Flour

Last weekend, we spent a couple of days in the Boston area. Among our various stops, we paid a visit to Flour, a terrific bakery -- one of my absolute favorites. Since the last time we were there, Flour has opened a new location on Farnsworth Street, so we stopped in there. Part of the haul is shown below (counterclockwise from top left): a Scharffenberger double chocolate cookie, an oatmeal maple scone, a piece of apple snacking spice cake, a lime cornmeal cookie, and a small loaf of cherry-chocolate bread. We also brought home a small triple chocolate mousse cake; however, it didn't manage the travel home well. On the other hand, it tasted really good even after its structural integrity was compromised.


I'm really psyched because Joanne Chang, owner of Flour, is writing a cookbook. I'm pretty sure she was in an office at the Farnsworth Street location late Saturday afternoon. I wanted to shout out my enthusiasm and eagerness for the impending cookbook, but I figured that blogging about it was going to be geeky enough. (That said, Joanne, if you happen to Google yourself or Flour and you find this, rest assured that you have one cookbook buyer looking forward to the new book.)

A Sweet Trade

Last week before I decided that we should donate Karen's birthday cake to PLTI, I made a separate chocolate sour cream pound cake (from Quick Chocolate Fixes by Leslie Weiner and Barbara Albright) for the PLTI class. That left a balance of one unclaimed cake. To say thanks to our friend Patti for stopping in to keep an eye on the cat while we were away, I left the cake for her. In exchange, she left us some of her homemade biscotti (photo below). I like how this deal worked out!

Birthday Cake

For Karen's birthday, I knew I had to make a cake that somehow involved chocolate. I decided to try something from Dede Wilson's latest book, The Birthday Cake Book. After perusing some chocolate-cake-with-chocolate-frosting combinations, I decided to make a yellow cake (with miniature chocolate chips in it) covered with chocolate frosting. Everything about the cake and the frosting came together really well, and it sure looked great when it was assembled.

Then we got home kind of late, plus had gotten dessert when we were at dinner. Believe it or not, the cake was never tasted. Knowing that we had plans that would leave us unable to dig in to the cake for a few days, we decided to donate it to the PLTI class this week -- with the promise that I'll make another one next week.

Strawberry Cupcakes

Today I brought some (early) Valentine's Day cupcakes to share with Claire's skating teammates. I used the strawberry cupcake recipe from Julie Hasson's 125 Best Cupcake Recipes. I've made that one before, and this time boosted the flavor with a bit of strawberry extract. With some chocolate frosting and sprinkles on top, they were good to go, and seemed to be pretty well enjoyed by everybody.

Peanut-Butter Cookies

Last Wednesday's New York Times had a recipe for peanut-butter cookies, and I've been a bit fixated on making them since then. I decided to do part of the dough as straight-ahead peanut-butter cookies and half (or so) as peanut blossoms (mostly to use up a bag of chocolate stars). I think that both versions turned out pretty well.

Pistachio Cupcakes

This week for Lost Lunch Thursday, we'll be having Pistachio Cupcakes, from a recipe in Julie Hasson's 125 Best Cupcake Recipes. They're frosted with a plain buttercream icing from the same book. I usually don't do this sort of thing, but I tinted the icing a light green to emphasize the pistachio theme. The cupcakes call for 1/2 cup of ground pistachios. To prevent them from turning into nut butter in the food processor, I ground them with a heaping 1/4 cup of the flour from the recipe. I'm already looking forward to lunch tomorrow.

Chocolate Pound Cake

This week's PLTI treat is Darn Good Chocolate Cake from Chocolate from the Cake Mix Doctor by Anne Byrn. I've made this cake before, and it's not too bad. Instead of plain chocolate chips, I used some raspberry chips; the glaze is a lemon ganache. (That ganache had been intended to be truffles, but it never quite set up firmly enough to roll properly.)

I always feel a little sheepish about cake-mix things. However, on days like today, when there was more stuff to do than time to do it, a mix can come in handy.