Last Christmas I went on a gingerbread cookie binge after finding a surprisingly good recipe in Baking Illustrated. The only problem was the only cookie cutters I had were circles and hearts. There are few sights sadder than a tray of gingerbread cookies cut into circles and hearts, believe you me. Adding [...]
So this week we had a terrible convergence: a staggering, late-August-esque heat wave (temperatures up near 100, humidity right up there with it) and the bulk of the strawberry crop at the farm. So yesterday Boomer and I went out to pick six quarts of strawberries, and ended up with a gazillion berries that [...]
Welcome to IPB Living Investigates, a hard-hitting series where we tackle the most burning of questions. Today’s edition finds us exploring the age-old question: is a chocolate peanut butter cookie really necessary. This question was first drawn to our attention… um… well… sorta just yesterday. You see, Gentle Reader, in a spur [...]
The farm is starting up again next week, and I’ve heard that there will be lettuce included in the first week’s pick-up. This isn’t surprising, because lettuce is the silent building-block of my farm share. I talk a big game about all the tomatoes we get, but I think the thing we get [...]
Last July I wrote a post about what cookies I wanted to try out when the Unicorn kitchen was completed. I’ve checked off the Molasses Spice Cookies with Rum Glaze, the Chewy Ginger Oatmeal cookies, and the Gingerbread cookies, all of which were A+, keeper recipes. I knew I wanted to make cookies [...]
Mother’s Day means we pull out all the stops for Boomer, and “pulling out all the stops” means a fancy-schmancy cake from Chez Alice in Princeton.
Boomer selected the “Pink Passion”, which is layers of sponge cake with passion fruit and raspberry mousses. This is kind of an adventurous choice for us, but the rationale [...]
We recently got into a discussion with our friend kms2 about extracts and vanillas, and it got us wondering if our reliance on Neilsen-Massey vanilla is baseless. I’ve been buying Neilsen-Massey instead of my grocery store’s standard McCormick vanilla extract for years now because Baker’s Catalog sells the 32-oz. bottles of it, and since [...]
Boomer’s birthday is in November, which makes it difficult for us to shower her with gifts and then still have ideas (and a budget) left over for Christmas. Recently we solved this dilemma by taking to treating Mother’s Day like her birthday instead. On top of getting her heaps of fun presents, we [...]
Pookie has long been trying to get me to buy the fancy extracts sampler from Baker’s Catalog, and I finally succumbed when she convinced me that the new kitchen was a good excuse for getting them. So I’ve had these five little bottles sitting in the pantry, and I haven’t really had a lot [...]
Holy crap. I just made croissants. I can’t believe they worked out. I’ve made pastry dough before, but never anything laminated and yeasted. This is such a thrill, I can barely even put together the words, can barely even remember how I got to this point…
It all started on Friday night [...]
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