De Baking Psychopath

This past weekend, I joined a friend of mine in traveling back to her hometown for a grand endeavor: to make delicious jam!  She decided to make blueberry jam from frozen blueberries, which means we can recreate her masterpiece any time of the year. I had my heart set on marmalade, but since citrus is out of season and not found frozen in large chunks, I decided to make them a supporting role and to instead find a seasonal fruit to be the star so we can remember the summer as it begins to slip away. I settled on Peach-Orange Marmalade. We went to a local orchard to pick up 5 pounds of peaches from the end of the season bounty. Before leaving Pittsburgh, I picked up a few organic citrus from Whole Foods for the recipe. Armed with fresh produce, we embarked on a marathon jam-making session on Saturday. To say the results of both jams were delicious would be a gross understatement.  Her blueberry jam was "the best berry jam" we've ever had. It is ...

Last weekend, a friend and I went frolicking at a local orchard and country market for the bounty of the local harvest. Early apples, late white peaches, fresh pie! She also scored a bushel of tomatoes for $26....that was a freaking large amount of tomatoes. She thereafter stewed them down and canned them for her and her husband's use through the next several months. But before that, she and I tried our hands at making berry jam! We got the recipe from The Berry Bible . So we forgot to do the cold-spoon-gel-test before canning and our jam didn't actually gel into nice firm jam (we probably needed more pectin)...oops! But we got some really yummy fruit sauce out of it! It's been great on plain yogurt and ice cream!

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...