Hello old friend

It's been years. People say that all the time but it has literally been years.

I have a number of excuses ranging from laziness, to a temporary exit from the kitchen. My biggest excuse is kitchen size. After my Thanksgiving pie post I started school as a transfer at The Catholic University of America. Despite the fact that I was coming in as a junior I stayed at the dorms. Admittedly I probably could have kept baking and razzled and dazzled with my dorm kitchen skills but for those of you who haven't been to a kitchen in a girls dorm... keep it that way. It's disgusting and I simply cannot work in such filth (read in a French accent). After I finished up at school I got my first apartment and the kitchen, although cleaner, still wasn't doing it for me. I was in a whopping 400sqft studio. My oven wasn't even a standard oven size; it was more like a little tike’s kitchen appliance. The two times I did bake I over-cooked and nearly burned. In my defense I was going from an electric oven to gas. I made a couple pies for my firefighter boyfriend to take to his firehouse (food is truly the way to a man’s heart) and a pecan streusel and pumpkin cookies, again for the firehouse. The streusel, while tasted fine, was definitely overcooked making the top way too crunchy for my tastes.

Recently, move boyfriend and I moved in together so for his going away I made 2 peach pies, 2 blackberry pies, a black cherry, and the boy’s favorite, lemon meringue. I probably made too many but we did some damage.

I also recently found a really great recipe for homemade bread here. I stumbled upon the recipe on Pinterest and had to try it. I read the comments on her blog and decided I had a few of the same issues with bread rising that were mentioned. Other than that, it's super easy. This being my first attempt at homemade bread I’ll take slightly less risen dough any day. It was still delicious and made fantastic sandwich bread. I think I’m going to attempt the recipe again this weekend while my fireman is at work.

 

All that being said, I’m still in the kitchen and still baking. Now that I have some actually counter space in the new place anticipate more baking experiments to come!