When the holidays come around, many people start to do more entertaining than usual. When problems arise in the kitchen, it is easy to pick up the phone and call your mom, mother in law, grandmother, father, or any other member of your family who can cook to give you some last minute advice. But it’s good to have a backup plan in place if family can’t help you out - or if you’re simply too embarrassed to ask! One solution is to browse through your favorite food blog for holiday tips. A better solution if you don’t have a specific question in mind is to call a holiday hotline to take to a live person. There are two big ones that should be pretty helpful: the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line and the Crisco Pie Hotline.

The turkey hotline is staffed with turkey-cooking experts who can help you on everything from brining time to roasting temperature. The number is 1-800-BUTTERBALL. They staff more than 50 experts who have made more turkeys than most of us will ever see. You can also find tips on their website, or check out the version of their website for mobile devices and you can text the word “TURKEY” to 36888 for tips and reminders.

The Crisco Pie hotline is designed to help you out with pie crust and pie making. The number is 1-877-FOR-PIE-TIPS (1-877-367-7438). Unlike the turkey hotline, which is only available in November and December, it is actually available year-round, but as Thanksgiving approaches and pie season kicks into higher gear, they extend the hours: Nov 16 - Nov 25: Monday - Friday (8 - 8 EST) and Dec 14 - Dec 23: Monday - Friday (8 - 8 EST). During the year, they are open Monday - Friday (9 - 7 EST).

• Nami Nami used a bunch of not-quite-right bananas to bake a batch of tasty Banana Muffins with Pecans. Her post is a great reminder that, while it is always good to use great-tasting fruits in baked goods and desserts, baking is a great way to improve the flavor and texture of less than perfect fruits by enhancing them with other ingredients. The recipe itself is a lovely looking recipe for some basic banana muffins that could easily become everyday breakfast favorites.
• Oatmeal, coconut, sweetened condensed milk and lemon all come together in Eat My Cake Now’s easy to make version of Lemon Squares. The lemon squares have a creamy, sweet-tart center thanks to the sweetened condensed milk and lemon, and a flavorful crust that is both crisp and chewy. It’s easy to make because the bottom crust and the top crust are made from the same mixture, so you can put this dessert together in only a few minutes before popping it into the oven.
• In spite of the name, the Pistachio Coffee Ring baked by One Pefect Bite doesn’t include any coffee. It’s actually a sweet yeast bread, made rich with the addition of butter and milk, that is quite like a coffee cake. It has a spiral of pistachio nuts in the center that add crunch and color. It looks quite impressive and is not too difficult to make - and definitely worth experimenting with yeast for pistachio fans out there.
• Coconut Coffee Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Frosting from 6 Bittersweets, by contrast, do include coffee. Coffee and coconut add relatively subtle flavors to the cupcake base and really serve the purpose of highlighting the Peanut Butter Swiss Buttercream that tops these off, making the frosting seem even richer by comparison. The frosting is a good stand-alone recipe, too, and would make a nice topping for chocolate, vanilla or banana cupcakes.
• One of the most indulgent Thanksgiving side dishes you can have is candied yams, or candied sweet potatoes. Rich with butter and sugar, and topped with marshmallows, it’s a dish decadent enough to be dessert. Bake And Destroy has some Vegan Sweet Potato Cupcakes that seem to turn this classic into dessert! The sweet potato cupcakes use canned sweet potato puree and lots of warm spices. They are topped with candied walnuts and marshmallows, which are bruleed before serving. You can find vegan marshmallows at some natural food stores, but you can also rely on regular marshmallows if you’re not vegan and want to give the recipe a try.

Bon Appetit online is hosting a virtual bakeoff called Blog Envy, featuring some favorite recipes from some of my favorite and your favorite food blogs! The recipes aren’t all specifically for the holidays, but all of them make great holiday treats. The recipes are broken down into categories: Cakes, Cookies, Custards, Pies and Miscellaneous Desserts. My Maple Coconut Blondies are listed in the Cookie category, so feel free to cast your vote for them, especially if you’ve tried the recipe already.

Why vote? By voting, you are entered into a drawing to win a brand new Kitchen Technology Center. This gadget is a digital cookbook, high-definition TV, photo frame, and wireless Internet device all in one - and it comes in a protective case so you won’t splash it as you prep recipes from your favorite food blogs and watch cooking shows online in the kitchen. To check out all the entries (including mine!), go to the Blog Envy main page. As you scroll through the entries, you’ll be able to click through to different blogs to read the recipes and give them, then select your favorite to vote for it!

It’s not an ingredient that you’ll see called for too often in American cookbooks, but you’re sure to see custard powder mentioned in cookbooks published in the UK or Australia, or even in the pages of foodie magazines imported from either country. I used some recently in my recipe for Vanilla Slices. Custard powder is not dried, powdered custard. It is actually a powdered mix used to make custard, and it is very similar to the type of mix used to make instant pudding in the US. Just combine it with milk, cook to thicken, and you have custard (or pudding)!

Custard powder is primarily made up of thickeners that give the pudding its texture. Cornstarch is usally the biggest component, since it is great for thickening liquids, disolves easily and is almost foolproof. The powder also contains flavorings - vanilla is the one you’re most likely to find in a “standard” custard powder - and a hint of yellow coloring. Yellow coloring gives the custard just enough color to look as though there are plenty of eggs in it, as most basic custards are thickend with eggs instead of powder.

You can find custard powder at some specialty markets and some markets that specialize in imports from other countries. If you’re traveling abroad, you should be able to find it pretty easily. Birds’s is a big name in custard powder, but even Pillsbury produces it for other markets. If you can’t find it, instant pudding mix is a great substitute.

• Meringue and custard are generally at opposite ends of the texture spectrum, one light and airy and one dense and silky. Perhaps that’s why they make such an interesting combination in No Special Effects‘ Filipino Meringue-Custard Roulade. The outer shell of this roulade is made from a soft meringue made with 10 egg whites. The 10 egg yolks leftover all go into a custard, along with some sweetened condensed milk, to make a very rich (and very satisfying) filling. The finished dessert has a great balance between the layers of the roulade.
• I often make a Cranberry Orange Bread for the holiday season and I like the idea of a Cranberry Orange Buckle, which Family Style Food made as more of a comfort food take on the flavor matchup. This buckle is like a moist cake, loaded with fruit and topped with a smattering of crumbs to create a nice crisp topping. I think that you could serve this as a coffee cake, but serving it warm while the berries are at their juiciest seems like it might be the best way to enjoy this recipe.
• Everyone who was tempted by my Snickerdoodle pie should take a peek at Recipe Girl’s Pumpkin Snickerdoodles. This snickerdoodle variant has pumpkin puree in the cookies, giving them a lovely orange tinge to their color and a slightly more cake-like consistency than the original. They’re got great flavor and travel a bit better than pumpkin pie does, especially if you’re going to be bringing dessert to a far off family gathering!
• Clumbsy Cookie baked up one of the most upscale versions of Oreos I’ve seen in a while, Oreo Macarons. This take on the classic french cookie has actual Oreo cookies in it, to give the macarons an authentic flavor. The chocolate wafers from the cookies are ground up and incorporated into the almond-meringue shell of the macaron. The leftover filling is actually used to fill the cookies, so you get very close the the “real” flavor of the oreo in a totally different vehicle. Still looks like they taste good when dunked in milk!
• I’ve never seen a pumpkin flavored Ben and Jerry’s ice cream in my grocer’s freezer, but Please Pass the Pie has their cookbook and made Ben & Jerry’s Pumpkin Ice Cream at home. This recipe is a must try for pumpkin pie fans, since it contains pumpkin puree and is spiced up with a mix of pumpkin pie spices. Try to make sure your spices are as fresh as possible for the best flavor, and consider serving scoops of this in mini graham cracker crusts for a pie-like presentation!

I am a big fan of coconut and try to use it in recipes whenever I can. Coconut milk and coconut cream are great, but really I like the taste and texture of shredded coconut and that is generally the type of coconut that I - and probably most of you bakers our there - use most. The most commonly found in grocery stores in my area and in most of the US is sweetened shredded coconut, but unsweetened shredded  coconut is also easily available and I often get asked which is better for baking for use in a certain recipe or if the two can be substituted for one another.The simple answer is that the two are pretty much identical in how they behave in recipes, mixing in easily and adding a nice, chewy texture. You can use these two types of coconut interchangeably in a recipe and get good results. That said, if a specific type is called for in a recipe, I would try to stick with it because the two coconuts taste a bit different and will give you a different result. If no specific type is called for, you can use what you have on hand or whichever type you prefer.

The sweetened coconut has sugar added to it before drying, so it tends to be a bit sweeter and more moist from the outset. The sugar actually helps to bring out the flavor of the coconut, but since most baked goods will have sugar in them anyway, this isn’t necessary to ensure a good finished result and unsweetened will still perform well. There is a small chance that sweetened might be slightly too sweet in a recipe that calls for unsweetened, but the sweetened coconut is not so sweet on its own that it should really throw off a recipe in that way.