De Baking Psychopath

It's been difficult to make any significant headway into the plethora of baked goods in my freezer during the shelter-at-home.  We're not natural bread-eaters; although we love it in all its forms, we just don't have that bread-eating habit that Americans of European descent have of eating sandwiches oftentimes as much as once or twice a day, or eating bread as a side dish to dinner, and therefore making short work of plowing through loaves of bread and other baked goods.   At some point, though, it became difficult to repress my usual stress-/procrasti-baking tendencies, and also baking projects provide fun activities to keep the kiddo occupied for a little while.  Furthermore, with all the sourdough love on the Internet these days, I felt like I need to keep Gus in peak condition to flex some sourdough muscles and show everyone he's still got his skillz.  (Spoiler: Yes, he still does!)  A nd so despite good intentions to preserve my flour reserves fo...

Close, but no cigar. This past visit to Philly was a fruitful one, as we went to the Metropolitan Bakery to do another taste test of the now-legendary raspberry bars. I decided to be bold and ask the staff whether they knew whether the crust of the raspberry bars was of the same recipe as the lemon bars, or very different. They didn't rightly know, but before we left, the helpful staff member had dug out the ingredient list for all the bakery items and found the raspberry bars. We discovered that in contrast to the simple shortbread crust of the lemon bars, ground and chopped almonds were important components of the raspberry bar crust, and thus I had my next scavenger hunt clue to continue the chase. This recipe, which DOES include almonds in the crust, comes from the cookbook of another famous bakery, Tate's Bake Shop.  The crust is a bit crunchier than the last one I tried, but I think I will need to swap out some of the flour for almond flour to see if I can improve ...

Here is installment 2 of the Pandora box of granola recipes that I have unleashed upon myself!  I don't remember what I was searching for, but I found online that the Metropolitan Bakery granola won a blind taste test at Epicurious.com . Looking at their ingredient list online, I discovered that the famed granola bore a strong resemblance to the contents "Almond Oat Cereal" recipe that is in their cookbook, so I decided to see what the fuss was all about. This granola, after eating the Bedford Springs Granola for a few weeks, felt sort of pedestrian due to the lack of fragrant coconut, but as I ate more of it, I grew to enjoy and appreciate the pure oat and nut flavor. The milk powder also lent a nice sweetness to the clusters. Also, the wheat germ was deeply nutty and fragrant. One thing that was not in the original recipe that I ended up adding was salt. Just a pinch of salt made a huge difference in the flavor and tastiness of the granola, so definitely don...

Every time we go to Philly to visit Jess, I come back with items from the Metropolitan Bakery that 1) are absolutely delicious, and 2) I want to recreate. You'd think it'd be easy to find the recipes to recreate these items since they have a cookbook published, but alas the bar cookie we were swept away by this time is not in the book. Jess and I went foraging in the day-old bin, and the two of us were like giddy little children in a candy store as we rifled through the unusually large selection of discounted items that early Saturday morning. Croissants! Frosted carrot cake! Muffins of all sorts! Loaves of bread! And fatefully, raspberry crumb bars. We didn't get a chance to eat the raspberry crumb bar whilst in Philly, but upon returning home and finding it packed into our food bag by a sneaky Jess, Michael and I shared the bar and liked it more and more with each passing bite. The shortbread crust was sturdy and crunchy on the base, the jam deep-flavo...

One lonely package of cream cheese in the fridge. We all know what that means: breakfast buns from the Buttercup Bake Shop Cookbook! Why, of course. These were previously featured on this blog , and also the blog of a dear friend . The recipe can be found here . Today's flavors are nutella and black raspberry preserves. Six of each. Last time I spooned the batter into 18 normal muffin cups, but this time I squished everything into 12. Also I layered the preserves/Nutella in the center of the batter and swirled with a wooden skewer. Twenty minutes at 350 degrees later, here are the results: beautiful, tall crowns, and importantly, no jammy overflow! Café DeBakingPsycho is open for business!

I have put off trying Jim Lahey's no-knead bread for a long time, even though Mark Bittman's feature of his recipe that was published in the NYT back in 2006 can be rightfully credited for starting the food-blogger no-knead revolution these past few years. And even though I received Jim Lahey's baking cookbook, My Bread, as a birthday gift! Two main reasons for this delay: 1) I loved the flexibility of the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day refrigeration method so I tried recipes from that book first, and 2) I pored over the introduction and recipes in Jim Lahey's book when I first received it...and to be honest, his writing voice rubbed me the wrong way. The tone of writing came across as arrogant and full of himself.  Something about his writing style, the way he presented his philosophy and life story--I can't identify the exact things that made me feel this way, but it made me procrastinate in trying the recipe out. Several weekends ago on...

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...

This is where part of the other half of the can of pumpkin I used for the pies went. This is muffin number three from the weekend of muffin baking awhile back. For most of my life, I've eaten and baked my mother's version of pumpkin bread, which has been much modified to suit our family's tastes--less sugar, pine nuts instead of walnuts, no raisins, etc. It's a delicious recipe that reminds me of my childhood, but I haven't tried any other pumpkin bread/muffin recipe in recent memory so I lack a frame of reference to compare it to other recipes. So when I decided I needed to make pumpkin muffins as part of the evacuation plan for the leftover pumpkin puree, I looked around for a new recipe and found this promising recipe in Baking: From my home to yours , which is full of tasty-looking muffin recipes. This recipe tries to recreate the pumpkin muffins sold by Sarabeth's Kitchen, a famed specialty bakery and restaurant chain in NYC. While I've never had...

I'm starting to run again. I decided to set myself some running goals, such as a certain number of miles to be run/week, irregardless of how much I run in any one given session. The treadmill is my preferred mode of running. Maybe it's the control freak in me, but I like knowing exactly how fast I'm running, and I like to be pushed to maintain the pace I set by the belt moving continuously. No stoplights, crazy drivers, slow-walking pedestrians, random 15% gradient hills (!!), or my own inertia to distract and slow me down. My Achilles heel many a day has been going running right after work (basically, dinnertime) but not eating a snack or something to tide me over and give me some energy to run. Which sometimes then results in me cutting my workout short because I fall victim to mild acute hypoglycemia and become lightheaded and nauseated. So my purpose in making these energy bars is two-fold: 1) in preparation for my increasingly-frequent running workouts as I work up...

This cookie is an Ultimate cookie: loads of chocolate, ground oats, toasted nuts, even toffee bits. The result is a chocolate chip cookie that is heartier, nuttier, and more complex in flavor than your average chocolate chip cookie. When just a tad underbaked and still warm from the oven, it has that dark, chewy, ooey-gooey texture that would pair wonderfully with some ice cream or a glass of milk They are supposed to be a copycat of cookies made by The Christie Cookie Company , the sole supplier of the Doubletree hotel cookies (although apparently the Doubletree CCC and the signature Christie CCC are not one and the same). I have never stayed at a Doubletree nor tried a Christie's cookie, but that doesn't stop me from trying or enjoying their copycat recipes! This recipe has earned the unique distinction of being the first CCC recipe I made solely to freeze the dough for easy access later. I found these satisfying enough after the first try to make the full recipe (which ...

A good friend of mine gifted me with an awesome set of safari animal cookie cutters for my recent birthday , and as soon as I saw them, I knew I had to put them (as well as the animal cookie cutters I already owned) to good use. My first thought: animal crackers!! Although I do have a more traditional recipe for little cookie/crackers that remind you of the store-bought little treats, I instead decided to go with a heartier sweet biscuit for my first animal cookie foray. Can you find the following animals below: cat, bat, elephant, mouse, zebra, frog, lion, giraffe, bear? Hint--you may have to tilt your head up to 180 degrees upside-down for the correct perspective for some of the shapes. These cookies were designed to be gnawed upon by teething babies, but they've got enough flavor to satisfy the discerning adult palate as well. They are lightly sweet, hearty from the wheat germ, faintly citrusy and cinnamony, and a suitable complement to a cup of coffee or tea...or a sippy ...

You know, one of those days. Where even though you have "more important" things to do (i.e. an application for research funding due by midnight the next day), baking seems infinitely more urgent, and important to your mental health. And you realize you have some pantry cleaning to do. On Sunday, I really wanted a chocolate chip cookie. And while flipping through a few cookie books and finding more chocolate chip cookie variations of interest, I was reminded that 1) I haven't in recent memory given either AB's CCC or the NYTimes CCC a try, and 2) I have some bread flour I really need to start getting rid of. Alton Brown's The Chewy: up close and personal The premise of Alton Brown's The Chewy cookie (and the NYTimes-featured cookie, although I didn't make that recipe this time) is that since bread flour has a higher percentage of protein (gluten) in the flour, the moisture you give it (in the form of water from melted butter) and the time you let it rest t...

Sorry for the absence of posts lately. I have lately gone through the rigors of what is called the "Comprehensive Examination," which to those of you who may not be familiar with it, suffice it to say that it is the mid-way point of Hell for a graduate student. There are many variations upon Hell that can be inflicted upon the unsuspecting graduate student, but mine came in the form of independently (no help from my advisor) writing a proposal on a project and then defending that project in front of a committee of SIX professors over the course of 2 hours. One of the ways I attempted to ease the pain of the gauntlet run I was about to embark upon was to prepare token offerings in the form of muffins and the Green Tea Mochi Cake for my judges. I made Raisin Bran Muffins and Blueberry Pecan Muffins, both from the book Once Upon a Tart... , brought fresh brewed coffee from my special stash of Casi Cielo (it's a seasonal special roast from Starbucks, a Guatemala Antigua be...

Today was a pre-birthday celebration for one of my friends, and he loves orange and green, and so when I mentioned to him I'd like to make a cake with orange and green frosting in his honor, he exclaimed, "Ooh, can ya make a Ninja Turtle? Michelangelo's my favorite!" Dubiously, I looked into it. I figured if I could find a stencil (the kind you find to carve on pumpkins), then I could probably do a simplistic version of it. I'm not the best artist in the world, let me tell you. This was the simplest I could find: Most pictures were from the live-action movie, or from little action figures, or from some bad-ass version of the cartoons, so they look really buff and angry but also drawn with too much detail for me. So I printed out the picture above, cut out the head, and blew it up a bit on my photocopier to make it roughly the right size to trim from two 9-inch diameter cakes. And here, I'm proud to present, is my Ninja Turtle cake: I am sooooooo happy with h...