De Baking Psychopath

The big birthday bash has come and gone. It was a very busy weekend: shopping on Friday, baking all day Saturday, and then the festivities on Saturday evening. Here was our menu, with links to recipes used, if available: Savory An assortment of crackers, baked flour tortilla chips, and toasted baguette slices Crudite and Hummus (store-bought) Smoked Salmon Dip Warm Spinach and Artichoke Dip Pasta Salad (brought by friend) Homemade Roasted Sweet Potato Fries Assorted Puff Pastry Hor's Doeuvres (bought; Costco) Sweet Kid's Thumbprints with Orange Marmalade or Blackberry Jam ( Baking: From My home to yours, pg. 163) Chocolate Toffee Cookies Tate's Bake Shop Thin and Crispy Cookies Tiramisu (made by friend) Black and White Chocolate Cake ( Baking: From My home to yours, pgs. 258-260) Party Favors One big fat chocolate chip cookie ( the famed NYTimes recipe ) So I actually have a pitiful number of pictures of the party, and even more pitiful is that I forgot to take my usu...

Tuesday was our last class of the 4-week Ethics course I was taking, which turned out better than I thought it would be. I baked for the once-weekly class, at first because we didn't get dinner (budget downsizing), but later we got some pizza, so it was just for fun after that... The first week, I went back to my beloved Cooks Illustrated choco chip cookies, and I also threw in some Mayan Chocolate Cookies from Robin Hood (a flour company) that I had frozen dough from awhile ago. The second week, I made the Samoa copycat cookies from Oatmeal Cookie Guy, which got rave reviews from my classmates and some requested it again for the next week, so I obliged. And for the last week, I decided to try some new things from those famous bakeries I blathered on about in my last entry (have you watched that SNL rap about macking on Magnolia cupcakes yet? if not, you really should...). The first item was brownies from scratch! Despite years of making cookies and cakes now, this was the first t...