Posts Categorized: Baking and Sweets

Last-Minute Bake Sale Cake

Ah springtime! Season of magnolia blossoms, standardized tests, and — between recitals, orientations, half-time fundraising, end-of-the-year whatevers — seemingly a bake sale every week. I can’t tell you how many times in the past month a reminder has popped up on my iPhone saying something like “Bake Sale/Lacrosse” or “Recital/Bring Cookies” and all I have to say is…what is wrong… Read more »

Come and Get It

See the coffee table in this picture? We’ve had it for fifteen years. We bought it before we had kids, when we were rushing to furnish our first real apartment and we went to some big Crate and Barrel sale and bought a bunch of stuff that looked like the kind of thing that grown-ups would have in their first… Read more »

He’s Sweet, She’s Savory

There are many reasons why I love going to Naria’s and Peter’s house for dinner. For starters, they live in my town, and I don’t think I’m the only one who feels that one of the great pleasures in life is having neighbors cook for you. This is especially true when those neighbors really know how to bring it in… Read more »

From Scratch

For my grandmother’s 80th birthday, her best and oldest friend in the world, Midge — fellow bridge clubber, golf partner, drinking buddy, all-around Golden Girl — hosted a dinner party, on the Wedgwood china, in her big brick house on Forest Avenue. Jenny and I were in attendance, as were my father, two widows — Mary and Shep, both in… Read more »

Never Fail Banana Bread

Yesterday, Phoebe came home from school with her aspiring-baker friend Abby (different Abby) and declared “We want to make bread.” “How long is this playdate exactly?” I asked. “Abby’s mom is picking her up at 5:30.” “Hmmm.” I was a little concerned about their plan. “Aw c’mon…We can make that easy bread you always make?” She was, of course, referring… Read more »

Heart Cake

It’s been well documented on this site that whatever limited talent I have for say, spinning a lone onion into dinner, that this talent has somehow never translated to the baking side of my brain. The most recent evidence to support this being that cornbread I baked for our friends John and Shiv over the holidays — the one that… Read more »

Maple Buttermilk Custard Pie (And Then Some)

Sometimes I think the most necessary characteristic a cook should possess is restraint — in other words, the ability to stay out of the way of something delicious. (Think summer corn, a farm-fresh egg, homemade pasta.) In this case, that rule happens to apply to food blogging as well, and the something delicious happens to be the most beautiful book… Read more »

Graveyard Cake

Along with the block I live on, my memory has been getting a little cobwebby lately. Can it possibly be that I’ve written this blog for three and a half years, aka four Halloweens, and not told you about my all-time favorite tricky treat? Every year I try and fail to come up with something as simple and clever as… Read more »

The Drawer

There was a drawer in my childhood kitchen. If it wasn’t made of actual walnut, it was definitely made of walnut-veneered wood, and sat beneath the silverware drawer, which sat beneath the mustard-colored formica countertop. The drawer had no heft and seemed to always be falling off its tracking likely due to the many dozens of times a day we’d… Read more »

Banned For Life

There are certain food items that Jenny has banned from the house forever. Most are desserts. Actually, all are desserts. There were the Mallomars when we were first married, which we stashed in the refrigerator and ate by the box until she turned, viper-like, upon them. There were those sugar-coated, citrus-y gum drops from T Joe’s, which she loved dearly… Read more »

I Was a Soda Jerk

. We are honored to present a very special guest poster today on DALS — my dad, Steve Ward. As I have noted here before, my dad did not have the deepest (and that’s putting it kindly) repertoire when it came to dinner, but man, could he do a good, no-bake dessert. Sundaes (topped with crushed, roasted peanuts), ice cream… Read more »

21 Rules of Entertaining

One of the more fun parts of my “job” is that I have an excuse to reach out to people I’ve been secretly stalking for decades.  Take that time, for instance, when I met Susan Spungen for breakfast at a Union Square coffee shop. Spungen spearheaded the food section at Martha Stewart Living twenty years ago. We have her to… Read more »

Sundae on a Spoon

Newest delusional tactic to keep the dessert madness in check: One spoonful of something with a LOT going on, including, but not limited to Strawberry Sundaes, Rich Man’s Reese’s (with sea salt), Banana Split, Brownie Sundae, Chipwich. One spoonful. Just one.

Do As We Say, Not As We Eat

We wish we could tell you we raised our kids to think of dessert the way one is supposed to think of dessert: as a “treat” in the true definition of the word; as something you get rarely, if you’re lucky; as part of a celebration – say, an ice cream cone after a hard-fought soccer game, a slice of… Read more »

Lotsa Matzoh

  I know this might sound strange, but there are few things I enjoy more than matzoh with a schmear of butter. Not just any butter. Breakstone’s Whipped Salted Butter, the brand of choice in my childhood kitchen, which may not be the best out there, but, well…that’s not quite what it’s about with this one.  My daughters get equally… Read more »

Eat Your Pudding

Abby: Is there any other way I can drink milk besides…drinking it? Me: If by “drinking milk,” you mean “consuming an adequate amount of calcium so that your bones and muscles grow big and strong” then yes. To get the same amount of calcium you’d normally get in one cup of milk (300 grams), you can also have: 1 9-ounce piece… Read more »

Not Chaos. Richness.

When you edit the essay section of a parenting magazine like I did for four years, you get used to reading a lot of stories that start with what I liked to call the “breathless” paragraph. They usually go something like this: It’s 7:00 am and I just realized I forgot to pick up the juice boxes for my son’s… Read more »