Author: Nicole

If you like chili peppers, The Ultimate Insanely Super Hot Chili Pepper Cookbook is the book for you – as if you couldn’t tell from the name alone. The book is absolutely dedicated to chili peppers of all kinds, and it serves as a great introduction to cooking with chili peppers if you haven’t used whole peppers much before in your own kitchen. The book starts off with an introduction to working with peppers and descriptions of about 30 chili peppers from around the world, from the mild pasilla chili to the super-hot (hottest chili in the world, actually) bhut jolokia, or ghost chili. Once you have a feel for what you’ll be dealing with, you can head into the recipes.

The book is divided into seven chapters: appetizers and soups; salsas, marinades and pastes; fish and seafood; meat and poultry; vegetables; pasta and rice; drinks and sweets. There really is something for everyone in this very diverse group of recipes – especially considering that the dessert recipes in the last chapter also include chili peppers! The recipes are straighforward and easy to follow along with, and every one includes a beautiful photo of how the finished dish should turn out. For those who like chilis but are a bit sensitive to heat, it is also worth noting that every recipe has a note indicating how mild or spicy the finished product will be.

This is a really fun book to have in the kitchen because all the dishes are made from scratch and you can really get some experience trying new techniques that you might not get in other cookbooks. This is because many books not only rely on the same types of chilis in their recipes (most are common in this book, but a few might require careful shopping to find), but also rely on powdered or dried chilis instead of fresh. Working with fresh chilis gives you a whole new dimension of flavor and kicks things up in the kitchen just enough – especially when you go for the spicier recipes!

Some people like to wake up to the smell of freshly brewed coffee, or a plate of hot bacon. You could count me in for both of those things, but freshly baked cookies would make the list, too. That said, I would be very suspicious if I woke up in the middle of the night and suspected – by smell or by the sounds of pots and pans moving around – that someone unknown was in my house baking them for me. This is exactly what happened to a man in Michigan this week. He heard some suspicious noises coming from his kitchen and called the police to report an intruder. The police arrived and found a woman in the kitchen baking cookies. It turns out that the man’s wife had stuffed some clothing under the covers in bed so it looked like she was there, then went down to the kitchen to bake a surprise batch of cookies!

Who knew that a simple batch of cookies could turn into such a big deal? I hope that there were enough to share with the police who responded to the call as well as with her husband.

I was recently watching a documentary on the history of the Coca-Cola company and it got me thinking about whether I could use Coke in baking. I’ve used sodas, like root beer, before in barbecue sauces, but would the flavor of the soda come through in a cake or other baked good? I didn’t have to wonder for long because it turns out that there are lots of recipes that use Coca-Cola right on the company’s website, including a recipe for a Cola Cake (pdf).

The cake uses Coke in both the cake and the glaze that covers it, and it was almost exactly what I had in mind for a recipe that used coke, since it used quite a bit of soda. It’s a chocolate sheet cake topped with a Coke-infused glaze and lots of crunchy pecans. Now, I said “almost exactly” because I made some changes to this recipe right off the bat. I reduced the amount of butter called for slightly, used less cocoa powder to make sure the Coke flavor came out and added a bit of salt to contrast the sugars in the cake. The result was really delicious, so I am confident in saying that Coke works out well as an addition to some baked goods!

I like that this cake is baked and served in the same dish because it’s easy and unfussy to do so. This is especially true because the glaze is poured on while the cake is hot, so you don’t need any frosting for it. The cake is very, very moist and very soft. It has a nice chocolate flavor to it and you can just get a hint of the spicy flavor of the Coke through it. This is helped along by a butter and Coca-Cola glaze that is poured over the cake just as it comes out of the oven. Pecans are used in the topping to add crunch to the cake, and they’re slightly candied by the butter-Coke mixture before they make it on to the cake. One great finishing touch is to make sure to use toasted, salted pecans for the topping. That extra salt really makes for the perfect contrast and just might make this cake as popular as the soda featured in it!

(more…)

The sweetest gift you can give your loved one is the pleasure of your company, perhaps over a big carafe of coffee, a glass of fresh orange juice and a big breakfast that you enjoy together while reading the paper on a quiet morning. Or a plate of homemade baked goods, since the time that you’ll put into them makes them worth a lot more than a box of even the most expensive chocolates. And, naturally, what could go better with some homemade baked goods than a copy of The Baking Bites Cookbook? It makes a great Valentine’s Day gift for the baker in your life – and I’m not going to tell if you crack open the cookbook yourself to make a batch of Jelly Donut Muffins to go with that Valentine’s Day Coffee. If you have kids, get them to help out with the gift preparation (i.e. baking the treats) too and you’ll get even more Valentine’s Day brownie points, and you’ll definitely have one sweet day.

The book is available directly from me via PayPal (free US shipping included and a discount if you buy two copies!) and can also be found on Amazon.com.

As much as I love my cupcake carrier, there is one thing about it that I don’t like. It is very large and it takes up a lot of storage space when I’m not using it. This is true of all of my cake carriers, too, but because the cupcake carrier has more than one rack inside for stacking cupcakes, it’s not easy to stack other, smaller, storage containers inside of it. There is no need to try and stack smaller containers inside this Collapsible Cupcake & Cake Carrier, however, because the whole carrier folds down to a very compact size when it is not in use. It takes up about half as much storage space as a more traditional cupcake carrier, so it can fit on the shelf alongside your other containers, pans and baking accessories. The silicone sides of the carrier are sturdy and will not accendentially collapse on their own, but must be pushed firmly into place to fold. The racks inside the carrier will hold up to 24 cupcakes securely.

It is easy to talk about your favorite Girl Scout Cookies. Mine are Samoas. This shouldn’t be much a surprise because the two most popular Girl Scout cookies are Samoas and Thin Mints, and they have been for years. These are the cookies that, even if you’re making them at home, you still wait eagerly for in the late winter when Girl Scouts start selling them. But other cookies come and go, dropped from the production lineup for lack of popularity.

So, while I know what the most popular cookies are, I have to ask what are the least popular Girl Scout Cookies? As much as I’d like to think that they’re all pretty good, I’ve had some over the years that were pretty bad – the kind of cookies where the box never really gets finished because you’ll reach for another snack long before taking a cookie from the already open box. For me, I would have to say that I’ll pass on anything reduced fat or reduced sugar. This is primarily because if I’m waiting a whole year to pick up a box of cookies, I’m not going to worry about a few extra calories, but also because these cookies don’t even approach the flavor of the classic cookies in the lineup! Over the years many cookies have come and gone – some better than others. What were your least favorite Girl Scout Cookies?

If you want to reference some of the cookies from years past to refresh your memories, take a look at these comments were people relive some of their favorites, too.

Weddings are undeniably special occasions and you’ll see some of the most beautiful and most elaborate cakes ever baked on display at wedding receptions. You’ll also see some of the most over-the-top cakes, for better and for worse. One of my favorite instances of this is a life sized wedding cake made to look exactly like the bride herself. It was certainly memorable, down to the matching dress, bouquet and hairstyle of the bride. This wedding cake wedding dress, a designer creation by Lukka Sigurdardottir that is unlikely to be appearing at any real ceremonies in the near future, was built along a similar vein. Instead of making the bride out of cake to wear the cake dress, this gigantic dress-shaped wedding cake has a real woman at the center – “wearing” the dress! Naturally, she can’t move too well in the outfit, but she is in a good position to snack on the rainbow-colored, multi layer cake while she waits to be rolled – since walking is pretty much out of the question – down the aisle.

If you’ve ever had a glass of cherry limemade, you know what a good combination cherry and lime can be. I used that combination as inspiration for this Cherry Lime Bread. This quickbread is sweet, and zesty, with flavors that you don’t see too often together. It is moist and tender, with a texture that hints at that of a pound cake.

There are two keys to getting a good result from this bread. The first is to use fresh lime juice. Fresh limes are going to give you the most vibrant flavor. I find that a lot of their tartness is lost when you use bottled juice, so make sure to pick up some fresh fruit to juice to make this loaf. The second is to use a good cherry preserve for the filling. I used Orchard’s finest Michigan Red Tart Cherry Preserves, an all natural cherry preserve made by Smuckers. It’s not too sweet and has a lot of big chunks of cherries it in, adding both a nice cherry flavor and a good texture to the bread. This jam is so tasty that I was tempted just to eat the whole jar on toast (and I did eat a lot of it that way, don’t get me wrong), but I’m glad I ended up putting some of it in this loaf because it went so well with the bright, zesty lime.

This loaf is equally good for breakfast and for dessert. It will keep well for a couple of days, so you can bake it on the weekend and enjoy it during the week – at least, you can enjoy it for the few days that it will last in the kitchen – or bake it a day ahead and serve it during brunch on a Sunday morning.

(more…)

One very common phrase in baking is the direction to “bake until just set.” This phrase tends to mean slightly different things for different baked goods, although you’ll see the same instruction for brownies, cookies, cheesecakes and custards.

For cookies, baking until just set means that the edges of the cookie should be slightly firm or dry to the touch and the top of the cookie should no longer look wet. In other words, it shouldn’t still feel like raw cookie dough if you gently touch it with your finger. This instruction is most often given with chewy cookies, or fudgy and brownie-like chocolate cookies where you want to make sure that the finished cookie is not overdone and the amount of browning around the edge does not necessarily give you a definitive result on how done it is.

For cheesecakes and custards, where the term is used even more frequently, it is a little more difficult to  determine when something is “just set,” although with a little bit of practice, you’ll be able to spot it very easily. Cheesecakes and custards are never cooked until they are firm. Instead, you need to jiggle the pan slightly and see how the batter moves. It will jiggle slightly and evenly over the whole surface, not just at the center. If you’ve ever made jello and seen how it firms up more quickly at the edges than at the center, use that as a reference because that is exactly how cheesecakes and custards set up – from the outside to the center. So, watch to see that the center doesn’t look significantly looser than the rest of the cheesecake when you give the pan a nudge and you’ll have a cheesecake that is done perfectly when you take it out of the oven.

Cakesicles are popsicle-shaped cakes that bake in a unique pan and, when finished, can be skewered with popsicle sticks to give the cakes (or cookies) you bake with the pan a fun look. Norpro’s Heart-Sicle Pan offers another variation on this unique type of cake. This nonstick pan features heart-shaped molds that are a similar size to the popsicle molds, and the cakes baked in it can be mounted on popsicle sticks and presented in just the same way as the popsicle-shaped cousins. Hearts are good all year round, but they are particularly nice around holidays like Valentine’s Day, as well as during anniversaries and birthdays.

Cookies and brownies hold up very well in a pan like this one because they are sturdy enough to support their own weight when on a stick. Cakes will hold up quite well, too, thanks to the size of the pan. However, for the sturdiest cakesicles you should sandwich two together with some frosting, insert your popsicle stick into the center, then dip the whole thing in glaze or melted chocolate to hold everything in place and rally create a finished popsicle look.

Chicken and dumplings is classic American comfort food. It’s one of those dishes that you just want to curl up with on a cold winter night since it’s hearty, flavorful and can be very easy to make. If you’ve never had it, chicken and dumplings is a lot like chicken soup (very heavy on the chicken) with steamed biscuits floating in it. The chicken and broth portion of the dish already has a comforting, homey flavor to it and adding steamed biscuit dough makes the dish filling and lends a nice buttery flavor to everything.

This version of chicken and dumplings – and you should know that there are as many ways to make this dish as there are ways to make a chocolate chip cookie – is a quick one-dish meal that you can make in less than an hour from start to finish. I start with a whole rotisserie chicken and shred the meat. I make a chicken soup base using onions, carrots, celery, garlic and chicken stock (storebought, but homemade is good if you have it) and add the shredded chicken into it. I make homemade biscuit dough, drop it in small chunks into the boiling soup, then put the lid on the pot and cook everything until the biscuits are soft and tender.

I think that the homemade biscuit dough is the key to this dish. The finished dumplings are so buttery and flavorful, and they even have a bit of a flaky texture to them that you’re not going to get from a can of biscuit dough dropped into the soup. It’s worth noting that you’re not going to get the same kind of rich, buttery flavor from canned dough, either, since most are made with shortening. The dumplings will be done when they are cooked through and fluffy, no raw dough in the center; you will probably have to cut one open to double check and can cook the whole dish a few minutes longer if you need to. It reheats well, but is best fresh!
(more…)

One of the hardest things about bread-making – especially with artisanal breads that involve multiple slow rises – is the timing. The recipes are stretched out over many, many hours and I’ve heard of people waking up at all hours of the night just to feed their starters, knead down a first rise or get a loaf into the oven. To be honest, hearing stories like this makes breadmaking seem intimidating, when it’s really not all that difficult to do! Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day breaks down bread-making into simple and easy to follow steps that remove the stress from trying your hand at artisan breads. And Reinhart does it all without “dumbing down” the recipes, instead relying on clear explanations and detailed instructions to encourage the reader to bake and produce great results.

As I said, the recipes are very easy to follow. While Reinharts previous books are detailed, this book approaches the task of artisan bread baking looking for new techniques and new methods that will make the process simpler but still produce great results. Many of the breads have starters, most call for long rises and they are all shaped by hand before baking. The instructions simply serve to reassure you as they guide you. Want to do a 4 hour rise? A 48 hour rise? No problem. Just leave the dough as the book tells you and come back any time for the next step. There is none of the buildup (high stress for many would-be bakers) of having to stick to a set-in-stone timeline as you work.

The book is filled with beautiful photos, showing the breads in progress as well as the finished loaves. When shaping techinques are called for, such as braiding a loaf, photos showing the steps accompany the instructions. The recipes are divided into Sourdough Breads, French Breads, Enriched Breads and Rich Breads, and there is also a chapter that discusses the methods used in the book and breadmaking in general to start things off. The breads range from simple sandwich breads to whole grain sourdoughs and sweet brioche. Finally, if you have Reinhart’s other books, keep in mind that the recipes and techniques, even for the same breads, are different in this book, so it’s work getting if you’re a fan of his work. Otherwise, it’s a well-rounded book that should appeal to experienced bakers and for those just looking to get their feet wet.

After eating a sub-par muffin at a diner I really like recently, I realized that it has been far too long since I made a batch of muffins at home. It’s funny to have gotten out of the “habit” of making a batch every week or two, since they’re so easy to make, but then again there is nothing like an absecse (of muffins, in this case) to make the heart grow fonder. I wanted to make use of some of the oranges from my tree, so I decided to go with orange blueberry muffins.

For some reason, lemon ends up paired with blueberry much more often than orange. It’s true that tarter lemon makes a nice contrast with the sweetness of the berries, but oranges are plenty zesty and really brighten up an otherwise plain muffin. I used both fresh orange juice and plenty of orange zest in these, giving a great orange backdrop for the blueberriesin this muffin. Fresh orange zest will go a long way in providing orange flavor, but you can use store-bought orange juice if you don’t have fresh juice at the ready.

The muffins are moist and sweet enough to stand on their own without needing jam, honey or other toppings. They have a great orange flavor to them, too. These will keep well in an airtight container (or a ziploc bag) for a couple of days, so you can enjoy a batch over the course of several mornings without worrying that you have too many muffins around. Fresh and frozen berries will work in these muffins. If you do use frozen, try not to over-mix them into the batter, or you’ll risk the berries thawing slightly and streaking the batter with purple!

(more…)

The most difficult thing about making sandwich cookies, whether you’re making an Oreo-type sandwich with crispy cookies or a whoopie pie with cake-like cookies, if getting all the cookies to be about the same size and shape. When they’re not, your sandwiches will look less than perfect, and you’ll often end up with a cookie leftover that just doesn’t fit well with anything else. My solution to this problem is practice. When you form enough balls of cookie dough, your eye gets used to a certain size. Weighing the dough out works even better, although you still have to shape them into balls.

The Whoopie Pie Pan from Williams-Sonoma makes things even easier. It looks a lot like a muffin-top pan, with shallow rounds for dough that limit how big your cookies can get. All you need to do is place your dough into the rounds and you’ll end up with cookies that are all the same size every time (though it is possible to get different thicknesses if you significantly over or under-estimate the amount of dough you need). The pan is nonstick and can be used with a variety of cookie doughs, from whoopie pies to brownies. It would be great for making ice cream sandwiches, too, and can hold a loose batter together when simply dolloping the batter onto a baking sheet can’t. Still, most of the time you’ll be able to make cookies like these without a specialized pan, but if you make them often, this will definitely speed up the process for you and might be worth the investment!

This month, Girl Scouts around the US will kick off their annunal cookie sales. Some councils have already started, and some will be gearing up in the next few days. This is a time of year that most cookie-lovers look forward to because it means we can pick up a few boxes of our seasonal favorites. The Girl Scout Cookies are produced by two different bakeries, Little Brownie Bakers and ABC Smart Cookies, so the distribution of the new cookies flavors varies by region and which bakery supplies cookies in your area. Samoas (Caramel de Lites), Thin Mints, Tagalongs (Peanut Butter Patties), Do-Si-Dos (Peanut Butter Sandwich), Trefoils (Shortbread) are available everywhere. Lemon Chalet Cremes, a lemon-filled cookie, and Lemonades, a lemon iced cookie, are back for another season but are available in different regions. Thanks-a-Lot, a chocolate-dipped shortbread cookie and the 100-calorie pack Daisy-Go-Rounds are also back from the ABC Bakery, while the Dulce De Leche shortbread cookies return from Little Brownie Bakers. One new cookie this year is called Thank U Berry Munch, light and crispy cookies with dried cranberries and puffed rice cereal in them. As much as I like the new cookies, I still think back to some of my favorites from years gone by and hope that some of them – like Lemon Coolers, Golden Yangles, Aloha Chips and Juliettes – will make a return!

While I’ll be on the lookout for Girl Scouts to support (and new cookies to try), I’ll also be baking my own at home as I do every year. Homemade Girl Scout Cookie recipes make it easy to have cookies any time of year and, since they tend to cost less than the boxed cookies, where only a percentage goes to the troops, you can donate the savings directly to your favorite group of Girl Scouts (and maybe encourage them to have their own bake sale) to support them.

If you had an Easy Bake Oven growing up and liked it for the fun of baking small batches of miniature dessets, but are now a little bit too old to appreciate the unique flave and texture of the teeny cake mixes that come with such a gadget (or are looking for something a little hotter than a lightbulb to do the baking), you might want to get yourself a Mini Cupcake Maker to play around with. The machine looks a bit like a George Foreman grill from the outside. Inside, it has 7 nonstick mini muffin cavities. Put your batter in, close the lid, and you’ll have a small batch of miniature cupcakes, muffins or brownies in just a couple of minutes. It’s also not a bad idea if you’re looking for a little more portion control and don’t want to make a dozen or two dozen cupcakes at a time, although since most recipes aren’t scaled for such an amount, you’ll have to experiment with halving recipes when you work with one of these.

I think that you’re still going to get the best results with a “real” oven, but if time and space are at a premium, one of these little gadgets might not turn out to be such a bad thing – especially if it means you can have freshly baked cupcakes at a moment’s notice!

The only thing better than a cupcake is a cupcake with a rich cream filling. So, when you start out with a cupcake that is well known for having a delicious frosting – such as red velvet, which is almost always paired iwth a cream cheese frosting – you know that it can only get better when you manage to incorporate more into the cupcake.

Red velvet cake is a buttermilk cake with a light cocoa flavor that gets its name from its color: red. The red in the cake comes from food coloring and the more you use the redder your cake will be. This recipe is adapted from a Cook’s Country recipe for a red velvet cake. They call for using 2 tablespoons of food coloring, which is an entire little bottle of the stuff. You can get away with using half that amount, but don’t skimp too much or you’ll lose a lot of color. If you leave out the food coloring completely, the cake will have a reddish brown tinge to it (thanks to the combination of cocoa powder and baking soda, this is where the idea of a red cake came from in the first place).

These cupcakes are moist and tender, with a distinct cocoa flavor to them. It isn’t enough to make them taste like a chocolate cupcake, but it is enough to give the cupcakes a good, solid flavor. I really like this about these cupcakes because it is too often that red velvet cupcakes don’t have much flavor at all and simply trade off their unique color. With the cream cheese filling (the same as the frosting), the cupcakes become even more moist. They will keep well for a couple of days in an airtight container.

If you’ve never made a cream-filled cupcake before, I have a filled cupcake tutorial that will guide you through the process. It involves removing a piece of cake from the center of the cupcake and adding filling. With this method, which only takes a few seconds per cupcake to do, you get a lot of filling in each. An alternative is to simply stick the tip of a pastry bag or a can of frosting into the cupcake and squeeze, but you don’t get nearly the same amount of filling and it doesn’t save very much time. You don’t need to do anything special to finish these off, but if you dye a little bit of frosting red, or have a red gel frosting pouch, you can add a little squiggle to the top that is reminiscent of the squiggle on the classic, cream-filled hostess cupcakes.
(more…)

One of the most frequently recommended ways to make Dulce de Leche is to put a can of sweetened condensed milk into boiling water and cook it for a period of 2-4 hours. This is not a good thing to do – and one look at the warning on a can of sweetened condensed milk will tell you why: the can can explode. This can happen when the water level in the pan gets to low, when the burner you’re using has a hot spot below your can, or when any other situation arises in which excess heat builds up in that can. I’ve used the method with good results – but it’s not worth the risk of stepping out of the kitchen and returning to a big mess of sweetened condensed milk everywhere, not when there is a safer method that is just as easy to do and that is even a bit faster.

This method for making dulce de leche uses a double boiler. Simply open a can of sweetened condensed milk and pour it into the top of a double boiler, where the bottom is already filled with a few inches of simmering water. With a double boiler, you don’t need to worry about the water evaporating while you cook, and since there is no pressure from a sealed can, there is no risk of an unexpected explosion (yes, it really does happen).
(more…)

French macarons are a little bit more difficult to make than your average chocolate chip cookie. They’re not by any means impossible, but the light meringue cookies take a bit of time and patience to bake and sandwich together. The finished cookies are well-worth the wait because of their lovely texture, with a crisp shell and creamy center, and how flavorful they are. Another thing about these cookies is that they’re difficult to find in the US, where they’re not too popular at bakeries or restaurants. I found them recenetly, however, in the freezer at Trader Joe’s.

The Trader Joe’s Macarons à la Parisienne come 12 to a box, with six each of chocolate and vanilla macarons. There is a lot of packaging with these little cookies to keep them separated and their shells perfectly intact. It works: the cookies looked flawless coming out of the box. To serve, you simply need to defrost these for about 30 minutes. I have to say that, while they’re not going to top homemade or fresh macarons, these did hit the spot. They had good flavor and really got that balance of crisp shell and creamy filling. The chocolate had a ganache center, while the vanilla was more along the lines of a pudding or custard center. It didn’t take long to go through th box and I’d definitely go back for another – even if I was feeling inspired to make another homemade batch before getting in the car to go back to the store!

Whoopie pies are a classic snack cake – despite the name that makes it sound like some sort of practical joke (like a whoopie cushion). They’re two soft cookies sandwiched together with a creamy filling. The standard whoopie pie has a chocolate cookie and a vanilla cream center. As good as this combination is, there is no harm in switching things up a little, right?

These are reverse whoopie pies, made with a vanilla cookie and a chocolate cream filling. The chocolate filling makes them seem a little bit richer than the classic pies. The cookies are very soft and cake-like, so eating the whoopie pie is almost like eating a cupcake where the frosting is in the center.

The pies are easy to make. Simply dollop the batter onto a baking sheet, as you would with regular cookies, then allow them to cool completely before making the chocolate cream filling. Try to get every cookie to be about the same size, so that it is easy to match them up in pairs for the sandwiches. Otherwise, you can make them any size you like.

(more…)