De Baking Psychopath

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...

One of my classmates brought a PB&J sandwich for breakfast every single freakin' day in our first year of medical school. For his birthday that year, I decided to make a PB&J cake in his honor. It was a chocolate cake, with a strawberry jam layer in the middle and peanut butter frosting on top. Unexpectedly, it was another one of my other classmates, Mark, that took a fancy to this flavor combination in cakes, and he's requested it for his own birthday ever since. So when he decided to throw a get together for his birthday yesterday, I decided to re-invent the PB&J cake for this year's offering. After some Internet searching, I found myself linked back to one of my favorite baking blogs, Bake or Break , for a peanut butter pound cake with milk chocolate chunks strewn throughout. Perfect. I decided to throw some strawberry jam into the cake for good measure, and to top things off, I made a strawberry sauce to bring out the strawberry-peanut butter combo. Mar...

Tuesday was our last class of the 4-week Ethics course I was taking, which turned out better than I thought it would be. I baked for the once-weekly class, at first because we didn't get dinner (budget downsizing), but later we got some pizza, so it was just for fun after that... The first week, I went back to my beloved Cooks Illustrated choco chip cookies, and I also threw in some Mayan Chocolate Cookies from Robin Hood (a flour company) that I had frozen dough from awhile ago. The second week, I made the Samoa copycat cookies from Oatmeal Cookie Guy, which got rave reviews from my classmates and some requested it again for the next week, so I obliged. And for the last week, I decided to try some new things from those famous bakeries I blathered on about in my last entry (have you watched that SNL rap about macking on Magnolia cupcakes yet? if not, you really should...). The first item was brownies from scratch! Despite years of making cookies and cakes now, this was the first t...

This is another Bake or Break inspired recipe. We stopped by the grocery store yesterday, and the sight of pears reminded me that this recipe was burning a hole on my to-do list. So, three little pears came home with me. I have undying love for cinnamon. Nine times out of ten, I will add more than what the recipe calls for to amplify the cinnamon profile in the end product. This recipe has a full tablespoon , plenty to suppress my cinnamon-supplementing tendencies. The recipe itself is quite simple...too simple to be a safe recipe to have on hand. You start by mixing together all the wet ingredients: 3/4 cup butter or oil (I used Smart Balance, which is non-trans fat), 3 eggs, 2 cups of sugar (I reduced this down to about 1 2/3 cup, eyeballing it), 2 cups of grated pears, and 2 teaspoons of vanilla. Then you just mix in the pre-combined dry ingredients: 3 cups flour, 1 tsp baking soda, 1/4 tsp baking powder, 1 tsp salt (I reduced this to 1/4 tsp since I used salted margarine), 1...

If I lost all my recipe books in a natural disaster, as long as I could access the Internet, I could probably find all my staple baking recipes. And part of the reason is that I get most of my "to try" recipe material from following my favorite baking blogs, such as Bake or Break (see "My favorite blogs" for the link), the inspiration to today's recipe. Jennifer (author of Bake or Break) says of this recipe from Buttercup Bake Shop in NYC, "If you never believe another one of my recipe endorsements, believe this one. These little treats are so, so good." It's hard to resist such a statement, especially when it's accompanied by mouth-watering, gastric juice inducing photographs of aforementioned treats... So this recipe made the shortlist. This week was positively awful in the amount of non-research related work I had to take care of. Part of it was all those student committee things I do for my program, added to homework made for a hectic we...