Dead Easy: Chocolate Chip Blondies

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I love a one-bowl recipe.  Lately, with my MA course ending and changes at my job and this massive manuscript edit looming over my head, all I've been wanting to make are easy, comforting, quick recipes – had you noticed?  With the exception of the lemon cream pie, nearly everything I've made in the past 2 months has come together in under an hour and involved one bowl, a couple of measuring cups, and a (usually lined with foil) baking dish/tray.  Few steps, few ingredients, few dishes to clean up – great result.  That's my kind of recipe.

The Lazy Baker Strikes Again: 'Baked' Brownies For Slackers

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The other day, I wanted a snack, but our cupboards were bare.  This is a very dangerous situation.  When we're out of snackables, I usually just eat way too much of everything else (random cold potatoes leftover from dinner, old candies from Christmas stockings, toast with butter and jam at 5pm), but occasionally I'll get up off my butt and bake.  But it has to be something easy and quick, because when I get snacky it usually means I'm either hard at work (scoff) or bored and lazy.  Enter: the lazy version of the 'Baked' brownie.

This recipe, in its original form, isn't even that involved.  But I was looking for super low-maintenance baking.  I toyed with using a one-bowl recipe from Allrecipes, but the reviews were either fantastic or abysmal, and I wasn't really up for taking the chance.  So I went back to this post from Brown Eyed Baker, for the brownies from the book 'Baked', which has been getting a ton of buzz around the food world – especially for the brownies.

Martha's Magic: Lemon Cream Pie

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I love Martha Stewart's recipes.  My banana bread recipe comes from her book, and it's been a regular favorite of pretty much everyone who knows me for years.  In fact, my friend made it for her boyfriend the other day and she said he loved it, so the legend lives on!

A Genius Among Us: Joy's No-Roll Pie Crust

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I'm sure you all know Joy the Baker by now, yes?  She's the adorably quirky baker/blogger/muser-on-life who brought us such gems as sunflower seed bread, chocolate peanut butter puffs, and these lemon meringue cookies, which I'm dying to try once I don't feel too lazy / I buy a pastry bag.  Basically, she's kind of a genius, as well as being so creative it actually makes me sleepy just to read her blog.

But sometimes her creativity energizes me, because it encourages my laziness.  Enter the no-roll pie crust.  This dough doesn't require a lot of work (amazingness, especially for a pie dough); it mostly involves grating frozen butter, manhandling the dough a bit, and lots of greasy fingers.  Have you ever grated butter?  It's kind of weird, but also kind of ingenious.  And more than kind of pretty:

Indecision Baking: Banana Fluffernutter Muffins

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I have a bad habit of changing direction in the middle of projects.  I do it when walking (suddenly decide to take a different route), I did it with my book (and as a result have been busy rewriting the first 3 chapters almost entirely), and I do it with baking.  A lot.

These muffins are a perfect example.  See that pear up there?  The one with all the brown splotches?  I was totally going to use that.  I was going to make healthy muffins, with bananas and a pear and low-fat yogurt instead of butter or oil.  I had the best of intentions.  But then...

How to tell if your neighbor is a food blogger...

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...well, if she makes pie dough in her nightgown in front of the bedroom window, trying to photograph the process with floury, buttery hands, that's a pretty good sign.