Treats for appetites of every size
The last of my back up recipes: Pumpkin Cheesecake. I probably had time to bake this weekend, but it was kind of nice to just be lazy instead. We’ve got a long weekend from school, but the rain and general yuckiness stopped us from heading into the mountains as planned. Oh well. Watching High School Musical and exploring the Massachusetts area isn’t a terrible alternative.
I just got back from a camping trip and am due at a birthday dinner in under an hour, so I’ll be keeping this post short and sweet (pun intended). Last week I mentioned that I had so many baking events coming up – this is one of the recipes I made, with the help of Laura, Neha, and Alisa (their hands feature prominently in these pictures). Almost a month into the new school year, and the four of us had yet to be in the same room as one another, so we resorted to the best kind of girls …
I’ve been baking up a storm this week! I’ve already made two recipes, and have another one lined up for Wednesday night. This seems particularly amazing given I’ve also been having a crazy busy week otherwise. I guess its true that the more you do the more you can do.
I always feel a little bit like pancakes don’t quite belong on this blog. As a baker, I’m drawn to breakfast food, and they do have cake in their name, but they seem like less of an adventure than other things I make. But I wanted to make another loaf of sourdough bread this weekend, and was already feeding my starter, so decided to give these a try. As consolation for them not being super exciting, I’ll supplement them with a good story.
Amid a whirlwind weekend full of family, tacos, and probably too little reading, I needed to find a quick recipe that would also be a crowd pleaser. I’ve had this before around Christmas, and generally am not able to step away from a plate of it. Turns out it also makes for a great cookout dessert for a lot of people in very little time.
I’m not really sure why the weather went from full Summer to deep Fall in the last couple of days, but it has definitely helped ease the transition into my last year of law school. Today, with the rainy coldness that is the outdoors, baking warm cupcakes indoors has been an ideal activity. It would have been a great day to make some sourdough bread, but that would have required much more foresight than I had this week.
It was cold outside this morning. I was out for a walk with my mom, and definitely could have used a sweater. With September only five days away, it felt like Fall was trying to make itself known. And with the first years starting school this week, I’m definitely leaning towards a Fall frame of mind. However, it is still August, and I did spend a good amount of my afternoon napping in the sun. So I also wanted to carry on my summer recipes for at least a few more weeks.
In my second installment of high altitude baking, I really went for something challenging: a true cake. Cookies bake for a short period of time, meaning that recipes really don’t need to be altered all that much. However, cakes are in the oven longer, and rising is much more important. Though there are plenty of websites online that explain adjustments of various ingredients at altitude, I decided it would be more fun to find an actual cookbook. What I found was a great little spiral bound book called Mountain High Cakes, written right here in Jackson, Wyoming!
I’m writing this post from my phone, sitting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where I decided not to bring my laptop and the house decided not to have super consistent internet. Overall, this is a great feature, because it means I spend much more of my time hiking and biking and reading than looking at a screen. However, when it came time to blog, it did make it a little trickier.
Ever look over at your fruit bowl and realize your bananas have turned almost completely brown before you even had a chance to eat one? Looking for a quick recipe when you don’t necessarily have all of the ingredients on hand for the best banana bread ever? Good news: if you bake (from scratch) ever, you definitely have everything to make these muffins and feel like you didn’t waste food after all.