Baking for Pleasure

You know how when you eat the same cereal every morning, you get so tired of it that you don't want it for, like, 2 years? Or if you work in an ice cream shop, people think that's so cool but really, the last thing you want to do is ingest any cold creamy substance? Well, baking kookies can be like that some times. There must be something about smelling the same smell every day that gets to someone. Kind of like Chinese water torture...slow, but deadly? Ok, we're exaggerating.

But we use Baking for Pleasure as little breaks away from Hello Kookie, to remind us that we really do enjoy and love this process. There's something about baking that is simply so satisfying. You feel good doing it, but you feel even better knowing that you're producing something that people truly enjoy. When you give someone a kookie (or a cookie) or a cupcake or a brownie or whatever it is, you just know that you're taking that person back to fourth grade where all they really want afterwards is either a hug from their mom or a glass of milk (or both).

Here's Dina's latest installment: whole wheat oatmeal chocolate chip cookie bars. Sort of healthy, but really not.

Even raw looks pretty darn yummy.

Baked was pretty good, too. Almost too many chocolate chips, if you can believe it.

P.S. This turned out to be a great Sunday activity since it was raining today in San Francisco. In September! What's up with that?!

Baking for Pleasure

Inspired by Bakerella's awesome blog and her cake pops, this was Sunday's adventure:

Cake balls (cake mixed with frosting, formed into little balls, dipped in chocolate, topped with sprinkles. Whew!)

Looking super cute in their little to-go boxes (one for the babysitter, the other for the dogwalker who let Dina & Wendy in when Dina locked herself out of the house!).

The only thing is that the cake balls are pretty sweet. After all, it's cake, mixed with frosting, then dipped in chocolate! As Dina's husband said "Don't let the kids have too many of those. They're like speed balls."

So the kids actually didn't get any (yet). But they did get some whole wheat banana muffins!

Baking for Pleasure

Some of the best childhood memories are of family traditions. Maybe it was game night every Friday night. Or maybe it was Meatloaf Monday (thankfully, not a tradition in either of our households). In Dina's house, there's Pancake Saturdays (there also used to be Mango Shake Sundays until Dina realized that was more of a gift to her, than her children).

But we think that these traditions are pretty cool, so we're toying with the idea of Kupcake Sunday for our families. That seems like just the stuff that memories are made from, don't you think? And even though we spend our days making kookies, decorating, and trying (and trying and trying and trying) to perfect our kookie techniques, we still want our families to have fun baking memories.

Here's the first installment of Kupcake Sunday at Dina's house: Fruit Ring Kupcakes (Fruit Rings = organic 365 brand from Whole Foods), adapted from Froot Loop Cupcakes.

These look little because they are minis.

Little Fruit Ring kupcakes all in army formation.

Baking for Pleasure

Another kookie-decorating bash the other day, and another need for some reprieve. So Dina baked Blueberry Muffins, and not only are they Blueberry Muffins, but according to Cook's Illustrated, they are the BEST Blueberry Muffins! Not sure why they are the "best," but they did call for making a little blueberry jam to swirl into the the muffins so you get some blueberry goodness in every bite.

The jam (and no, I don't mean jam as in an 8th grade slow dance song):

The batter-in-waiting:

Jammy goodness dolloped!

Swirl, or attempted swirl (only a misdemeanor here in California):

End product.

Seriously, though, these were so good that for a bit, Dina said forget kookies, I'm baking muffins now (or should she call them kuffins?).

Baking for Pleasure

The hard thing about when you make something you love (like baking cookies) into a job is that it becomes exactly that -- a job. So every once in awhile, it makes sense to go back and remember why you love what you do so much that you do what you (a doo doo doo, a da da da, is all I want to say to you -- woops, sorry, couldn't resist).

So Dina, after baking cookies and icing them, found her zen moment baking some Apricot Muffins. She got a pound of organic apricots in her produce box, and since her boys don't love the tart taste of apricots, decided to bake something that would be a little easier on their newby palates.

Here's the final product.

P.S. The sad part of all of this is that although baking muffins was a nice reprieve from cookies, her boys still didn't want them!!!