Anyone who has been in a Starbucks lately has seen Starbucks Via. The coffee company has been promoting their new instant coffee like crazy, so it’s pretty hard to miss. If you were lucky, you might have even gotten a free sample or two in a promotional taste test. I say “lucky” because Via is actually excellent for an instant coffee (and quite a bit better than some regular coffees). Starbucks came up with a new process to produce it, so it is not the same as the freeze-dried instant coffee that populates store shelves, nor does it taste anything like that watery, bland stuff. Via comes in two flavors - Colombian and Italian roasts - and tastes fresh and strong. It also dissolves easily in both hot and cold water, thanks to that new production process, so it can be used any time.

While I actually have taken a big like to taking a few packets of Via when I travel, I have found that it is an excellent baking ingredient in the home, too. Adding it into a recipe that calls for coffee flavoring is like adding a whole cup of  coffee with just a little bit of powder. It definitely packs in much more flavor than regular instant coffee and incorporates much more seamlessly. This means that there is no need to dissolve it in a bit of hot liquid before adding it to a batter; you can stir it into dry ingredients just as you would with any ground spice, and it will blend perfectly into your finished product. The Colombian is good, but the Italian has a darker and stronger flavor, more like espresso. Via is a little more expensive than a generic instant coffee, but definitely well worth the price for the flavor and the convenience. I think that it is actually easier to use than the instant espresso powder that I usually use, and pretty much ties with Trablit coffee extract for flavor. Definitely worth keeping a box around the pantry if you like to use coffee flavoring in your baked goods or other dishes.

When I use toffee in a recipe, like Toffee Palmiers, I usually wait until I have some big pieces of toffee around and chop them up to use. This means that I use it more around the holidays, when toffee seems to be more widely available in stores. There is an alternative to waiting for big blocks of candy to chop up and that is to use Heath Bits o’ Brickle Toffee, which is packaged, chopped toffee make by Hershey’s. This toffee is very convenient and really tasty, with notes of caramel and almond to it. It’s the center portion of a Heath Bar, basically. They’re also very light and crisp, and stay that way during baking without turning into a hard mass of sugar that you can’t bite into.

The only downside is that they’re not kidding when they say “bits.” The pieces of toffee are very small, a bit larger than a sprinkle but much smaller than a chocolate chip. They mostly stay crisp during baking, but some of the smaller pieces will kind of melt into a cookie dough or cake batter, leaving you with the flavor and not the crunch. This isn’t a bad thing, but it is something to keep in mind if you’re looking to have larger, more noticeable chunks of toffee in a dessert. Otherwise, these taste great and can be found at most grocery stores, so they’re worth keeping around the pantry and are a great addition to an otherwise boring batch of chocolate chip cookies.

Puff pastry is a very easy product to work with, which is one of the reasons that it is a staple in many bakers’ freezers. It helps that it has a wonderfully light, crispy and flaky texture and a buttery flavor, too. Homemade puff pastry is great when you have a bit of time to make it, but store-bought is the way to go most of the time for the sake of convenience and reliability. You can shape the pastry into tarts and turnovers, as well as using it in sheets. If you’re going the store-bought pastry route to begin with, you can also take a shortcut when it comes to shaping the pastry by buying ready made pastry cases, like Pepperidge Farms Puff Pastry Shells. Available in two sizes, these pre-cut discs of pastry bake up into vol-au-vent (hollow, cylinders of puff pastry) that can be treated like tart shells and filled with a variety of hot and cold, savory and sweet fillings.

The star-shaped discs of pastry baked up beautifully, rising high and golden brown above the baking sheet, just like the picture on the box. I defrosted them completely before baking, as I would with puff pastry. They were easy to use and held up well to liquid/wet fillings without becoming mushy. For these, you pull off the top circle - helpfully labeled “top” - to create a pocked that is ready to fill. The top can be replaced or simply eaten. I opted for the latter.

The only drawback to using these is value compared to starting with sheets of pastry. While you have the convenience of ready-to-use pastry cases, you only get six in a box (of the large size; more in a box of minis). That said, unless you’re really planning to go all out for a huge gathering, six should be plenty most of the time.  I would still get them again because the results were good, but it’s something to keep in mind if you’re going to need a lot.

At one time, you could search for cinnamon on the spice aisle at the grocery store and see just a plainly market bottle staring back at you. No country of origin listed, no special variety mentioned. In most stores these days, the selection looks quite a bit different, with various brands and types of cinnamon to choose from.  Is there a difference between the brand that goes for $.75 per oz. and $8 per oz.? And is it worth tracking down the fancier spices even if you need to go to a mail-order catalog to do so?

In the latest issue of Cook’s Illustrated (Nov/Dec 2009), the test kitchen set out to answer these questions with a lot of cinnamon and a panel of taste-testers. Cinnamons were rated by heat, complexity and texture, in fairly plain applications (mixed into applesauce) and in baked goods. By the end of the experiment, the tasters determined that there was a clear difference in spice from brand to brand. The favorite cinnamons - which did tend towards the expensive - had complex flavors that came through distinctly even in baked goods. The “recommended with reservations” cinnamons were milder and less likely to stand out on their own in a cookie recipe. Favorites included Penzey’s Extra Fancy Vietnamese Cassia Cinnamon, Durkee Ground Cinnamon and Smith And Truslow Organic Cinnamon. The “recommended with reservations” cinnamons included many easy to find store brands, like Spice Islands Saigon Cinnamon, McCormick Gourmet Saigon Cinnamon and McCormick Ground Cinnamon.

In all cases, the freshest cinnamons performed the best. Often, these were the mail-order spices which weren’t sitting around in storage at a grocery store. You can  still get the most out of your cinnamon no matter which brand you use by replacing your jar (if you don’t go through it quickly, which I tend to do) at least once each year.

Homemade cookies just about always beat store bought, prepackaged cookie doughs. They’re more fun to make - especially if you’re looking for an activity to do with your kids - they’re tastier and they don’t have any strange ingredients, like preservatives, in them. The only advantage of the prepacked doughs is that they’re quicker and more convenient if you absolutely don’t have time to make dough from scratch. Pillsbury recently introduced a new line of prepackaged cookie dough called simply Cookies that give packaged cookies a push closer to homemade. The real selling point is that they are not made with any artificial ingredients. In fact, the ingredient list of the cookies reads just like a recipe ingredient list would (flour, brown sugar, eggs, vanilla, etc.). I had a chance to taste the Peanut Butter Cookies when I visited General Mills a few weeks ago and was quite impressed with them. They were nice and chewy, and they had a great peanut butter flavor. They are made with shortening (non-hydrogenated), so they don’t have a real buttery flavor to them, but that’s not a drawback in a peanut butter cookie where you want the peanuts to be the star.

Now, I’m still going to make my cookies from scratch, but I do think it’s nice to know that there is good store-bought option out there if I need some cookies in a pinch or if a friend who is short on time (or ingredients) needs a recommendation.

I much prefer my homemade bran muffins to just about any bran muffin I’ve either had from a store or made from a mix, but that doesn’t stop me from keeping an eye out for healthy options when they pop up. Trader Joe’s Triple Berry Bran Muffins are a new product I spotted while out shopping last week. I’ve had good luck with some of the TJs mixes in the past, so I thought I’d give these a try. The muffins have whole wheat flour, wheat bran,oat bran and a combination of dried cranberries, blueberries and raspberries.

The directions couldn’t be easier: add two eggs, a cup of water and bake. My baking time was much less than the time recommended on the box. I think I baked these for about 18 minutes, where the box suggests 23-28. The muffins turned out looking just like the photo on the box. They were moist, but had an open crumb and a pleasant bran-y texture. The berries were a nice touch and an interesting mix, although I think that these muffins would be even better if you incorporated some fresh or frozen berries into the mix, as well. They would make them more moist, would boost the berry flavor (which was mild) and would cover up the hint of baking soda flavor that I detected in these nicely. I might also experiment a bit and use milk instead of the water called for in the recipe to give the muffins a slightly richer feel.