A lot of catching up to do.........

Hello to my loyal visitors who are still checking this page despite my complete negligence.  That being said, though I have been slacking off majorly on the recording of my baking escapades, I thankfully have gone full force on the important part- the baking!  In the last... uhhh month... I have made a plethora of scrumptious treats that I am going to briefly talk about (and show pretty pictures obviously).  For those of you who are more interested in the play-by-play kitchen commentary, I will try to squeeze a little of that in too.  However, for the sake of brevity, I will resume with the step-by-step recollection of my baking experiences next time (earlier than September, don't worry).

RECIPE 1: First up is the famed bread that I briefly mentioned in a previous post.  Though I was showing the fairly primitive stages of the bread during that previous post, it evolved quite nicely as you will see below.  The recipe is at this link:  http://www.marthastewart.com/907240/chad-robertsons-tartine-country-bread

See the resemblance?? I don't either......

The bread some mean paninis with tomatoes, pesto, fontina and sopressata: 

 Just one more picture of 3 of the 7(!!!!) loaves:  It was quite a big time commitment so multiple loaves were necessary to justify the fact took a whole day to make! 

RECIPE 2: The recipe was not outrageous like a few of the ones to follow, but I had to mention these (http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/heath_bar_cookies/) Toffee cookies because they represent the first successful cookie-making endeavor in Gertrude.  The secret (or should I say secretS) is two pans stacked on each other, parchment paper, top rack, half the necessary time and 50 degrees less in the oven.  The result- beautiful, unburnt, chewy cookies.  In my opinion, crunchy cookies are not worth eating, so I am glad that attacking Gertrude at various angles allows for edible cookies. 

RECIPE 3: Cake batter balls.  Once in a while, I come across a recipe that I wish I didn't know about. In these cases, the reason for my desire of ignorance is that the recipe produces something in just too little time that tastes just too delicious.   This recipe (http://www.the-girl-who-ate-everything.com/2011/03/cake-batter-truffles.html) is actually an instance of "Cooking With(out) Gertrude", since Gertrude played no part in this.  Despite Gertrude's lack of involvement, I had a minor fiasco with the dipping chocolate.  Though dipping chocolate is supposedly way easier to work with than chocolate chips, the addition of the cake mix to the dipping chocolate as mentioned in the recipe did not bode particularly well.  The chocolate did not get to the thin consistency I needed, and I ended up way overheating the chocolate to the point of no return.  Unfortunately, dipping chocolates are very hard to come by in Davis, California after 7 pm.  I thus had to resort to using white chocolate chips which though albeit delicious, do not look as attractive when melted. Luckily, covering the balls in sprinkles made everything better.   It helped that these cake batter truffles tasted phenomenal.  I don't think I will ever make the traditional cake balls again- why bake a cake, destroy it, then ball it up again when you just ball the batter up and skip those middle steps?? 

RECIPE 4: Oh boy, now I'm on to the good one.  Peanut Butter Cup Cookie Dough Cheesecake bars.  If every major obesity-related medical problem could be packaged into bar form, this would be it.  I mainly followed this recipe http://insidebrucrewlife.com/2013/03/peanut-butter-cheesecake-cookie-bars/ with a few modifications.  I did not have chocolate chips, so I just used peanut butter chips in the dough.  To compensate for the lack of chocolate in the dough, I added a layer of 12 big peanut butter cups that I broke up into pieces.  Then, I proceeded to add the cheesecake, more cookie dough, peanut butter chips and a chocolate drizzle.  There literally is no way for this to go wrong.  A picture is worth a thousand words. 

RECIPE 5: This one was fresh out of the oven today.  Yesterday at my work, my students (who are the lucky recipients of 95% of all of these baked good) finished off a box of drumsticks in about 10 min (2 drumsticks each).  A while later in the class,  I asked them what type of dessert I should bring for the next day (today).  They were all so full from the ice cream, that they jokingly suggested salad.  While I didn't go that extreme, I did use vegetables as an inspiration as I decided with zucchini cupcakes! I used the following recipe of http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/zucchini-cupcakes for the cake part and http://www.food.com/recipe/homemade-caramel-frosting-303255 for the caramel icing.  Though I accidentally used bread flour instead of cake flour to make them a bit more "bready" then I wanted, they had a lovely flavor that was complemented well by with the icing.  And the picture turned out really well:

Man, I am sick of writing now.  Well, I guess that is my own fault.  Until next time!!