De Baking Psychopath

When we weren't playing with Cordie, we went out to explore the City of Brotherly Love. It was a crisp, gorgeous Fall weekend. Perfect for a walk-tour of the city. My friend has the awesome fortune to live and work in Center City, and we hung around Rittenhouse Square quite a bit. On Saturdays, a small but bountiful farmer's market appears along one side of the little park/gardens of Rittenhouse Square. The bakery stand looked especially yummy. We walked north and said hi to William Penn, perched on top of City Hall. We also did the touristy thing and made a trip out to the Philadelphia Museum of Art--not for the art, but for Rocky! My beloved has the same size feet as the fictional prizefighter...fortunately he is not going to subject himself to years of traumatic brain injury and get Parkinson's. (Actually, that would be an interesting final sequel to Rocky...Rocky: PD) From the Museum, you can get a really nice view of the skyline and city hall. And George Washington...

We spent last weekend with this pretty one. Her name is Cordie, short for Cordelia. Her human is one of my best friends and 3-year college roomie, who rescued her from a massive adoption drive near her home this past Fourth of July. She spends most of her time sitting on or sprawled over this little area rug. It's her safe zone and/or throne. It is pretty much the focal point of the living room. She's still pretty young and has quite a lot of energy to chase after her toys...particularly if the toy has treats hidden in them, like the hollow egg she is chasing above. She is a little bit unsure of newcomers. It took her a little bit of time to warm up to us, probably because I half-chased her around the whole weekend, trying to pick her up and flip her into a position she couldn't roll out of. It works with my Kimchi, who is equally against being picked up. But she quickly let us stroke her and brush her. By the end of the weekend I think she was quite used to the triple...

I have discovered bread pudding! For whatever reason, I always thought it would be heavy and dense and like a rock in your stomach. Then I thought about it. It's basically bread soaked in custard and baked. Sounds like baked French toast. How bad could that be? I asked an American co-worker, has he ever eaten bread pudding? What is it like? His answer ("It's moist and custardy, like French toast!") gave me the encouragement I needed to try this recipe. The source of this recipe is the same as the Jewish Honey Cake featured a few posts ago: Kathleen King (of Tate's Bake Shop) via her monthly recipe newsletter. I usually just tuck these recipes away in my "Recipes" e-mail folder, but the recipes from these past two months' e-mails demanded to be made immediately. The chilly weather recently heralded the beginning of pumpkin massacre by baking throughout kitchens all over the US. This recipe gave me a great opportunity to participate in the bloodshed an...

In yet another example of food blogger fads, which I am uncharacteristically very happy to follow, here is a recipe from the much-anticipated cookbook by the Fat Witch Bakery that just hit the shelves less than a month ago. They specialize in brownies of all sorts and flavors. Another bakery to put on the list for our future potential revisits to NYC! These brownies had the thickest crackly-shiny top that I've ever made in homemade brownies! They had a nice mild chocolate flavor and more of a moist cakey texture than probably the original fudgy brownies were (many reviewers of the book on Amazon actually complained about the cakey texture). I think this texture is due to the lower-than-normal chocolate content and a good number of eggs (four). I think next time I will retry these brownies with one less egg, as one of my brownie-connoisseur taste-testers suggested, and this may do the trick for getting slightly chewier/fudgier brownies. Although these were tasty just the way th...

I have no pretenses--this is a very ugly pie. I had a lot of difficulty rolling out the dough, which wouldn't stay together in one piece enough for me to do any sort of crimping. And there's the issue of the top crust collapsing a bit in the middle. But the marriage of a crazy amount of bourbon (1 cup!) and apples was downright amazing. The alcohol from the bourbon had cooked out, but the full-bodied flavor remained and gave the pie a whole extra dimension. I'd used a combination of Golden Delicious and Fuji apples, and they still maintained some structural integrity despite some cooking and an hour in the oven--excellent news for me, since I am not a fan of mushy apples in pie. It was easily the hit of the evening, especially with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I still have a whole lot of bourbon left over from the bottle a friend left over at my house, and apple season's only just beginning...I'm thinking this pie will show up a few more times this Fall. Bourbon A...