The NC Bakery Tour continues! I met my sister at Gugulhupf, a German bakery in Durham. In case you were wondering, there are a whole bunch of bakeries in Durham, but most of them are closed on Sundays. Now I know!
Anyway, it was a beautiful spring day, so we chose our pastries and sat down at a table outside. Pictured above is Rachel’s choice, the mango mousse torte.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you might remember my post about the bakery tour of Manhattan that my friend Laura does annually for her birthday. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can find it here!)
Considering Laura has been doing this for five years, I’m not sure what took me so long to come up with the idea to do my own version. However, I’m going to do it a little differently. Rather than having one day where a group of friends travel from bakery to bakery in one city, I’m going to visit as many bakeries as I can in the entire STATE! I have no idea how long that’s going to take, but anyone is welcome to join at any point!
Last week, I made my first two stops in a small town called Fuquay-Varina. I met up with fellow dessert-lover Ashley, who took me first to her favorite cupcake shop, CupCakeBite.
AMAZING photo courtesy of Julie!
And now for something completely different – a savory recipe!
There’s a backstory attached to this post, so I’ll start from the beginning. I discovered Julie of Willow Bird Baking through LiveJournal (yes, that’s still a thing), and at first I just enjoyed her recipes. Then, I realized that she lives near me! I immediately emailed her and asked if she would be interested in baking together.
I was thrilled when she responded that she would love to meet up with me! Unfortunately, it took a long time for our schedules to match up, but we finally made it happen this past weekend! Now, here’s the part where I explain how the savory recipe fits into the mix.
I love sprinkles. In fact, sprinkles and I have had an extensive love affair over the years. I have college memories of dumping spoonfuls of sprinkles on top of my ice cream and yogurt. The sprinkle yogurts that you can buy in the grocery store don’t come with anywhere near enough sprinkles for me. Something else I love is Purim! For a full history lesson on Purim, check out Chabad.org, but basically, it’s another Jewish holiday where the Jews were almost massacred, they weren’t, so we eat. The food that we eat on Purim are called hamantaschen, which is a Yiddish word meaning “Haman’s pockets.” (Haman is the bad guy in the Purim story, in case you didn’t click the link above!) We should probably eat food that commemorates Esther or Mordecai (the heroes of the story), but who am I to mess with tradition? Well, I messed with tradition a little bit. Continue reading
Ok, so I like baking with bananas. I bought a few to make cookies to send to my grandmother (that’s a separate blog post!), and I bought a few extra also. I told the husband that he could eat them if he wanted to, because last time I bought extra bananas, I nearly chopped his hand off when he went to take one.
By the middle of last week, none of the bananas had been eaten. Husband was working from home, so I told him to grab all my Baked books (yep, I have four) and pick a banana recipe for me to make. He chose a recipe from Baked Elements, which is a really cool dessert cookbook that has the recipes put into categories based on their main ingredient.
This is a recipe that could have gone in the banana category or the peanut butter category, but the Baked guys chose to put it in the peanut butter category. Bananas were definitely included, but the peanut butter is the reason that the husband chose it, so peanut butter is certainly an acceptable choice.
I bought bananas to make these special healthy cookies that my Grandmother loves to mail to her, and I bought some extra bananas to do something else with. So I was searching Pinterest for banana recipes (follow me!), and I spotted banana bread scones, which I thought sounded genius.
When I was a kid, my family got bagels almost every Sunday. Sometimes, muffins were picked up from the bagel store as well, and my favorite was a cinnamon coffee cake muffin.
Unfortunately, these did not measure up to those bagel store muffins, but they’re pretty darn good anyway. I have been searching for cinnamon chips for months without any luck. I forget what we were talking about, but I mentioned to my husband about a week ago that I wished I could find cinnamon chips. He was confused, because he had just seen cinnamon chips at Harris Teeter.
I got a bundt pan for Chanukah! It’s the Nordicware Anniversary bundt pan, recommended by the Baked guys (of course).
I wanted to make a bundt cake from the “Baked Occasions” book, but I also had to play to my audience for the particular occasion, which was Christmas. As someone else was bringing a chocolate dessert, that knocked out the particular bundt recipe I had in mind. So I went searching, and found the perfect recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction – Glazed Apple Bundt Cake.
Not only was it a flavor that everyone would love, but I still have some apples left from apple picking in October! So this cake was baked completely from scratch, including self-picked apples.
I just got back from a long weekend in New York, so you know I ate tons of good food! The photos above are all from my excursion to Baked in Brooklyn – more about that in a bit.
I spent my first day and night in New York in Westchester with my parents, so nothing terribly exciting there. For my first city food, I went Italian for dinner, and then went with ice cream for dessert, despite the cold and rain.
It’s time for another trip post! This time, I went to visit friends in Boston. My friend Shaina and I spent almost all Saturday baking!
First, we made a chocolate birthday cake! It was requested that I somehow merge chocolate and strawberry into a delicious cake, so I found a recipe online and tweaked it. I kept the cake recipe the same, but the middle layer was a strawberry puree. I changed that part, because I’m not a fan of fruit purees in cakes like that. I find that they rarely add anything taste-wise, although they do look pretty.
dessertaholicsbakery.com 