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.

For Real This Time: Momofuku Compost Cookies

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Okay, so I know I already waxed lyrical about the wonders of the Momofuku method as a base for my favorite cookie ever, but I did also (finally) try the recipe as it's meant to be made: with all sorts of weird, shouldn't-that-be-savory things stuffed into it.  And I wanted to share my experience.

A couple of weeks ago, the bf's brother came to stay with us on his way to a year abroad in China, and I thought it might be nice to give him and his friend a good old American cookie send-off.  I wanted to make a batch of my chocolate cherry cookies, but I also wanted to try the real Compost Cookies of lore.  So I made the dough up until the additions bit, split it in half, and did one batch of choc-cherry and one with potato chips, pretzels, and chocolate chunks.  You can see the bits here:

Topsy Turvy Cravings: Pear Upside-Down Cake

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I don't know why I always seem to make things out of season.  It's not intentional, but I do seem to crave certain foods more when everybody else in the world is ignoring them – maybe it's my affection for the underdog!

Anyway, for whatever reason last week I got a mad craving for pear upside-down cake.  I've never made an upside-down cake, and the most common one seems to be pineapple, which I'm not a big fan of (in things. I love it fresh), so it didn't make sense that I would want this specific baked good, but there you have it.  I'm just a slave to my cravings (and no, I'm most certainly NOT pregnant).

What to eat when there's nothing in the fridge: Mishmash Salad

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The bf and I have been crazy busy lately.  He's spending all hours at school and in the hospital (for school), and I'm trying to edit the first draft of my manuscript, wrap up my MA, and deal with book proposals and agent queries, all while still working part-time.  There are a lot of people out there who pile more than that on their plates, and plow along just fine.  But we're not those people.

We're the type of people who get home in the evening and go straight for our computers, each of us hoping that the other will sort out dinner while we zone out in front of youtube or food blogs (respectively).  And that's where this salad comes in.

Another English Classic: Elderflower and Raspberry Jelly

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I never knew what elderflower was as a child.  I figured that you could make alcohol with it, provided it was related to elderberries, because otherwise this scene didn't make much sense (to the extent that Monty Python really ever made sense), but I had no concept of what it tasted like.

So when I moved to England, and found elderflower-flavored things everywhere, I was a bit surprised.  I feel like in this day and age we like to think that we've at least heard of the big flavor combinations of the countries we're familiar with, but somehow I never noticed this one, even when I was living in England for 6 months in college.