SMiLes by Meg

Tag: sugar

Hamantaschen

These were really fun. If you don’t know by now, I give up sweets for Lent every year. Which means I try to find people to bake for each week so that I won’t have the temptation around me. This year, Erik made it easy. He wanted to make hamantaschen for Purim so that we could send cookies to a long list of people, all over the country, that he stays in touch with. Sending cookies by mail far from Boston fits in well with my Lenten promise to not eat said cookies. A win-win all around.

Old Fashioned Doughnuts

I think I’m losing my touch. When I first started law school, bringing in treats to class was a surefire way to make them disappear quickly. A short post on my section’s Facebook page, and I could get more people than cookies to come and take said cookies off my hands. It didn’t seem to matter what I baked; I had a willing audience.

Gluten Free Peppermint Whoopie Pies

The last of the Christmas cookies: candy cane whoopie pies. If you read my blog often, you know that for family events with my mom’s siblings, I try to make something gluten free. Usually, this means flourless cake or haystacks or something of that sort, which on their own don’t have flour, but this year I decided to try to use an ingredient I see pop up a lot in gluten free recipes: xantham gum. This stuff is supposed to help mimic a recipe that would otherwise call for flour, so if you want to make something recognizable as a …

Snowball Cookies

In Part Two of my 2017 Christmas Cookie Extravaganza, I’ve got a recipe that is seasonal for the entire winter, not just Christmas, and, under other names, can be made all year long: Snowball Cookies! I’m posting this one today for two reasons. One, it seemed particularly fitting to post about snowballs when I’ve spent the past couple of days in Wyoming doing snow-related activities (largely cross country skiing). Two, as I hit “post”, I’m hanging out with my best friend from college, Cate, who was the first person to make me a variation of these back in college, though …

Classic Cherry Pie

This is Part 1 of 2 Thanksgiving pie posts coming at you in the next couple of weeks. Good news: they can just as easily be Christmas pies (if you don’t make the one true Christmas dessert: Chocolate Trifle), so keep these on hand as the holiday parties start piling up. Also, I’ve done a little bit of test kitchen work on these, trying out different pie crust recipes and combining some filling recipes to figure our what works well together. The results were pretty good, and have made for some tasty breakfasts in the Thanksgiving aftermath.

Cinnamon Chocolate Chip Cookies

I made some really really really good cookies this week. Like, I’m staring at the last one in a Tupperware next to me at the table right now seriously struggling with whether to eat it. I’ve already had 2 today. And maybe 3 yesterday. And every day before that since Monday. It didn’t help that the batch made about 60 cookies. So even though my students did some good work on the huge container I brought to their conferences this week, I still had too many left over.

Saltine Bark

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.

Magdalenas

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.

Cinnamon Pinwheels

I’m officially on summer vacation! With a month before I start my last year of school ever, I’m definitely trying to pack a lot in. In a couple of hours, my mom and I will leave for our annual Nantucket trip. Then, two days after we get back, I’ll head out to Montana and Wyoming for a couple weeks of hiking and generally not being in an office. With all of this traveling, baking will be a bit more challenging, but don’t worry – I’m committed.

Gluten Free Chocolate Cookies

I’m usually pretty wary of gluten free recipes that seem to be making odd substitutions, or just eliminating flour and thinking the baked good will come out the same. If they don’t do that, they require weird ingredients (has anyone ever actually found xanthan gum?) before they’ll reach a kind of close-to-right consistency.