Halloween is one of the fastest-growing holidays in America, in terms of dollars spent. What used to be an exercise in creative reuse of on-hand materials for costumes (my older sister drew a body-sized peanut on an old pillowcase one year, cut holes for her head and arms, and went as a Goober) and parties (my brother is famous for Halloween parties with honest-to-God bobbing for apples: each contestant is timed with a stopwatch) has become a blockbuster for the local party store.

If you’d like to get back to the make-your-own fun style of doing things, allow me to propose making some pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, King Arthur Flour was named one of the Top Small Workplaces in North America by the Wall Street Journal and Winning Workplaces. This is a real honor for our company, a wonderful indication that we’re on the right track with the open and supportive corporate culture we strive to foster here.

As an employee-owner, I have the pleasure of coming to work in a place where I feel respected, where my contribution is valued, and where I see caring demonstrated every day in interactions with customers and employees alike. So you know what? Honored as we all feel, I’m not really surprised to find out that King Arthur Flour ranks so highly. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Is there any more powerful draw to the kitchen than the smell of baking gingerbread? The unique combination of ginger, molasses, and cinnamon carries with it the feelings of warmth, home, and welcome. It’s a lot like the perfect hug on a plate.

Since gingerbread is so tied to everyone’s taste memories, everyone assumes that recipes for gingerbread are easy to come by. There are fewer around these days than you might think, because it’s not actually “trendy” right now. We surprised ourselves Read the rest of this entry »

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…) Read the rest of this entry »

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? Read the rest of this entry »

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…” Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the ne plus ultra of artisan bread.

The gold medalist (whoops, make that King Arthurist) of chewy loaves.

The Holey Grail. Read the rest of this entry »

I love regional food. There are specialties to be ferreted out all over the country, and no matter where you live, other exiles from your home region all have the same visceral reaction to a particular food that they grew up with.

Being a Jersey girl, I can’t live without Taylor Ham, bagels, sticky and crumb buns (the bakeries Down the Shore in Ocean City still make me swoon). As a child, we went down to Ocean City for family reunions. My grandfather was one of seven children, thus my mother had a healthy number of cousins. One of them, bless him, worked for the Tastykake company in Philadelphia. This family cousin arrived with cases of KandyKakes and Butterscotch Krimpets, which considerably brightened our lunchboxes for weeks afterward. Needless to say, as far as we were concerned this was a one of our coolest relatives. Read the rest of this entry »