I’ve been working on a lot of gift lists to suit various themes, but I still feel like I haven’t hit upon some of the best gifts that are out there. So, I’ve decided to make up a little list for fans of bakingsheet that has some of the best gifts that I can think of. These are all things that I have, have used, want or otherwise recommend and are pretty much guaranteed to please anyone who is a fan of this blog. Now, you might not want to get them for yourself (buying presents for yourself right before major holidays is a major no-no), but you can forward this post to friends and loved ones to nudge them in the right direction:
The Good Home Cookbook
– I was one of the recipe testers for this brilliant collection. My name is even listed in the back of the book – true, it’s with all the other testers, but it was exciting for me to see regardless. The recipes are easy, work well and it covers just about everything the home chef might possibly want to make. The pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie, cheese bread and black walnut cake are all great.
I think that Beth Hensperger is a brilliant baker and The Bread Bible is one of my favorites, although all her books are excellent. The range of breads, from Dutch Crunch Bread and Orange Cinnamon Swirl Bread to whole grain breads, tortillas, scones, quick breads and even bread-machine breads, you can find everything in here. Other bread books I highly recommend are Paul Hollywood’s 100 Great Breads and Baking with Julia for breads and other things.
For non-breads, I really enjoyed Dorie Greenspan’s new cookbook Baking: From My Home to Yours, which has tons of great recipes, great photos and great ideas. Just about every recipe in the book sounded appealing. I already made Chewy, Chunky Blondies and Cinnamon Chocolate Squares and am planning on trying the Cranberry Lime Galette and Apple Cheddar Scones in the not-too-distant future. I also, as always, highly recommend anything by Maida Heatter. Other top authors in my book are Donna Hay, Bill Granger (yes, I know he’s not primarily a baker) and David Lebovitz, to name but a few.
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Speaking as someone who chronically does this, pears are an underutilized fruit when it comes to baking and dessert. This is a shame because they have great flavor, work well with a variety of spices and are easy to bake because they already have a soft texture and you don’t have to worry about undercooking them (it can occasionally be a problem with apples, which is why many apple muffin recipes call for them to be shredded, or finely diced).
This is a pear bundt cake, relatively low in fat and made with pear sauce, which I found at Trader Joe’s. Applesauce can easily be used instead without sacrificing anything in terms of flavor. The cake has a tender, but firm, crumb of the kind that is ideal for pairing with coffee or tea, when you want to pick up the slice of cake and eat it with your fingers, rather than delicately nibbling off a plate. The pieces of pear are wonderfully moist and blend in with the cake well. You would never know that it was low in fat.
Tempted? I hope so, because I loved the way this cake turned out. Unfortunately, I spilled coffee all over my notes for the recipe and can no longer make out my final version. I’m going to go back through my notes and piece it together again (update: the recipe is up now!), but I couldn’t resist putting the photo up now. I’ll bake another cake, if I must (not a big sacrifice, I assure you), to get it right again.
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I go back and forth, trying to decide whether I prefer chewy cookies or crisp ones. More often than not, I’ll take the crispy cookies because most cookies that claim to be chewy don’t really end up being exactly what I had in mind. There are exceptions to this general rule, like these Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies, but there is only one type of cookie that will consistently turn out to have a good chew: peanut butter. If you bake the cookies at a low temperature, they will develop an appealing and addictive chew. The problem here is that they are peanut butter flavored. I finally figured out how to get around that and still achieve the same chew.
The secret? Cashew butter.
I made some homemade cashew butter on Slashfood and used it in a standard peanut butter cookie recipe. I usually make mine crispy, but this time I took a tip about baking time from Elise to try for chewy ones.
The cookies turned out perfectly chewy and, incredibly, you couldn’t taste cashew at all. The flavor is so mild, lightly sweet and vaguely buttery, that it just blended into the cookie! Everyone was asking how on earth I ended up with such chewy cookies. Of course, you’ll have to diclose your “secret” to anyone with a nut allergy, but otherwise you can try this with chocolate chips, raisins, or any other add-in you like in your cookies.
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Baked apples are something that I don’t make very often because it is just so much easier and faster to eat the apple as it is. Of course, when you do that, you’re not getting the warmth and tenderness that a baked apple has, which can be very satisfying on a winter day.
The apples are very easy to make, since they’re basically just apples that are baked in the oven until they are very tender. Anything else – fillings, spices, etc – is completely optional. I recommend peeling off most of the skin before baking as it tends to get kind of tough. For the apples I made here, I used a potato peeler to remove a spiral strip, but it would be easier to peel vertical strips and would be equally as effective.
I used some of the streusel topping that I made here to top off the apples after removing the core and stuffing them when chopped pecans and raisins. It’s not an exact science, but I like the fact that having some flour in the mixture gives it a crisp top. You can just use sugar and cinnamon, if you prefer. The amount you’ll need of everything varies based on how many apples you’re going to make, but the baking time should be the same whether you’re doing one or a dozen.
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