De Baking Psychopath

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!

A few weeks ago, I officially entered the realm of "late twenties" and promptly heard my biological clock ticking like a time bomb. To herald the next decade of worrying about when to have kids before my risk of having mutant babies becomes too significant for safety, I decided to throw a scrumptious brunch and declare, "To heck with my slowing metabolism and biological clock! I am going to STUFF MY FACE." And I invited my friends to join me. I've been trying very hard to keep the sweet stuff to a healthy minimum. So here are these gorgeous roasted Hasselback potatoes stuffed with lovely slivers of garlic. And this yummy onion, mushroom and cheese frittata that I threw together on a whim and prayed would turn out okay! (It did!) And a loaf of sundried tomato and Parmesan cheese bread, made with the no-knead dough of the week! Soooo good. Moist, flavorful, savory! But of course it wouldn't be a PARTY unless there were some sweets! Front and center ...

We tend to put more emphasis on our dating anniversary. To me, it's a better landmark of when our lives and destinies became bound together and seems somewhat more significant than the day we signed a piece of paper to make legal what was by then already a reality. Of course it's also that we've grown accustomed to celebrating this day, and to not do so would seem almost a denial of how significant this day is in our relationship. We're almost to double digits here (next year will be the big 10), and we went all out at home with the food to celebrate. Two gigantic ribeye steaks, a healthy portion of buttery boiled potatoes, and our favorite salad (inspired by one of our favorite local restaurants, Girasole ). The cooking can largely be attributed to Michael. The steaks were a beautiful medium-rare to medium, tender, juicy, and well-seasoned. The salad is composed of baby greens, chickpeas (canned), cherry tomatoes, sunflower seeds, Gorgonzola crumbles (not enough t...

Nutella. Nutty, chocolatey, gooey, thick...great on toast, on Triscuits, with jam, on ice cream, straight out of a jar. The lovely ladies at www.nutelladay.com started this world holiday in 2007, and it's kept on growing since. I decided to make my own Nutella in honor of the holiday, and I tried the following two different recipes. The first recipe for Chocolate Hazelnut Spread is from Gale Gand, found via Phe/Mom/enon. The recipe can be found here . In your food processor, puree the 1 cup toasted, peeled hazelnuts until smooth (you probably will need to add the 2 tablespoons of oil to get it to smooth out). Add the 1/2 tsp vanilla extract and continue processing. To the puree, add the 2 tablespoons of powdered sugar, 1 tablespoon cocoa powder and blend until smooth. Then add 12 ounces of GOOD QUALITY milk chocolate, melted in a double boiler or in the microwave and cooled briefly. Blend until smooth. Transfer to heatproof jars/containers and let cool. It will set up and bec...

Moist yellow cake with a Nutella swirl. Frangelico (hazelnut-flavored liqueur) soaking syrup. Chocolate-Nutella ganache. To top things off, a sprinkle of chopped toasted hazelnuts. Drooling yet? I am. Remember that exam that I recently survived? Somewhere in the middle of it all, I promised myself that once it was all over, I would bake myself a big freaking cake to celebrate. And this week, that time had come. It had to be a Bundt cake, in honor of the upcoming National Bundt Day on November 15 and fellow baking blogger Mary the Librarian's quest to spread Bundt love to the world. She made a Nutella Bundt cake that looked absolutely awesome. She'd used a yellow cake recipe and swirled some Nutella-flavored batter in for striking visual appeal. Meanwhile, I've had my eye on Smitten Kitchen's Best Birthday Cake , so I figured that this would be the perfect time to test-run this yellow cake recipe. I followed the recipe verbatim for the yellow cake, which is enou...