Currently cooking from All About Braising by Molly Stevens
My next book goes hand-in-hand with fall and winter. All About Braising was made for long, cold evenings, when your body craves slow-cooked comfort food. I love to make these kind of dishes, where you do a little prep work at the beginning, but the majority of [...]

Finally, I have the recipe for the Fresh Fruit Muffins. I made these one last time last week, just to make sure that I was satisfied. I was.
A couple of notes: First, I found that if I used too much fruit, I couldn’t get the muffins out of the pan. About a cup of frozen [...]

Currently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie
Making this focaccia was a mistake. A HUGE mistake. See, Bryan is trying out a gluten-free diet, so anything I bake I try to get rid of before he gets home. So I made this focaccia, and all my regular baking recipients weren’t answering [...]

Currently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie
Versions four and five of my fresh fruit muffins went from complicated to simple, but got better as a result.
For the fourth attempt at tweaking this recipe, I increased the maple syrup to 1/4 cup and decreased the amount of milk by the same [...]

Currently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie
Challah (a traditional Jewish bread, usually braided) was one of the first breads I learned to make in baking school. We liked making it, because it could be mixed, left to rise and then baked in the five hours we were in class. Some [...]

Currently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie
What to do when the baking gods give you a cake that looks like this?
You make trifles. You take the lovely, lemon butter cake that showed such promise as a batter but then bombed in the oven and cut it into cubes. You take [...]

Almost exactly a year ago, I was wandering around the Borough Market in London. It was my first trip to London, and I was having a fantastic time. The market was full of people and food, and I probably looked like a dolt as I snapped picture after picture. One of the stands I wandered [...]

Currently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie
Right from the start, me and this tart didn’t get along. It all started when I went to the market to get some plums. You see, the original recipe calls for plums, not nectarines, and for several days running, the market had piles and [...]

Currently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie
For my next attempt at the fresh fruit muffins, I looked for ways to add flavor and texture to the muffin.
I decided to stick with blueberries for the fruit component. To add more flavor, I added a tablespoon of maple syrup to the batter. [...]

Currently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie
Here’s another cake where I liked the batter better than I did the baked version. The recipe starts off by combining butter, sugar and lemon zest and beating the heck out of them. Eggs, lemon juice, yogurt and dry ingredients are then added. At [...]