Baking Binge

“It’s Fall!” they say.

My favorite bloggers are sending out their new fall baking recipes: apple cinnamon and pumpkin everything. The local grocery stores have had giant bins of pumpkins lining the front sidewalk for at least a month. Pinterest and new memes are featuring flannel again. Not to mention a certain flavor at a certain coffee chain that’s already sold out in some places(???)! (But also can we be thankful that said coffee chain is open. This post is brought to you mostly by sitting in a coffee shop “dining area.” Unfortunately it’s the chain one, because my current city lacks ANY local options.)

Meanwhile, it’s sort of cooling off down here in Houston, so the “feels like” due to humidity is below 90 degrees today. (Not so yesterday. Actual temperature 92.) In the spirit of fall, I am thankful that we don’t have a heat index of over 100, though! And last weekend it was actually in the 60s, so we hurried our butts to the pumpkin patch first thing in the morning, but with my personal internal heater (#thirdtrimester), I’m still unable to embrace sweaters like the native texans here do as soon as it’s below 70 for a single minute of the day. Afternoon highs be darned. I’m tangenting, but seriously guys, it’s almost November and I can’t even think about putting on a pair of jeans. 

Anyway back to my bloggers—The past several weeks, I’ve been on a bit of a baking binge. It started one week in late September (when it first stopped being so so hot). On Tuesday, I baked the cake layers for an Italian cream cake I wanted to serve for company on Thursday night. Once cooled, I popped them in the freezer to stay fresh until assembly time on Thursday. On Wednesday, I baked a double batch of pumpkin chocolate chip muffins to split between a family with a new baby I was bringing dinner to, and a moms group meeting I was asked to bring a little something sweet to. On Thursday I made the frosting and assembled that Italian cream cake (which was my best one yet, and was an absolute hit with our guests). On Friday morning, I was up early enough, and those bananas in the fruit bowl needed to go anyway, so I whipped up a batch of banana chocolate chip muffins to complement the pumpkin ones for the meeting that day. On Saturday, the fridge was full of leftovers, so I didn’t cook anything. On Sunday, I decided to make a key lime pie to share at a small group meeting we were hosting that night. I have to take my opportunities to bake for other people, because if I bake for just my family, guess who consumes most of those calories in the end.

(It’s me.)

The following week, I obliged Luke’s weeks-long request to make homemade granola, and may have gone overboard by making two separate batches, in order to have a side-by-side comparison of the two recipes. One of them I got from a friend years ago and have made several times. One is from a cookbook I recently impulse-checked-out from the library, because it was on display, and I recognized the author. Her sister and I were friends from a mission trip we both went on during college, and subsequently from a church playgroup when we had both become moms-of-two in another state (small world!). Anyway, I was like, “I kind of know this author by two degrees of separation so obviously I need to check this out.” Plus the photo on the cover looked like something really tasty. (In fact, I made the cover photo recipe and it was really tasty.)

Have I ever mentioned that I read cookbooks for fun? Like, cover to cover, read them. Back when I was teaching myself to cook, I wanted to know more about the science of baking and cooking. At the intersection of the results of my internet research about what to read, and what the library had available for me to check out, were Shirley Corriher’s Bakewise and Alton Brown’s I’m Just Here for the Food. Five years later, I asked for (and received!) my own copy of Bakewise for my birthday, because I kept wanting Corriher’s explanations about why things happen as they do—as well as her Magnificent Moist Golden Cake recipe—over and over. And Justin and I still watch Alton Brown on TV. And America’s Test Kitchen. And half a dozen other YouTube channels/shows featuring chefs, recipes, and cooking. (Like these: Basics with Babish, The Chef Show, Food Wishes, Cook’s Country, Bon Apetit, Matty Matheson, Quarantine Quitchen, Dessert Person, various people who smoke meat, etc., etc.) And reality competition or documentary-type shows featuring both amateur and professional cooks, bakers, and pastry chefs, including Great British Bake Off, Nailed It!, Sugar Rush, Chef’s Table, etc.

Cooking shows are a go-to for family TV watching around here. Justin was watching a DC Comics adaptation that’s way too dark for children, when a child walks into the room? Quick, switch to a cooking show. They’re quite familiar with ATK, and they love “the silly truck show” (The Chef Show). They frequently ask, “Mommy, can we make this sometime?” I always say Yes or Probably, although it’s rare for me to actually go back and find the written recipe and make it. But! Our YouTube watching has inspired the purchase of several-a-cookbook. My cookbook box at the bottom of the pantry is now overflowing, so I need to get on the Bookshelf for the Living Room task on my to-do list soon. The “puzzle corner” of the living room has been needing a shelf upgrade (meaning, the puzzles need to get off the floor and onto a shelf of any kind) for a while, now. Perhaps I can find a shelf to do double duty. I’m sure the easier access will only increase the amount of time the kids spend flipping through my copies of Sally’s Baking Addiction and Sally’s Candy Addiction, during which they point to every single photo and ask to make that. Someday, sweet kiddos, we will make it through all these cookbooks and try all these treats! Even the homemade “smarshmallows” (Luke’s term).

We are hoping that letting food into the kids’ entertainment will inspire them to want to help in the kitchen when they are big and capable enough to take over some of the meal prepping and cooking responsibilities. It certainly has already, when their help is not actually all that helpful, but we try to be as accommodating as possible when we’re not in a rush, because we do want them to find cooking enjoyable! Plus, when they help make something, they are more compliant about trying new ingredients. (Sometimes.)

Circling back to the key lime pie, as well as staying on the topic of cookbooks, I wanted to share about some baking experimenting I’ve done in my own kitchen. I used to NEVER deviate from recipes. Now, I’m comfortable enough with my own knowledge to take some liberties.

Last summer, we were on a lime kick. It was shelter-in-place. I was not pregnant. We may or may not have been making margaritas at least a couple nights a week. By “we,” I mean Justin, because he is the master mixologist in this family.

Side story. A few years ago, I tried to make mango daiquiris at home, in memory of the delightful ones we’d had on the beach in Mexico on vacation once, because we had some mango puree in the fridge anyway. The daiquiris were just okay (maybe because Missouri grocery store mangos just aren’t the same as fresh ones in Mexico, maybe because of my lack of bartending skills, idk), and I made a huge mess on the kitchen counter; from then on I’ve let Justin do the cocktailing around here.

Anyway, our frequent margaritas solidified my idea that lime is one of my very favorite flavors, and it got me curious about making a key lime pie. I checked my available cookbooks. Both America’s Test Kitchen and Sally’s Baking Addiction had a recipe, each slightly different. I thought, “Our neighbors on either side will help us eat these….I’m making both!”

Both were delish. However, Justin and I unequivocally agreed that Sally’s crust was better (crisper, just the right proportion), while ATK’s filling was better (more lime flavor, better balance of sweet-to-tart). So, a few weeks later, I made a third key lime pie, mashing up the recipes to our liking, and it was a great success. So when I made one a couple weeks ago, I combined the recipes again, and was still satisfied with the result. I finally wrote down the mashed up recipe in one spot so that next time I don’t need to get out both cookbooks.

I only recently created a google doc of my own personal recipes, which is where I recorded “my” key lime pie recipe. Formerly, there was no need, as most of my cooking was, again, exactly per the recipe, and mostly from Pinterest, which I can access from anywhere that I have my phone. But now I have a collection of just enough recipes that I’ve modified from the original to merit having a spot to keep them. I’m way too high tech (just kidding, it’s actually that I’m way too messy a cook to keep notecards unsplattered) to go for an actual box of physical recipe cards, so google docs is my friend, here! Plus, if I ever need to share a recipe, I can just export my doc or copy and paste individual recipes to email to friends. I highly recommend this method, if you’re in need of a method.

Since my week of baking almost daily that I detailed above, I’ve been on a regular baking kick. After all, it’s no longer swelteringly hot, so it’s bearable to turn on the oven. (I was so thankful this summer that we bought a grill last winter!) Just for fun, and because nesting is manifesting as a more-intense-than-usual affinity for list-making, here are some more of the things I’ve been baking.

Kremovka Papieska (Polish cream cake). Yesterday was Pope St. John Paul II’s feast day, and kremovka was supposedly his favorite dessert as a kid, and as a fun fact, I’ve actually eaten kremovka in JPII’s hometown in Poland, and I had a moms group meeting to share it with people at, and the recipe looked really easy, so I used puff pastry for exactly the second time in my life, and made pastry cream for exactly the first time in my life, and it looked quite rustic when I was done, but oh my was it delicious. Basically it was like everything a Toaster Strudel wishes it was, and then some.

Angel food cake. This is now a standard around here. Luke requested it as his dessert for his name-saint’s feast day (St. Luke the Evangelist). I had recently made one also for a Michaelmas (the feast of the archangels, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael) party we were invited to. If you have a two-piece angel food cake pan that you like, drop me a link. I’m in the market. Our angel food cake frequency is making the one-piece pan more and more tiresome.

Salted caramel sauce. I texted my best baking friend throughout the process of making this. There were two batches. The first was an absolute disaster. The second was a team effort between Justin and me, and it turned out looking great, and tasting…burnt. Meh.

Pumpkin chocolate chip bundt cake. I brought this to a moms group meeting, and between the moms and the kids, I got many compliments, and only about 20% of the cake came home with me. The caramel sauce was supposed to go on here, but luckily the cake was perfectly lovely without it! It was sturdier, without being drier, than my go-to pumpkin bread recipe, and a little bit prettier for presentation.

Pecan chocolate chip cookies. This is another recipe I’d never forgotten from Bakewise, also incidentally Justin’s favorite chocolate chip cookie, so I finally got around to making a batch. There are still cookie dough balls in the freezer, because I knew that if I baked them all right away, we would eat them all within 48 hours. Now we have a stash instead.

Blueberry muffins. ATK has truly the best blueberry muffin recipe. I broke out some frozen blueberries from our annual summer berry picking and whipped these delights up for a moms group meeting. Noticing a theme? I told you, I have to have people to share with!

“American picnic” jam souffle. For the feast of the Nativity of Mary (Mary’s birthday), I decided last minute to make souffle, but I didn’t have any fresh berries, so I went for jam instead, which is another of those modifications I’ve experimented with, to success, as a shortcut for just such an occasion as this. We got hooked on The Berry Nutty Farm’s jam when we lived in Missouri, and now we pay the shipping charges to get our favorites delivered all the way to Texas. Shop local, even if it’s far away! It turned out suuuuper sweet, but hey, Mary was probably super sweet, so it was fitting. The kids were thrilled to get souffle, and what better thing to celebrate than our blessed mother’s birthday?

Lastly, speaking of birthdays, my own birthday cake layers just came out of the oven for assembly, celebration, and devouring tomorrow. It’s to be a Guinness chocolate cake with Bailey’s buttercream with a chocolate ganache drip on top. So far, the cake part smells amazing. I haven’t made a chocolate cake in a long time. I’m really, really looking forward to this one.

I’ve spent a lot of time this year talking about veggies. It was time to talk sugar for a minute instead. Hope you’ve enjoyed!

Tell me in the comments below: What have you been baking–or wanting to bake–lately?