just tuck these recipes away in my "Recipes" e-mail folder, but the recipes from these past two months' e-mails demanded to be made immediately. The chilly weather recently heralded the beginning of pumpkin massacre by baking throughout kitchens all over the US. This recipe gave me a great opportunity to participate in the bloodshed an...

In yet another example of food blogger fads, which I am uncharacteristically very happy to follow, here is a recipe from the much-anticipated cookbook by the Fat Witch Bakery that just hit the shelves less than a month ago. They specialize in brownies of all sorts and flavors. Another bakery to put on the list for our future potential revisits to NYC! These brownies had the thickest crackly-shiny top that I've ever made in homemade brownies! They had a nice mild chocolate flavor and more of a moist cakey texture than probably the original fudgy brownies were (many reviewers of the book on Amazon actually complained about the cakey texture). I think this texture is due to the lower-than-normal chocolate content and a good number of eggs (four). I think next time I will retry these brownies with one less egg, as one of my brownie-connoisseur taste-testers suggested, and this may do the trick for getting slightly chewier/fudgier brownies. Although these were tasty just the way th...

I have no pretenses--this is a very ugly pie. I had a lot of difficulty rolling out the dough, which wouldn't stay together in one piece enough for me to do any sort of crimping. And there's the issue of the top crust collapsing a bit in the middle. But the marriage of a crazy amount of bourbon (1 cup!) and apples was downright amazing. The alcohol from the bourbon had cooked out, but the full-bodied flavor remained and gave the pie a whole extra dimension. I'd used a combination of Golden Delicious and Fuji apples, and they still maintained some structural integrity despite some cooking and an hour in the oven--excellent news for me, since I am not a fan of mushy apples in pie. It was easily the hit of the evening, especially with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I still have a whole lot of bourbon left over from the bottle a friend left over at my house, and apple season's only just beginning...I'm thinking this pie will show up a few more times this Fall. Bourbon A...

So I have this open bottle of limoncello that's been sitting in my fridge for awhile. It's too strong to drink straight, so of course the only other way to use it up is to bake with it. Of course. I went around looking on the Internet for recipes that used the most amount of limoncello at one time, and this recipe stood out among the rest. The creator of this lovely cheesecake is a guy named Dr. Robert Jantzen (or "Dr. Bob"), a math whiz whose side passion is cooking and creating recipes that he has very comprehensively posted on an online cookbook of sorts. The cheesecake itself was creamy and smooth and tasted distinctly of lemon. I added lemon curd on top rather than the sour cream topping originally in the recipe, but that was mostly because I didn't have sour cream. The hazelnuts in the crust added toasty crunchiness that stood out and complemented the lemon flavor very well. All in all, we really enjoyed the cheesecake, especially with a little fruit s...

A week or two before Rosh Hashanah, I received my Recipe-of-the-month from Kathleen King, the owner of Tate's Bake Shop in Southampton, Long Island. In this edition, she presented her version of Honey Cake, a traditional sweet eaten for the High Holidays. I'd never heard of Jewish honey cake, but in looking over the recipe, it seemed like an interesting combination of flavors. There's a full cup of coffee, some orange juice, and ground almonds in addition to the obligatory honey (a full cup of it!). I decided to make some for my advisor, and her being sensitive to extra sugar, I kept the honey but substituted all the rest of the sugar with Splenda, and I tried to decrease the glycemic index even more by using mostly whole wheat pastry flour. The cake was wonderfully moist and deep in flavor. I accidentally over-baked the little loaves I made by 5 minutes and you could not tell at all. Sweeten up your year with this tasty cake. Mazel tov! Honey Cake (adapted from Kathleen...