Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Bread

A good friend came to me recently, after we had struggled to find time to spend together, and asked if our next get together could involve baking something for her mother. She had joined me last when I painted the chevron pattern in the kitchen, featured earlier this month, and while we worked we had been snacking on some pumpkin-chocolate chip cupcakes which we both enjoyed. We discussed, and decided to make something similar for her mother. We ended up making chocolate chip pumpkin bread, 2 loaves so my roommates and I got to enjoy the other. I dug up a basic pumpkin quick bread recipe in my trusty Betty Crocker Baking book, and all we changed was the spices, and adding the chips.

Chocolate Truffles

First off I have to say that this may be the world's messiest dessert. Well, maybe not, but it is right up there. And I suppose it is really only the making of it that is messy, eating them carries far less risk of making a mess of yourself than, say, eating ice cream from a cone on a hot day.

There was something cathartic about the messiness of the process though. Something calming that reminded me of my childhood fascination with mud balls. And mud pies. And digging in mud. and really anything that involved mud.

Case in point:

Here I am at approximately 10 years old at a family reunion in Big River, CA with my cousin Cameron. Notice how muddy my hands are, and the fine display of mud balls we are proudly showcasing for the camera. Also notice that I seem to be wearing purple pants. That is unrelated, I just thought it was worth noticing. I suppose it should be no surprise that I found it very soothing and familiar when the process of shaping these truffles on a warm fall day turned out like this:

Sunday afternoon baking- Classic Crinkle Cookies

You all know how I love alliteration. Classic Crinkle Cookies- how can I resist? This is my attempt at the Betty Crocker original, and no, these weren't made at Christmas time in my childhood, I wonder if I was missing out? These chocolate cookies are rolled in powdered sugar, and as they bake they expand, creating a web of cracks that show the dark chocolate center from underneath the powdered coating. The ingredient list is simple, all things I ordinarily stock for baking projects, and while they do take a while to make (up to 4 hours total) most of that time is for the batter to chill, the active prep time is actually quite short, and the preparation itself is simple. Since they require so long to chill in the fridge, I chose to make the batter in the morning and bake them in the late afternoon. In between, a trip to the Children's Museum with some friends seemed like a perfect diversion.

Sunday afternoon baking- Chocolate Fudge Tart

                   Consulting my cookbooks for a good sunday afternoon baking recipe.


There is one reason I will probably never be a great baker. Baking involves math, my worst enemy. If you were to ask me off hand "what is 7 + 45?" I would probably break down crying before I could give you an answer. Especially if counting on fingers isn't allowed. So far, I have managed to get away with doing quite a bit of baking without encountering much math at all. Today that changed.

This morning I decided to bake a simple chocolate tart. I went to the grocery store, and picked up my supplies (the store, by the way, was a mob scene due to the current water emergency in the Boston area, lines down each aisle of people eagerly waiting to buy bottled water, most stores have already sold out) and hurried home to get started. No sooner than I took my ingredients out of the bag was I slapped in the face with a real life, contextual math problem. The kind of thing math teachers always say will happen, how you will use math in your everyday life and be grateful that they taught it in school. Well, I guess that all never really got through to me, because as I thought it through my mind could not make sense of any of it.

If I have a 500 gram bar of chocolate, and the recipe calls for 140 grams, and my bar has 40 squares....how many squares do I need for this recipe? My pulse quickened, and my breathing grew labored. MATH RELATED ANXIETY ATTACK!  How can I ever hope to bake well if I can't figure out how many damn chocolate squares this tart will need?

Plantain-coconut cookies

I first started toying with this cookie recipe a few weeks ago, on a cold day in late march. The furnace in my building had been broken for over a week, and a final day in the 20s was enough to render my usually too warm apartment freezing. My roommates and I bundled in our sweaters and blankets, waiting for the oil company man to arrive. We ended up turning on the oven in an effort to warm up the house a bit. I decided at that moment: wouldn't it be better if we were slowly warming up with the oven on, and there were cookies? Yes. Of course. So I went out in search of interesting ingredients to bake into cookies. The following recipe is not exactly what I made that day, the first batch was a bit too cakey, and seemed to be missing something...This is a reworked version, adding honey and nutmeg to my original recipe, and reducing the flour and white sugar drastically, which I baked up yesterday, one of the warmest days so far this spring.

These cookies are sweet but not too sweet. Oats, chocolate chips, plantain, coconut, walnuts and nutmeg come together to create a wholesome cookie that tastes quite a bit like banana bread. These cookies are crispy at the edges and remain very soft inside.