A Cookie Long Overdue

It recently occurred to me that although I’ve made plenty of cookies with chocolate, including several takes on chocolate chunk biscotti, I have never actually put up a recipe for plain old American chocolate chip cookies.  It’s about time I rectified that.
These are not my trademark chocolate chip cookies, which are a kitchen-sink affair involving [...]

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What Makes a House a Home, Part 2

As much as I was itching to, it took a while for me to be able to bake again.  While we did ship some particularly loved or difficult-to-replace equipment, there was so much that was too heavy or bulky that it wasn’t worth it, and a lot of demands were further up the priority chain [...]

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One for the Road

My house is a hollow wreck of a corpse.  Everything we want to keep but won’t need for the next year has been packed and put in storage, and almost all the furniture we don’t want to keep has been sold off.  A handful of boxes full of winter clothes and other need-but-not-immediately items have [...]

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Alton, We Need to Talk.

Didn’t I just equate your lava muffin recipe with divinity?  Haven’t I been your biggest fan since your very first episode, in a burning-adoration-from-afar, entirely nonthreatening, restraining-order-free, totally un-Kathy Bates way? Didn’t I even forgive you for the exercise in self-indulgent whimsy that was your functionally useless book, the first cookbook I have ever in [...]

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Midnight Snack of the Gods

There are nights — long, dark, melancholic nights — when the only thing between you and abject despair is chocolate, and a candy bar just isn’t going to cut it. Maybe the weltschmerz is growing unbearable, or maybe you have people coming for dinner in twenty minutes because you opened your mouth without thinking and [...]

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Buzz Buzz Buzz

Honey is my favorite souvenir purchase when I travel, because it’s easy to obtain, rarely ridiculously priced, takes up little luggage space, and keeps well when I get it home. More compellingly, each one will taste so clearly and uniquely of its place that it will be like being there again. This is why [...]

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Sidewalk Table and Jacarandas Not Included

This week’s Sunday sweets blogging was partly pantry-clearing and partly nostalgia-tripping.
For our anniversary last year, His Lordship and I took a greatly-postponed honeymoon trip to Argentina. The idea was to show him where I came from, visit my pasta-producing grandmother, and consume unseemly quantities of amazing — and amazingly cheap — local food products, [...]

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Nibby Nanaimo Squares: Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here

Unless you’re from or have visited the Great North, you might not have fallen into the diabolical snare that is the Nanaimo Bar. I still simultaneously bless and curse the Canadian friend who brought over a tray of them as a thank-you gift for dogsitting, because my first bite of this odd little confection [...]

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The Return of Sunday Baking: German Chocolate Cupcakes

I won’t even bother with the usual feeble attempt at excusing the lags in blogging. Let’s just look at the pretty picture and forget all about it, OK? Right, moving on…
This lovely little morsel evolved out of my interest in this recipe, which I ran across mid-week and knew I wanted to try [...]

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Holiday Cookie Blogging: Pistachios and Chocolate Two Ways, plus Jam Almond Diamonds

My official policy is that the holidays are not over until I say they are, and I generally don’t say they are until after my birthday at the end of January, so there’s still time for holiday cookie baking as far as I’m concerned.
Depending on how organized I am in any given year, I launch [...]

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