Back to baking

Wow, I can't believe I spent the whole Summer season not blogging! That's not to say I didn't bake at all; I baked like crazy this summer. Chocolate chip cookies, almond cake, many, many loafs of banana bread, and a successful experiment in transforming my Pumkpin Ginger Bundt into a bread loaf.

But, now that we have come to Fall (and the start of my favorite three months of the year), I feel like it is time to get back on the blog. It is my goal this Fall to experiment as much as I can with one ingredient (Almost Iron Chef style but not as intense). The ingredient of choice for this season: Pumpkin! Ah, I am so excited!

To introduce our home to the start of Fall I made what I think is my absolute favorite thing I have ever baked: Pumpkin Ginger Bundt. The desire to bake came to me late in the evening a weekend ago and so I followed my whim and whipped this up. The only issue this time was that I was still in search of a great vanilla glaze. My secondary goal this Fall was to find a vanilla glaze recipe worthy to be paired with my favorite cake and I think Martha Stewart once again came through with a winning recipe (see it here). The trick: sifting the powdered sugar. Whodda thunk?! The texture was ten times better than any other glaze recipe I have tried.

This brings me to my second trick: let the cake cool completely before adding any glaze or icing! I figure that this is a standard Baking 101 tip but I could hardly resist taking a slice once the cake was out of the oven (and I challenge anyone to resist this cake once you smell it). The glaze was not pretty but the whole thing tasted oh-so-good! I can't wait to make this again when I have time to let it completely cool.

I hope everyone is enjoying the start of Fall. Stayed tuned for my adventures with pumpkin!

Happy Baking!

Baking with Friends - Cinnamon Swirl Cake

This weekend I had the pleasure of hanging out with my friend Honor. We had an awesome Pho dinner (if you have yet to try it, you need to. Best. Thing. Ever.) and then we spent the rest of the evening baking. I was really excited because I wanted to try a new recipe and plus it is always fun to bake with a friend. This is another recipe I found on allrecipes.com. It is a cinnamon swirl cake. Honor helped by chopping the pecans. The recipe called for walnuts but I already had some pecans in the pantry.

I love this girl because she is as picky about how to chop nuts as I am. We both like to get the pecans finely chopped. Neither of us like chunks in our desserts (we're two peas, Honor and I) plus I feel like the finer chopped nuts bring out more flavor. It really makes a difference!

The batter is a really simple cake batter. I was excited to try the swirl part. The trick is to layer half the batter in the form, add the cinnamon layer, and then add the rest of the batter. Well, Honor and I figured we added about half of the batter only to find that towards the end we probably added three quarters of the batter. So we thought we would just see how it turned out. After baking, the cake smelled amazing. The cinnamon and pecans added such a comforting smell to the kitchen that it felt like Christmas. We sliced the cake to see how it turned out and it looked beautiful!

I was so happy with the final product except for one thing: since we added too much batter before the cinnamon layer I would be cutting off most the cinnamon if I leveled the bottom of the bundt! Oh well, it still tasted great.

I was glad to share the fruit of our labors with Honor's family. I did end up taking a little bit home. I knew my husband would love this and I just had to share with him, too!

Thank you, Honor, for a fun night of baking!

Pumpkin Ginger Cupcakes... No, Bundt.

About a year ago I found a recipe on allrecipes.com for Pumpkin Ginger Cupcakes. I made the attempt at cupcakes in late 2011 but I decided to try my luck at transferring the recipe to a bundt form instead. My little adventure was a success! It has become one of my favorite things to bake. It is great for the whole fall and winter baking season. The smell is amazing and my husband is always excited when I bake this.

I have played around with different amounts of the spices and different types of glazes. Currently I use rounded measurements for all the spices and I use about half of the amount of crystalized ginger that the recipe calls for. I also love the recipe I found for the glaze. Again, it was something I found online but I of course tweaked it a little. I can't wait to try other glazes and spices to make this a really unique recipe!

I was blessed to share this week's treat with our Bible study group. In sharing my excitement for learning all things baking the conversation quickly turned to the difference between baking soda and baking powder and of course cookbooks! I now have two great cookbooks on loan and I can't wait to go through them.