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.

• When it comes to candy, turtles are usually a combination of pecans, caramel and chocolate. Bake List really improves on the basic recipe with Brown Butter Turtle Bars with Macadamia Nuts. These bars, inspired by a bakery in NYC, include both pecans and macadamia nuts in a rich caramel sauce. The sauce is sandwiched between layers of chocolate and graham cracker cookie. Better than a candy bar? Judging from the photos, it’s probably much, much better!
• If you’re getting sick of the standard strawberry shortcake, but not sick of fresh strawberries, try making a variation on the classic like Chocolate Strawberry Shortcakes, as Burghilicious did this week. The biscuits are deeply chocolaty, made with lots of cocoa powder to give them a tender texture and a nice depth. The not-too-sweet biscuits make a great contrast with the sweet berries, while the whipped cream-sour cream filling breaks up the intensity of the biscuit nicely with each bite. This biscuit base would work well with many other fruits, too.
• Fall usually means it’s time for pumpkin spiced baked goods to make an appearance. 6 Bittersweets made some Gluten Free Pumpkin Cupcakes to kick off the season. These cupcakes actually use a readily available mix of gluten free “all purpose flour” that you can find at most natural food stores, which makes them very easy to make even if you’re not used to baking gluten free. The finished cupcakes are moist, tender and a great treat for fall - whether you’re eating gluten free just for the cupcake or in general.
• Friands are small, moist cakes that usually have a fair amount of ground nuts in them. Technicolor Kitchen’s version uses coconut, instead of ground hazelnuts or almonds, for a distinctly tropical feel. These Toasted Coconut and Banana Friands feature both very finely ground coconut and slightly coarser shredded coconut, for a double dose of the coconut flavor. A single slice of fresh banana is pressed into the top of each one. These will be a bit more like cake than a coconut macaroon, but the overall feel of them (in terms of how lovely and moist they are) should be similar. They’re easy to make a sure to be a hit with anyone who has a soft spot for coconut desserts.
• Une Gamine dans la Cuisine used the Homemade Double Delight Peanut Butter Cookies recipe, a variation on the million-dollar Pillsbury Bake-off winning recipe from last year, as a jumping off point for some Nutella Peanut Butter Pillows. These cookies use a combination of peanut butter and Nutella in the filling to give them a chocolate hazelnut contrast to the peanut butter cookie exterior. The black and brown coloring also creates a nice contrast when you bite into each cookie.

• I have heard of a mock apple pie that uses saltine crackers in place of apples, relying on clever spicing to conceal the fact that there is no fruit inside. I haven’t heard of many other mock apple desserts, so I was surprised to see that Kara’s Kitchen Creations’s Zucchini Cobbler was described as a mock apple crisp and not as a savory dish. The secret is boiling the zucchini in lemon juice before adding them to the cobbler itself, then a generous amount of cinnamon and nutmeg into the filling and the soft texture is not unlike that of cooked apples.
• Speaking of zucchini, it never hurts to have an extra variation on zucchini bread lying around when zucchini season is at is peak. Real Mom Kitchen made an Orange Zucchini Cake that looks like a great use of the summer squash. The simple bundt cake orange juice concentrate and orange zest, and is topped with an orange cream cheese frosting. I don’t often frost bundt cakes, but this one looks absolutely lovely with a cloud of frosting adorning the top.
• Black and white cookies are a classic, and perhaps to preserve the color scheme, new flavors are not often introduced to them. Daydreamer Desserts bucked the trend and put a flavor twist on these cookies to make Espresso Black and Tan Cookies. They have espresso in the cookie base and in the frosting. The color scheme is a little nontraditional, but the flavors are good so it’s a nice overall variation on the original.
• Sweet, caramely dulce de leche goes well in so many dishes that it’s almost hard to use it up - because it’s so hard to choose on recipe over another! Dulce de Leche Muffins from Purple Cookie are fairly simple and actually don’t use that much dulce de leche, which means that they are a pretty good choice for a baked good if you don’t want to use up your whole jar at once. Don’t be fooled, though, these still have a ton of dulce de leche flavor because the caramel is blended right into the batter to infuse the whole muffin with sweetness.
• Caipirinha is pretty much known as *the* drink of Brazil. It is made with cachaça, a sugarcane liqueur, lime juice and some sugar over ice. It’s one of those drinks that manages to be refreshing, easy to drink and sneaks up on you at the last minute. The Cookie Shop used the flavors of the cocktail and made Caipirinha Truffles. The candies have a white chocolate base on which the cachaça and lime stand out just enough to evoke the drink. Rum could probably be substituted for the cachaça, but it is actually becoming a lot more popular and you will probably be able to track some down at a specialty retailer in your area.

• Alice Medrich’s Bittersweet Decadence Cookies have very little butter in them and your first thought, in looking at the recipe, might be that they are low in fat. On the contrary, these cookies more than make up for their lack of butter with a ton of melted chocolate that makes the cookies gooey and decadent. Lemonpi’s variation on the original is gluten-free and uses just a small amount of glutinous rice flour in the dough. Alice’s Cococa Fudge Cookies are her lower fat version of a similar recipe.
• Coffee and Vanilla’s Blueberry Crumb Cheesecake has a rich cream cheese layer studded with blueberries as its centerpiece, but it is the layers around it that make this cake a little more unique. The cheesecake has a crumb crust on the bottom and on the top. The crust and crumb topping are made from the same mix, with one packed down to provide a base for the cake and the other crumbled on top as a coffee-cake’s streusel topping might be.
• Pound cakes are know for being dense and tender, with a tight crumb and a high fat content. Eat My Cake Now tried out a recipe for a classic pound cake with a twist, a Light and Airy Pound Cake. The cake still has a very high fat content, but the primary difference between it and some other pound cakes is that the eggs are separated, then the egg whites are folded in at the end. This gives the cake a more open, less dense crumb and helps to make the cake seem less heavy overall.
• The Lemon Cheesecake Cupcakes from Cafe Fernando are individual cheesecakes baked in muffin cups. Each one has its own little crust pressed into the cup so it really does look like a miniature version of a full-sized cheesecake. The crust is made with crust gingersnap cookies and almonds, while the smooth cheesecake portion is a combination of heavy cream and cream cheese, touched with just a little bit of lemon and topped with fresh berries. These are great for parties, portion control and if you just want a little variation on a regular cupcake.
• La Tartine Gourmande’s Ginger Flavored Fig Tartelets are a great choice if you’re a fan of fresh figs. The simple tarts require very little work to put together. The crust is prepared and pressed into small tart pans. It is filled with a sprinkle of almond meal, sugar and grated ginger, then topped with fresh figs and butter before baking. The sugar adds just a bit of sweetness while the honey flavor of the roasted figs is allowed to be the star.