October 30, 2011

Jack-o'-Lantern Cookies

Halloween is tomorrow! Which of course, means some Halloween baking. Since I always make something with pumpkin around this time of year, I decided to make some pumpkin cookies this year.


Every year, I always think about carving a Jack-o'-Lantern, but I never do. It's always either realizing I have nowhere to put it or being too lazy to clean up the mess that comes along with it. Well, this year, I came up with a solution to this desire to carve something: Jack-o'-Lantern cookies, carving cookies not pumpkins. It's entertaining and not too difficult to do. Plus pumpkin and chocolate just seem to go very well together. Overall, a fun and delicious fall activity.

October 03, 2011

Bacon Epi

It seems that I haven't posted about bread for a long time on this blog. Well, that's about to change since I'm on a bread making kick. There are too many bread recipes I need to share :).


Now that I think about it, this was one of the first recipes I put together back when I started baking. The story is that in high school, my mom used to buy these long loaves of chewy french bread filled with pockets of bacon from a bakery at a local mall. I loved that it could be easily pulled apart into individual servings. My family always referred to it as "bacon bread". Eventually though, the bakery went out of business and we had no more bacon bread.


A few years later, when I finally took up baking, I thought back to the bread and realized that it was going to be difficult to find a recipe since I had no idea what it was called. But I figured the recipe wouldn't be too hard to recreate, just a baguette recipe with some bacon. After a bit of research, I finally discovered that this is referred to as "pain d'epi". An "epi" is an ear of wheat, which is what the shape is supposed to resemble. This bread recipe is one of my go-to recipes because it's not too difficult and it isn't that time consuming (relatively speaking for bread making), and of course, it's delicious.