De Baking Psychopath

Our Costco has stocked these lovely tea cookies in three-sleeve packs for a long time now. After years of glancing wistfully at them, I finally lacked enough self-restraint one day last year to buy a box and try them. Bad idea. Imagine crisp mild-flavored gingersnaps with a lemony icing filling. Yeah, the perfect thing to go with a cup of tea. Then, as always happens with me when I discover a new food love, our local Costco stopped stocking this cookie. (enter sad violin music) It was probably good for my waistline/hips, but alas I mourned the loss and have only purchased it at much greater cost for single-sleeve packs at fine imported foods stores. Until yesterday! It has come back to our local Costco. If you are so fortunate to find this cookie on your food store's shelves, don't waste time! Life is short! and will be made better by eating these cookies with your tea! If you can't find it in person, they sell it on Amazon, in all di...

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 ...

I love ricotta! Ricotta pancakes have been all the rage on the Interwebs lately, so I decided to give them a shot one recent weekend. These lemon ricotta pancakes were moist, fluffy, springy, and fragrant. I used the recipe found on this fellow blogger's site verbatim. The cake flour in the recipe gives the pancake a fine, tender crumb, and the ricotta keeps it very moist. Instead of a blueberry sauce, though, we made a quick Nutella ganache by combining hot cream and Nutella in a roughly 2:1 ratio and whisking until smooth. An easy way to elevate your routine weekend brunch to new elegant heights. Yum!

I made this simple but fresh-tasting lemon yogurt cake for a dinner party with friends. It was dense and sturdy, but moist and excellent with some vanilla ice cream! I would definitely make this again if I was looking for a citrusy, not-too-sweet dessert. I got to use my beloved Greek yogurt again for this recipe, although I will say that despite fat-free yogurt working fine for me, probably a low-fat or full-fat yogurt would have tasted a bit moister/richer. For the lemons, I used the juice and zest from some Meyer lemons I had picked up at Costco (and thus I reduced the sugar a teeny bit from the recipe since Meyer lemons are not quite as sour as regular). Lemon Yogurt Cake (adapted from Barefoot Contessa at Home ) Ingredients : 1 & 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt 1 cup plain whole-milk yogurt (I used skim Greek-style yogurt) 1 cup sugar 3 large eggs 2 teaspoons grated lemon zest (approx. 2 lemons worth) 1/2 teaspoon vanilla ext...

This is the queen of boozy cakes. Three-fourths of a cup of limoncello baked into the cake, then another 1/2 cup in a soaking syrup AFTER baking...eyebrows will raise at the rapidity of limoncello consumption in your household. I am a big fan of alcohol-spiked box mix concoctions. The alcohol masks/ameliorates the box cake mix aftertaste and the texture of the box mix is just so plush and moist that it's just useless to deny that such a texture is hard to replicate with from-scratch recipes. And with the myriad of liqueurs at one's disposal, the combinations are endless. Limoncello Cake (adapted from Blog Well Done and about.com ) Ingredients : 1 box yellow cake mix (probably white or lemon cake mix will work fine too) 1 small box instant vanilla pudding mix (the four-serving size, could also use lemon flavored) 1/2 cup vegetable oil 1/4 cup water 3/4 cup limoncello 4 eggs 3/4 cup brown sugar 3/4 cup butter 1/2 cup limoncello 3 tbsp lemon juice 3 tbsp lemon zes...

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...

I lied: I have more recipes to post. But I will try to space them out over the next several weeks so that the blog doesn't come to a complete standstill in the meantime. I had a bunch of sour cream in the fridge to use up before I go, bought for now-unknown reasons. Probably coffee cake that never got made. But I decided to try out these intriguing sour cream muffin recipes, and boy, am I glad I did! If you have a leftover cup of sour cream you don't know what to do with, consider one of these yummy muffins! First up: Sour Cream Bran Muffins , seen on Joy the Baker, recipe originally from The Gourmet Cookbook . The biggest change I made was to use honey instead of molasses, as I like the cleaner taste of honey. I used dried cherries and dried blueberries in these guys. They are super moist and soft and a touch buttery, yet wheaty and hearty enough to convince you that you're eating something healthy! Did you notice the pretty muffin cups? These are the ones I bought...

Spring is upon us, although it is still taking a bit of imagination to believe that it really is Spring because of the erratic weather. I think tomorrow we have a forecast of possible snow showers?! It seems like we're running through all four seasons sometimes, since we've had a couple of 80 degree days already, interspersed with downright chilly days. At a recent department potluck, I decided to find a treat that emanated Spring, and to me one of the fruits that reminds one of the Spring/Summer interface is blueberries. Mmm, I love blueberries, especially in quickbreads and cakes. (You may remember other posts I've had about blueberries: blueberry muffins and blueberry mochi cake , and of course the recent blueberry coffeecake . I have yet to make and post about my favorite blueberry muffin recipe, the one I've been making since early college. That'll have to wait until another time.) And of course one of the classic pairings with blueberry is lemon. These...