The shipping date for The Baking Bites Cookbook is approaching quickly. I wanted to say thank you to everyone who has preordered a copy. You won’t have to wait much longer until your book is in the mail and on its way! For everyone else, you can still place an order and the books will ship as they come in. The list price for the book is $19.95, but if you order it directly from this site, it’s only $16.95, including free US shipping. If you buy 2 or more copies, the price is just $15.95 per book. Did I mention that The Baking Bites Cookbook makes a great gift? International shipping is available, although there is a small surcharge for overseas shipments.

Anna, at Cookie Madness, tried out one of the recipes from the cookbook this week. You can see her photo of my White Chocolate Oatmeal Crunch Brownies at her site. They’re definitely a favorite of mine and it sounds like she really liked them, too. You can read a bit more about the book at my original post about it.

If you want a chance to win a copy of the cookbook, I’m giving one away with a great Mini Pumpkin Cheesecake pan this week! All you need to do is leave a comment on the pumpkin cheesecake post (not this post!) with your favorite flavor of cheesecake to enter! And you might want to check back in over the next couple of weeks, because there might be another cookbook or two up for grabs in the near future!

Way back in January, I said that one of my goals for this year was to finish a huge project: to write a cookbook. Unlike the resolutions that involve pledging to use that gym membership everyday (or at all), this is one that I can check off the list. I’m thrilled to announce that The Baking Bites Cookbook is coming out this October!

The book has 51 recipes - and to give you some perspective on how many this is, it’s almost 4 months’ worth of posted recipes! Almost all of the recipes are new, never before seen treats. Only four have been featured on the site before and it’s only because they’re so popular (and such favorites of mine!) that I absolutely couldn’t resist putting them in. The cookbook is styled after some of my favorite single-subject cookbooks, with full-page, full-color photos of every recipe. It uses a large font, making it easy to read and follow - no need to squint at the pages or bend down close to the counter to figure out the next step in the recipe as you work.

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Some of the easiest world records to set are food records, because even though it isn’t easy to build a giant food item, it is a heck of a lot easier than, say, being the fastest person up Mount Everest. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, the world’s largest cupcake was unveiled this past weekend. It measured 12 inches tall and 24 inches wide, which is much smaller than I would have expected it to be, but it weighed in at an impressive 150.7-lbs. This figure included 60-lbs of frosting and 15-lbs of fudge filling. The cupcake was made by cakes.com, which is run by cake-decoration supplier DecoPac.

Personally, I think that the line in between a cake and a cupcake is a little fuzzy at this scale. Part of the point of a cupcake is that it is a cup-sized cake. Even the Giant Cupcake Pan from Wilton seems to acknowledge that it is just a cake shaped like a cupcake. Is that all this giant cupcake really is? A cake shaped like a cupcake? It’s still tasty looking, no matter what you decide to call it in the end.

Speaking of ends, most record-setting foods are sliced up and shared with onlookers. This cupcake was shipped out to a pig farm after it was measured and photographed at the Mall of America. About 4,000 smaller cupcakes were given out to onlookers.

Nestle’s oh-so-convenient tubes of refrigerated chocolate chip cookie dough are being recalled by the company due to several reported cases of E. coli illnesses that may have originated by eating raw cookie dough. So far, 65 people in 29 states have come up positive, according to the FDA. The E. coli strain has not been definitively linked to the cookie dough, but as there is reported to be a strong correlation between the raw dough and the illnesses, Nestle launched a voluntary recall this morning of all refrigerated cookie dough products. None of their other products are included in the recall.

It is worth noting that the directions on the cookie dough package strongly discourage eating the dough raw, as tempting as it may be, in all situations.

Sounds like a good reason to bake some chocolate chip cookies from scratch!

• Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies
• Strawberry Chocolate Chip Cookies
• Giant Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
• Bakery Style Chocolate Chip Cookies

The 44th Pillsbury Bake-Off began accepting entries a few months ago, and now the deadline for the famous contest is fast approaching. You only have one week to iron out the kinks in your recipes (or come up with new ones!) because entries close on Monday, April 20th. Don’t stress out if you aren’t sure what recipes you’re going to submit; several of last year’s finalists told me that they submitted their recipes on the last day of the contest.

The final cookoff will be held next spring in Orlando, Florida, and finalists will get a free trip down there (it’s a fun time!) to cook their dishes for a panel of food experts. The grand prize winner takes home 1 million dollars - the largest prize in any cooking/baking contest out there - and it’s worth tinkering with a favorite recipe that doesn’t use some of the eligible products to take a chance at that kind of prize. There are also prizes given out for each category, an award for the most innovative recipe and even two $5,000 prizes for the best recipes using Jif® Peanut Butter and Crisco® Cooking Oil (qualifying ingredients from sponsor companies).Not bad incentives to get in the kitchen and start cooking!

Some tips for coming up with winning recipes are below:

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Do you remember the scene in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where Willy Wonka introduces some three-course-meal gum, which gives the chewer the flavor experience of eating a full meal without any of the actual food (or the calories)? It seems that science has come up with a Wonka-like gadget that delivers the flavor of chocolate at the touch of a button - without the user ingesting a single calorie. The device, called Le Whif, is an inhaler that delivers a burst of flavored air, created using a flavored powder, to the user. It comes in plain chocolate, as well as in raspberry chocolate, mint chocolate and mango chocolate, and will be sold starting at the end of April.

The inventors speculate that they could move from these simple flavors to more complex ones - three course meals, a la Willy Wonka - in the near future.

I tend to think that these gadgets, while they may be satisfyingly novel, aren’t going to replace real food any time soon. This is partly because we do still need to eat to survive, but also because feel and texture are a huge part of eating and deriving satisfaction from food. A “whif” might taste like chocolate, but there is no way it is going to feel like cococa butter smoothly melting on the tongue.