Treats for appetites of every size
I don’t know why I have this idea in my head, but I firmly believe that anything baked in a bundt pan is breakfast food. For some reason, the ring-shape of a cake makes it not a cake cake, just a breakfast cake. Fortunately, all of my friends in town for Harvard-Yale agreed and it’s just about gone.
I made the (great) mistake of starting Stranger Things this weekend. As far as things to watch during Halloweekend, I think I picked well, but as far as a full weekend of baking adventures, I only ended up with time for one.
As promised, it’s time for pumpkin. And when I decide it’s pumpkin season, I don’t mess around. This morning for breakfast, I had what I like to call the Gunther Tooties Pumpkin Trifecta: a pumpkin bagel with pumpkin cream cheese and a pumpkin spice coffee. I’m not sure you can get much more committed than that.
It turned into Fall yesterday. No warning, no gradual changes, no typical New England back-and-forth. Friday it was hot and sunny shorts-and-a-tank-top weather. Yesterday it was cool and crisp flannel-and-jeans weather.
I am solidly back into procrastination cooking mode. As tends to happen when my work picks up, I convince myself to make increasingly elaborate recipes in an effort to justify not doing that work. This week, I did this both with my baking AND my regular cooking.
Finally, another baking adventure out of my own kitchen. I’ve been a baby the past couple of weeks and baked only at my parents’ house, with the promise of central AC. But Neha was up for an afternoon of revelry, so Cambridge baking it was!
I’m a plan-everything-far-in-advance kind of person. Like, if I know I won’t have time to bake, I’ll make two recipes the week before. But sometimes, a whole weekend can work out perfectly with very little planning at all.
I’ve been on an uncharacteristically non-chocolate kick with desserts for the past couple of weeks. Something about the beginning of summer makes me think of light and fruity desserts. Which I guess is good if you’d (like me) spent the previous 9 months making heavy and rich desserts.
Cakes seem like they have it pretty good. Always out on display in bakery windows, drawing people in. Frequently the centerpiece at special occasions. Oohed and ahhed over when they’re particularly well designed. But I’d argue that they actually get the short end of the stick when it comes to baked goods.
I’m always surprised by how much of ice cream making is done over a stovetop. It’s a frozen dessert – I feel like at most I should be mixing the batter at room temperature, and then freezing it. But no, it’s like 20 minutes of stirring over low or medium heat and then using an ice bath after the fact to cool it down. Seems counterintuitive.