Posts Categorized: Baking and Sweets

Halloween Candy, A Second Life

Wow. So many options for titles today! What to Do With Leftover Halloween Candy A Problem I Did Not Know I Had Tips and Tricks for Making Candy Even More Unhealthy! Why Talk Presidents When You Can Talk Peppermints? Well, you get the idea. Yesterday I packed up whatever spooky outdoor decorations had not been destroyed by the hurricane and… Read more »

A DALS Honeymoon

From the Mailbox: Hi Jenny, I just wanted to let you know that I loved your book so much that I brought it with us on our honeymoon. (I put the DALS cookbook on my registry, hoping that someone would have the good sense to buy it for me, but when I didn’t get it at my shower, I decided… Read more »

Birthday Pie

How a girl like me — a girl whose idea of the perfect food is a chocolate buttercream layered sponge cake, a girl whose childhood dinners were considered incomplete without a slice of fudge-frosted Entenman’s tacked on to the end of them, a girl who could eat this morning, noon, and night — ended up being the mother of a… Read more »

10 Things I’d Love to Do for Halloween (But Probably Won’t)

I tend to be very ambitious for Halloween — thinking about Halloween that is…two months before it’s an actual reality. But because the holiday falls so close to Abby’s birthday, I end up having very little energy left in the inspiration bank once its time to dig out the hanging ghost for the front door. To look at my facebook… Read more »

Small Triumphs

There’s this meal — it comes every single day whether I like it or not and it is a continuing source of stress for me. At this meal, my kids turn their noses up at anything new; we’re always in a rush because we are pressed for time, and I am perenially un-inspired to come up with new things to… Read more »

Bringing Home the Bread

The First Best Thing my father ever came home with after work was, by far, a Ford Granada. It was powder blue, four doors, with a white vinyl top, and when I hopped on the kitchen counter to peek out the window that overlooked our driveway, I remember saying to myself, Is this real? Did my father just pull into our… Read more »

Book Club: What to Discuss, What to Eat

One of the age-old literary conflicts: What food to serve at book club? Naturally, since the book you will be reading and discussing is Dinner: A Love Story, it stands to reason that you should make a DALS recipe, am I right? And I don’t know about your book clubs, but mine generally meets after dinner which means that the… Read more »

The Summer of Self-Sufficiency

I know I’m susceptible to these kinds of stories, but there’s no getting around it: I’ve been haunted by a six-year-old for weeks now. Did you guys read the Elizabeth Kolbert article in The New Yorker last month — the one about how spoiled American children are, especially when we compare them to children in other cultures? I was only two… Read more »

Tried-and-True Cobbler

I knew it was a good sign when my mother-in-law, Emily, started rattling off the ingredients for her go-to berry cobbler over the phone, then interrupted herself to say, This index card is so stained and old, who knows where on earth I got it from? Those of you who have read my book know about Emily’s Index Card Cache… Read more »

And the Winner Is…

A couple of weeks ago, back when we proposed this guest post contest, I made reference to the fact that writing — for most of us, at least — is hard. It takes time, of which most of us do not have an abundance. It takes an idea, which is the most elusive thing of all, the thing you try… Read more »

Res Ipsa: Nutella Pizza

My mother, an attorney, was the first person to teach me about res ipsa loquitur, a legal term that translates to “The Thing Speaks for Itself.” I will leave it to the lawyers out there to explain the finer points of how it’s used to prove negligence in the courtroom, but as long as I can remember, my mom and… Read more »

The Homemade Pantry Solution

The subject of the email was “High Levels of Arsenic…” and the first sentence, written by Ali, my babysitter, was “Did you see this?” (Never a good sign.)  Attached was a link to an ABC News story telling us to watch out for elevated levels of aresenic in organic powdered formula, cereal bars, energy bars, or anything that listed “organic brown… Read more »

I Got This

We have a bowl on our counter. It’s a wooden salad bowl that we have turned into a fruit bowl. I’m not a chemist, so I can’t tell you why this is, but this bowl has a strange and unpleasant effect on the produce we (stupidly) put inside it: it accelerates the ripening process. It possesses mysterious transformative properties. It’s… Read more »

Melt the Bunny

I’m beginning to think that parenting is just a lifelong excuse to turn anything into a celebration. Because if you really think about it, there is always something to celebrate.  The problem with this of course, is…there’s always something to celebrate, i.e. there’s always some kind of treat that — in our house at least — seems to be central… Read more »

Kicking the Dessert Habit

You want to know what’s fun about being an editor? You get to live vicariously through people who are smarter, better traveled, and more interesting than you. Charles Duhigg is one of those people. Charles is an investigative reporter at The New York Times — if you haven’t been following his series on Apple, it’s really worth your time —… Read more »

How I Became a Valentine’s Day Cynic

My first boyfriend in high school was so dreamy. He made me mixed tapes that introduced me to exotic artists like Steve Miller Band and Crosby Stills and Nash and Dan Fogelberg. When he wrote me letters, they were in all upper case — BECAUSE EVERYTHING I SAY IS IMPORTANT! he explained. He was different from the quarterbacks my friends crushed… Read more »

Dollhouse Galette

These are the kinds of ideas that I really think twice about posting for all the world to see. Because pretty much nothing good can come of telling the world at large that I have home-baked an apple galette for my daughter’s doll. (Meet Esme, the luckiest Plan toy in the world!) I will say, however, that it is not… Read more »