An Offering: Lemon Ricotta Muffins

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I come to you, much like a suburban neighbor, with an offering.  A basket of muffins (or a cyber-basket, really), handed sheepishly over the doorstep in the feeble hope that my neglect will go unnoticed in a rush of fluffy and crunchy textures and bright citrus and sweet almond flavors.  Trust me, one bite of these muffins and you won't even remember that I haven't posted in over a week (there are plenty of excuses, but for now let's just focus on the muffins).

Travel, Family, and Meyer Lemons – Does It Get Any Better?

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Look at that.  Just...look at that.

Now do you understand why I checked out for so long while I was gone?  I know, I know, there are bloggers far better than I, who schedule posts to go up while they're away – there are even some bloggers, like the Energizer Bunny Pioneer Woman, who write and post while on vacation!  Alas, I am not one of these bloggers.  I am weak, and as much as I may know I should write a post while I'm home in SF, I cannot resist the temptation of an offer to walk along Crissy Field instead.

However, I am not entirely useless – I also cannot resist an opportunity to bake, and the overflowing bowls and bags of Meyer lemons in my mother's house were just that.  Her trees in Napa were heavy with fruit, and she was running out of ideas for what to do with it.  So I bring home for you: Meyer Lemon Quickbread (and some bad phone pics, sorry).

Leftover Egg Yolks? Make Sugar Cookies!

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I'm off to San Francisco in an hour, for a nice long visit with friends and family (I finally get to meet my first niece!) and a wee vacay, but I wanted to get a quicky post in before I disappear for a week or two.

So, remember that promise I made in the meringue post about a use for the leftover yolks?  Well, I'm going to deliver!  These sugar cookies are easy and quick, and best of all, they use egg yolks in place of whole eggs, which is not only convenient but also delicious and rich and chewy.

Signs of Growing Up: My First Meringues

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I had a bunch of girlfriends over for dinner a couple weeks ago, and one of them (whom I nonetheless love very much) is a serial dieter.  Not in a fad-diet kind of way, more in a oh-no-I-shouldn't kind of way.  It makes me sad, since I show my love through sugar and butter, but I was determined not to either a) do without dessert at my dinner party or b) make her watch everyone else eat pound cake while she tried not to salivate.  I did a bit of research, skipped a lot of recipes that involved Splenda or other unnatural ingredients (no offense to people who use that stuff, but I always find I can taste the difference, and anyway my dieter-friend is a bit of a purist), and wound up back at Joy the Baker, where I reacquainted myself with a recipe I'd bookmarked weeks before, for vanilla bean and cocoa nib meringues.

Slapdash Baking with Delicious Results: Banana Nutella Pecan Muffins

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I wasn't going to write a post about these muffins... They weren't anything special, as far as the process went, just something I threw together to get rid of some old bananas and buttermilk and feed a friend who needed comfort food in her life.  I didn't even plan on adding the nutella until the last minute – as is often the case when I make spur-of-the-moment baked goods, I was ad-libbing the whole time.  For once, I was baking to eat, rather than baking to blog.

Hence the terrible photographs.  I didn't take any pics until after we'd tried the muffins and declared them delicious – moist, banana-y, and chocolatey, with a nice crunch from the pecan bits – and multiple Facebook friends had read my status update and demanded the recipe. 

Failure and Fallbacks: Let-Down Lemon Tart and Brilliant Backup Brownies

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Can I tell you the truth?  I don't always turn out amazing baked goods, despite what people say.  The reason my friends think I'm such a good cook/baker is because I usually only serve things I've already tested myself, ideally multiple times.  And there are plenty of failures along the path to deliciousness.

For example, back when I made that amazing lasagne, I also made a failure of a lemon tart (well, semi-fail, and not a fail at all according to my ever-polite guests) – trust me, it looks better than it was.  I spent all that time zesting and juicing and whisking, only to find the end product lumpy and terrifying.  I think the eggs had been cooked a bit by the acid in the lemon juice, maybe... whatever the reason, it looked foul.

Another Family Favorite: Mashed Rutabagas

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My family's Thanksgiving celebrations are different every year.  Some years it's a relatively small group, just my immediate family, a few close friends, and whoever else can make it, and some years we have 35 people, half of whom aren't technically family, and we have to rent tables and silverware and cook three separate turkeys three different ways.  Sometimes we have traditional roast turkey, or Moroccan spiced turkey, or deep-fried turkey – one year we even had turkey tacos, which went over like a lead balloon with the younger generation.

No matter where we are, though, or how many of us gather, or what we decide to do with the bird, there are always a few dishes that are absolute must-haves.  Pumpkin pie is the most important, of course, followed closely by some kind of crisp.  We always have turkey of some sort, and gravy, and a big salad.  And we're likely to have mashed potatoes, but much more important (an absolute must, in my opinion) are the roods.