my baking exploits.

let’s turn our thoughts to baking. because, if there’s one really big new thing in my life after this summer, it’s my exponentially-increasing confidence in my baking abilities.

in short, i’m gettin’ my bake on. somethin’ fierce.

after a prior fiasco with an attempt at banana bread, i nailed it. not only did i craft 2 perfect loaves of chocolate-chip-walnut-banana-bread, but i had enough batter to make a half-dozen muffins, too. that shit was tasty:

tasty-ass banana bread.

tasty-ass muffins

so i gifted the 2 banana breads and polished off the muffins for breakfast (and lunch) (okay, and dinner) for a few days.

yesterday, i went about the tall task of totally winging a cookie recipe. made it up, based on prior cookie success, a desire to experiment with thicker, doughier cookies, and a tip from a web site that led to bumpier, “chunkier” looking cookies.

these are chocolate-chip-walnut-cookies and they are totally fucking bad-ass:

bad-ass cookies.

bad-ass close-up of bad-ass cookies.

this blog is the tastiest.

a question i get asked often is “what do you do?”

after they laugh at my answer (“i’m unemployed”) people generally follow-up with “well, what do you do all day?”

the answer? i bake.

i bake a lot.

today, i got it into my head to make dark chocolate m&m cookies. see, anyone can make m&m cookies. but i thought it a rather stroke of genius to make ‘em with dark chocolate m&m’s.

this was my first foray into cookies from scratch. followed a decent-looking recipe. beat my sugar and butter and eggs and flour and such. added my m&m’s. then i baked a first batch — but they were too big and therefore too thin and the edges burnt while the middles stayed doughy. so they wound up in the scrap heap — in what i’ve been referring to as the cookie mush:

cookie mush

fortunately, the next batch of smaller cookies turned out much better:

good-lookin' cookies.

but i had some dough left over. so i tried an experiment and made a cookie loaf. that didn’t work out so well:

cookie loaf mush.

what a delicious adventure!

stay tuned for more madcap tales from the oven.