• Although I frequently make orange juice (and other citrus juices) at home, there are many juices that it simply doesn’t occur to me to make because they’re so easy to buy. Like orange juice, however, homemade can often be better than store bought and doesn’t need to be difficult. Kitchen Simplicity made a batch of Cranberry Juice at home starting with a bag of frozen cranberries. The best thing about this - aside from the fact that it’s not too difficult to do - is that you can really control the juice and add as much or as little sugar as you like to the finished product.
• Life’s A Feast baked up a batch of Light-as-Air Dark Chocolate Bundtlets that sound like a bit of a paradox. Light and chocolaty? The lightness in these mini bundts refers to the texture, which is made light by adding some zucchini that actually helps to create a soft and moist crumb, and quite a bit of butter, which makes the cake very tender. The chocolate comes from a lot of cocoa powder, giving the cakes a nice deep chocolate flavor and a great dark color.
• Chiffon pies are light and airy, almost like a mousse contained within a pie shell. Mostly, they’re stabilized with some gelatin to ensure that they hold their texture long enough to be served. How to Eat a Cupcake’s Pumpkin Chiffon Pie is a much fluffier version of traditional pumpkin pie that has all the same warm pumpkin spices. Topped with a pillowy layer of whipped cream, this pie is a great finish to a hearty holiday meal because it’s not too heavy but still very satisfying.
• Financiers are small, moist cakes that usually have a high proportion of ground nuts in the batter that give them a dense, yet tender texture. The Strawberry Honey Financiers at Amateur Foodie are extra moist because they use fresh, juicy berries and include a good amount of honey, which holds moisture into the financiers and keeps them fresh tasting even after a few days of storage. The cakes use ground walnuts, but you could experiment with pecans or almonds in these, too.
• The Bourbon Caramel Apple Pie Cookies from Evil Shenanigans are basically little apple pies, baked in mini muffin pans and made with a cookie dough crust that makes them easy to handle while you eat the bite-sized treats. The apple filling is baked into the cookie dough crust, and once they come out of the oven, the cookies are topped off with a bourbon caramel sauce that adds a decadent sweetness and butteriness to the treats.

• You don’t need to start breakfast off with muffins, scones or leftover apple pie - or any of these “traditional” breakfast items. Thinking outside the box a little, you can have brownies for breakfast. Specifically, you might want to try Gluten-Free Goddess’s Quinoa Breakfast Brownies. These brownies aren’t chocolate, but do have chocolate chips mixed in alongside some raisins, and a chewy texture that will definitely remind you of a fudgy brownie. The bars are made with a blend of wheat-free flours, brown sugar, maple syrup and olive oil.
• Whoever thought of adding chocolate chip cookie dough to ice cream had a great idea. Culinary Concoctions by Peabody took the ice cream out of the equation but kept the cookie dough in Chocolate-Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cookies. These cookies have chunks of soft cookie dough “truffles” in them. They’re not really truffles, but egg-less chocolate chip cookie dough that is very soft and stays soft to give you that cookie dough effect even after baking. Actually - adding ice cream back to these as ice cream sandwiches might not be a bad idea!
• Pears and ginger are a great combination of sweet and spicy. Purple Foodie’s Pear and Ginger Cake with Walnuts has both in it. The cake here is a simple butter cake with some ground ginger added to it to give it some depth. Sliced pears add a juicy topping to the cake, while the nuts add in a little bit of texture to the fruit. If you have some, candied ginger might make a good addition to this cake, especially if you like your ginger a little on the spicy side.
• If you’re looking for something a little different than the usual chocolate cake for an upcoming birthday, a Raspberry Chiffon Cake might just do the trick. Dodol & Mochi’s cake is brightly colored and fruity. A chiffon cake is a light cake, similar to angel food cake, that gets a lot of its height from beaten egg whites. This means that the cake is not heavy at all, but still delivers a lot of flavor. The cake has some raspberry puree folded into it before baking to give it color and flavor, and the layers of this cake are spread with raspberry jam.
• The Fruity Apple Spiced Swirls that Passionate Baker made are a great dish for fall, warm and spicy, filled with a mixture of apples, raisins, nuts. The swirls look a lot like cinnamon buns, only turned on their sides. The dough is a bit like a pie or tart dough, so unlike actual cinnamon buns, there is no yeast involved and the finished dough is sturdy enough to hold up to the hearty filling. The added bonus here is that these don’t take that long to whip up and can be ready for an pretty easy winter breakfast on a lazy weekend.

• Carrot cake is one of those dishes that can either be very good or very bad. The bad ones tens to go overboard with ingredients and put everything and the kitchen sink onto a cake. Eating SF took a simpler approach and emphasized the spices in a Carrot and Cardamom Cake. Cardamom is a great match for carrot because it’s citrusy, spicy flavor brings out the natural sweetness of the carrot.
• Noodle kugel is basically a casserole type of dish with noodles baked in a sweet or savory sauce. It’s a traditional dish - with many families I know - around the Jewish holidays, and it tastes better than it sounds. The sweet kugels are often made with cream cheese and have a very cheesecake-like texture. The Food Librarian’s Apple Raisin Noodle Kugel is a fairly typical example of the surprisingly simple and tasty dish.
• Baking Obsession’s Cornmeal Walnut Focaccia with Concord Grapes and Gorgonzola has a great mix of textures and flavors. The cornmeal gives it a slightly more rustic feel than similar breads, and the grapes and strong cheese give it a nice balance of sweet and savory. This type of focaccia can go well with a variety of dishes, but it hearty enough to be served with a salad and turn it into a really satisfying meal. You can also cut it up into smaller pieces and serve it as an appetizer.
• If you’re a fan of lemon desserts, the Lemon Cream Cake that What’s Cooking, Chicago? baked recently is rich, creamy and has loads of lemon flavor. The cake starts with a lemon-flavored chiffon cake, which is split in half is both filled and topped with a mixture of whipped cream and lemon curd. The cake is fluffy and moist, and will have the same general flavor of a lemon meringue pie with a completely different set of textures to accompany it.
• German Chocolate Cake is a layer cake made with German’s Sweet Chocolate (an actual type of chocolate produced by Baker’s that is similar to semisweet chocolate) and filled with a mixture of sweetened condensed milk, coconut and pecans. It’s decadent and has a great flavor profile, not to mention that the stick caramel filling has a nice chew from the coconut and crunch from the pecans. Wallflower Wonderland made some German Chocolate Cake Ice Cream recently. This version doesn’t use the sweetened condensed milk that is usually featured in the filling, but the smooth chocolate ice cream provides a nice base in the frozen variant. Now, if you serve this with a brownie or a slice of chocolate cake, you’ll really take it over the top.

Some people - lucky people - can really pinpoint that exact moment when they became interested in cooking or baking. I don’t have that exact sort of “ah ha” moment to recall, although I do have lots of enjoyable memories about food and cooking in general. I remember baking Christmas cookies with my mom and watching my grandfather make apple crisp, as well as watching some relatives head out to farmers markets to buy dinner and listening to others order takeout.

There is one thing that stands out from the pack slightly, and that is of my first kitchen gadget. It was my own tool and I used it whenever I could: a plastic eggbeater. I’m pretty sure this was intended to be a toy, but it certainly worked well enough to scramble an egg or two for breakfast.  The beaters are very narrow, so I don’t know that I would try it to whip egg whites or anything, but I still have it and it still works. I don’t use it, but I keep it around because it reminds me of those first exciting days of making my own food in the kitchen.

I can’t say that the eggbeater inspired me to start baking. That said, perhaps it was somehow indicative of the fact that I’d just keep upgrading eggbeaters until I ended up with a big Viking mixer in my kitchen!

This past Saturday, I headed up to San Francisco for the 2009 BlogHer Food conference. It’s the first of what I think will be an annual conference series from BlogHer and was aimed at food bloggers. All of the breakout sessions of the conference covered topics that would be of interest to people who write recipes, review products and just like to write about food in general. The topics varied widely from how to attract readers to your blog, how to take better food photos and how to translate your love of cooking or photography into other venues, to name just a few topics. The speakers included (by blog) Simply Recipes, Pioneer Woman, Veggie Venture, Kalyn’s Kitchen and Matt Bites, again to name just a few of the many, many bloggers in attendance.

I skipped the lunch served at the conference because it was - no kidding - frozen Italian food. A food conference is a great place for product placement, but not in place of what could have been a more interesting meal. I instead went out to lunch next door at the SFMoMA’s Cafe Museo with Cooking with Amy and San Diego Food Stuff. I noticed several other conference attendees in the room with us, as well. Lunch was delicious. I had a ham and fontina panini.

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• Turnovers are little pies that are made without all the fuss of a crust - especially when they use ready-made puff pastry dough. Pro Bono Baker’s Apple, Honey and Thyme Turnovers start with a cooked apple filling that is placed in puff pastry pockets and baked. The filling is a little bit more unusual than a standard apple pie filling, as they tend to include cinnamon more often than thyme, but it is a good one all the same. Pro Bono Baker includes a great tip, too, noting that the filling can be spooned over ice cream if you don’t want to wait for the turnovers.
• Recipe Girl is getting into the season with some of the best flavors of fall in a batch of Apple Muffins with Maple Glaze. The muffins are light in texture, thanks to the inclusion of some quick cooking oatmeal, and have both maple syrup and fresh apple chunks in them. Each one is topped off with a pecan half, for a little color and a little crunch, and a quick and easy glaze made with maple syrup.
• The Double Dark Chocolate Cherry Cookies that Eat Me Delicious baked are very dark, loaded with chocolate and sweetened with a handful of dried cherries. It’s an overall great flavor combination, but the thing that really stands out about these cookies is their size: they’re huge. The cookies are a slice and bake recipe, and cookies of this type tend to be thin. These are sliced into 1-inch thick chunks before baking, so you end up with a big, soft, satisfying cookie.
• I believe it when Farmgirl Fare says that her Baby Shortbread Bites with Mini Chocolate Chips and Toffee Bits are a great recipe. The cookies, which are described as being somewhere between a shortbread and a butter cookie, are loaded with flavorful bits of chocolate and toffee. While the cookies could be made in any size, this recipe keeps them small. They’re cute and perfect for munching with a glass of milk. If you’re looking for recipes that will ship and store well for the holidays, Susan says that these taste even better they day after they are baked and ship beautifully.
• Another apple recipe comes in the form of the Toffee Apple Crisp at Maple n’ Cornbread. This is a fairly straightforward crisp recipe that has a lovely topping of oats, brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg blended with butter - along with an unexpected handful of toffee bits. Toffee always goes well with apples, and adds its own buttery sweetness to the crisp topping.