Yay, I finally baked a cake! And it felt great! Now I kinda understand what they mean when people say stuff like baking is therapeutic (which I always thought was b.s.). There is something about mixing up a bunch of ingredients and shoving it in the oven hoping that something great is going to come out of there. You’ve got to get it right the first time, there is no patching it up once it is done, unlike most of my dishes.  If something goes wrong, it is very difficult …

I’ve been looking for the perfect Jalapeno Cornbread recipe for a while now. I think I finally found The One! After looking around the web for a while, I finally settled on Michael Ruhlman’s recipe and after a couple of trials with some minor tweaks, I finally have a recipe that we love.  It’s sweet, it’s spicy, it’s soft inside and a little crispy outside, it’s perfect!
 
Jalapeno Cornbread
(Based on Ruhlman’s Jalapeno Cornbread recipe)

3/4 cup cornmeal (I used Bob’s Red Mill Organic Medium Grind)
1/4 cup unbleached all purpose flour
1 tsp …

Hope everyone had a fun and safe weekend! We stayed in town this long weekend and celebrated the holidays with friends. I had way too much food and way too many drinks that I could go a couple of days without any food.  Not that I am going to! I even tried to make some extra food to last us through the middle of the week. These muffins were meant to be breakfast for this week, but they disappeared before the weekend was over.
Siv frowned at the idea of Mango …

After a successful Banana Walnut Muffin experiment, I wanted to get a bit more creative on the baking front. This time I made a Banana Walnut Bread using pretty much the same recipe as the muffin, but substituted All Purpose Flour with Whole Wheat Pastry Flour and replaced most of the sugar with Maple Syrup.
Pure maple syrup is a good source of minerals,vitamins and amino acids and makes a great natural sweetener. You can substitute 1 cup of granulated sugar with 3/4th cups of maple syrup in recipes. Make sure …

Regular readers might know that I am not much of a baker. Actually, I don’t bake at all! Following a recipe to the exact measures is not something I can do very well. I always have to make some substitution or variation to make a recipe my own. Without having any basics in baking, I don’t have the know-how to make successful alterations, which makes it a very boring process. So I normally stay away from baking altogether.
Well, that changed last week when I had a week off, the first …

I made my first bread! While I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece, it didn’t turn out to be a total disaster, in fact it tasted pretty great! In the looks department, it was just okay… the top looked too dry and had some cracks, but the inside was really moist. I am so darn proud of my creation, I had this for dinner the night I made it.
It all started about three weeks ago, when I got an email from a favorite blogger of mine, funny gal Rajitha, inquiring if I wanted …