Bakery Catch Up

Well, it’s been a bit quiet around here, hasn’t it?  My sincere apologies.  I haven’t been blogging, but I have indeed been baking.

As the crisp air of fall settled in and I could stand having the oven on for extended periods of time again, I made a simple pledge.  Bake something once a week.

That first week I made pumpkin cookies using a recipe from a fellow knitter and baker, A Friend to Knit With (view it here).  They were very soft and moist, and the texture was more like a muffin than a cookie.  They actually reminded me of muffin tops (the tasty kind, not the unflattering kind some of us have).

Then I made some cupcakes for Halloween.

Last week, in celebration of election night, I made an O cake in red, white and blue trimmings.

I used a chocolate organic cake mix that I found on the regular baking aisle at Stop & Shop, Dr.Oetker Organics.  Sometimes these things can turn out badly, but this was great.  It tasted like homemade, with just the right balance of sweetness to a more acidic chocolate flavor.

And finally, this morning I made a batch of chocolate chip Blondies.  The recipe came from one of my all-time favorite cookbooks, The Foster’s Market Cookbook.  These were easy to make, but they use a ton of pantry staples, so if you aren’t stocked up on butter and brown sugar things could get dicey.

The recipe calls for 2 cups of pecans in addition to the chocolate chips, but I left those out, opting instead for another cup of chocolate.  When was too much chocolate every a bad thing?

I trimmed the edges off and crumbled them up to save for ice cream sundaes.  I had never made Blondies before, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that these bars taste like thick, chewy chocolate chip cookies.  How could some of that goodness be bad sprinkled over ice cream?  In fact, one bar would go great under a scoop of ice cream drizzled in chocolate sauce.  I must be hungry…

As the wind whips through today and seperates the last of the leaves from their trees, I am comforted by the warmth and sweet smell of baking.  Do you have any baking pledges?  Are you thinking about holiday baking yet?