You’ve been there, right?

Your teenage son comes home, dumps his backpack on the kitchen floor, opens the refrigerator, drinks from the milk carton with one hand while grabbing a box of cereal, bag of chips, and fistful of cookies with the other, and somehow, through his full mouth, manages to mumble, “Remember the team dinner tonight—you have to bring dessert.”

Team dinner… tonight?! When… where…

“Hey, wait a minute, buddy, you NEVER told me about any team dinner. What do you mean, dessert? It’s 4:30! What time is this dinner?” (more…)

Do you have any idea how easy it is to make a tender, tasty muffin? It’s “easy as pie.” A real “piece of cake.” Both of which expressions puzzle me, because neither pie nor cake is anywhere near as simple to bake as a dozen muffins. Popovers can be problematic; brownies might burn. Even cookies are more complicated. But muffins? Give me a bowl and a spoon, and I’ll produce a dozen steaming muffins faster than CNN predicts a winner next Tuesday. Which should be about 6:10 a.m., Eastern time. (more…)

Ah, here we have it, one of the Great Mysteries of Life: where does the name Monkey Bread come from?

You’ve got monkeying around. And monkey wrench (as in don’t throw one in). Monkey business, monkey on your back, more fun than a barrel of… colder than a brass. For some reason, monkeys make their way into the popular lexicon WAY more often than other members of the Animal Kingdom. I mean, how often do you hear anyone say “giraffe in the middle,” or “armadillo see, armadillo do”? Point taken. (more…)

Ah, autumn! The frost is on the pumpkin.

And the frosting is on the pumpkin cake. Cream cheese frosting, to be precise.

What is it about rich, thick cream cheese frosting that sings so beautifully with anything pumpkin? I mean, they go together like movies and popcorn. (Or October and political ads.) There’s just something about the slightly exotic, mildly spicy taste of pumpkin, and the temptingly tangy, sumptuous and creamy flavor of cream cheese that simply says YES to my taste buds. (more…)

So, I’m plowing through my inbox this fine frosty October afternoon, and I see an email from my mom. The subject line reads like this:

Fwd: FW: Really quick choco…

Well, of course I can guess the rest of “choco…” So how can I resist seeing what this “really quick chocolate” something is?

I open the email, and it’s obviously one of those messages that’s being forwarded around the world and will be opened by a million people by nightfall. You know, like one of those JibJab videos or the latest Obama/McCain/Palin/Biden jokes. Here’s what the email said: (more…)

Hard times demand hard solutions. And I’m not talking any $750 billion bailout. For the price of just about 2 gallons of gas, you can bake a big, warm, cinnamon-y coffeecake, a slab o’ happiness that’s guaranteed to take everyone’s mind off of Wall Street AND Main Street, and focus it instead on something a lot more palatable: comfort food. (more…)

I don’t know the secret to never-fail popovers. Do you?

If so—if you’re happy with your popovers—read no further. Who am I to mess with your good thing? If you can reliably produce towering, golden, buttery popovers, leaking steam from their eggy (but mostly naked) interior, then you don’t need any help from King Arthur.

But if your popovers are more akin to a wet sponge—you know, squishy and sodden—or if they capriciously blow up like a balloon one day, and lie sullenly in their pan the next—then read on. (more…)

Pink. Pink. PINK! Pink ribbons. Pink jewelry. Pink pens and T-shirts and bath sponges. A pink KitchenAid mixer; pink M&Ms. Pink ribbon-shaped bagels at Panera. Pink Ribbon Barbie! Heck, even Everlast has joined the party with pink boxing gloves (I’m SO there…) (more…)

Boy, these cookies sure look like biscotti, don’t they? And they’re baked just like biscotti. And they taste… just like biscotti.

Fooled you! They’re mandelbrot.

A cookie by any other name would taste as sweet? (more…)

Challah? Me, a nice Irish-Catholic girl from Boston—what do I know about challah?

It was Halley again. “Let’s put up some recipes for the Jewish high holidays. We need a new section on the recipe site. What should we put in there?

“Cheesecake,” said Susan. “And honey cake. And I have this wicked good potato crust pie…” (more…)