Tag: ginger

Bread of the Month: Loafing beyond pumpkin spice

Despite my love of autumn, I have to admit I get sick of all the pumpkin spice. There, I said it. Maybe it’s more the homogeneous mainstream concept that pumpkin spice represents that is less appealing to my taste.Yes, it’s become the hallmark of the fall season (which, according to […]

Scone of the Month: Speaking of sweet potatoes

Sometimes I am a rebel. When the rally cry is pumpkin spice, I start to think about sweet potatoes. Or should I call them garnet yams, which is what the red-skinned, orange-fleshed creatures most of us call sweet potatoes really are (the jewel sweet potato is another version of the […]

Cookie of the Month: Hunting an Irish ‘biscuit’

I can certainly be accused of “procrastibaking” that “practice” of baking when you should (“should”?) be doing something else (I’m also guilty of its flipside — procrastinating on getting baking projects done). But in that same vein, I also fall under the spell of what I call “escape baking” or […]

Steeping in the recipes beloved by Vincent Price

The name Vincent Price, to most people ,immediately conjures something at the minimal spooky or sinister, at the most the stuff of nightmares. For decades, Price (who died in 1993), with his moody ominous presence (in the characters he portrayed) and THAT VOICE that was at once irresistible and shiver-inducing, […]

Taking a break with Molasses Coffee Cake

Two years ago, Northern California was ablaze the first of two fall seasons where wildfires raged and devastated communities,  and for weeks darkened the skies and filled the air with a smoke that choked and permeated the atmosphere. It was during that first season of fires that, grateful to have […]

Slicing and baking through the holidays

[I]’ve been pretty obsessed with slice-and-bake cookies for…awhile. Like many things I become obsessed with, I spend most of my time obsessing and not enough time doing. Every Christmas cookie season, it has been my aim to have a catalog of cookie logs in my freezer, ready to go, so […]

Trying out two winter tonics

[I] like the word “tonic.” It has a reality-based sense of comfort and a tinge of humor for the extent it’s been applied to things that aren’t necessarily…good for you. What it seems to connote most, for me, is something you can make to heal yourself. Whether it’s a hair […]