De Baking Psychopath

Michael's birthday request: British Meat Pie . I used bacon fat for the crust. Best. Crust. Ever. Bake or Break always has the best recipes. This cream cheese and blueberry coffee cake was no exception. Another Bake or Break recipe: Pecan Cake . Fabulous. I used Greek yogurt instead of buttermilk and the cake turned out delightfully springy in addition to moist and nutty. Chocolate frosting was optional but delicious. I picked up some fresh figs from Trader Joe's and tried this fig and olive oil loaf cake from Tracy Shutterbean . It was dense, nutty, and delicious!

Alright, a break from yeast! First I wanted to highlight a new function on my blog, the Printer-Friendly button down at the bottom of each post. Thanks to the folks at printfriendly.com , you can pick and choose what to print from any website or blog, change the font size, and even save as a pdf. I hope this makes my blog even more user-friendly for my dear readers! Awhile back I made a couple different gluten-free chocolate chip cookies that were both pretty tasty. I got these recipes from some blog browsing a long time ago, but never got around to trying them until recently. So if you have a gluten-sensitive friend or just want to cut a bit of carbs out of your diet, here are a couple of recipes for consideration. Nutty Oatmeal Cookies (Adapted from Cookies for Breakfast by Michael H. Perlman ) Ingredients :  8 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature 1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar 3/4 cup sugar 1 large egg 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanil...

This was a dessert created out of necessity but turned out quite delicious in its own right. The task was to come up with something that was dairy free and gluten free. A flash of memory reminded me of the faux cheesecake a high school teacher of mine came up with when she had just moved to Taiwan many years ago and could not get any American cream cheese. So instead, she used fresh tofu. It ended up being a lighter and healthier version of the classic dessert that was so enjoyed by her family and guests, that even after she gained access to cream cheese again, she would substitute half the cream cheese with tofu. So to achieve my goal, I paired an all-tofu version of the recipe with a nut crust and homemade blueberry jam for a very respectable fancy dessert! For even less calories, you can substitute the sugar with Splenda. The softer and silkier your tofu, the less prominent the taste of the tofu will be; I used firm tofu one of the two times and it ended up much firmer and ...

I forgot what I bought the bag of almond flour from Trader Joe's for, but nut products shouldn't sit too long so I decided to find recipes to use it up quickly. As I haven't done enough field testing of macarons to really have the motivation to make those, I decided instead to make some gluten-free type of chocolate chip cookie recipes that feature nut and oat flours. This is the first of a couple I am planning to try. This one has the additional benefit of being egg-free, for those of you who need to worry about multiple allergies in a crowd of youngsters. I ended up having to throw in a few handfuls of all-purpose flour to tighten up the dough (it was too wet at first), but one could just as easily throw in more almond flour, or oat flour, or even rice flour if the same problem is encountered. This may have been due to the fact I used the coarser almond meal rather than the blanched almond flour the recipe directs. These were really well received! The texture...