The Adventures of a Frustrated Baker

After all the baking I have been doing over the last few weeks, I decided to take it easy this week and make some cookies and cream peanut butter.  I first saw this recipe over on Picky Palate 's site and thought it looked interesting.  I was wrong, it is amazing.  Seriously, I don't know if I am ever going to be able to bring myself to eat regular peanut butter ever again!  I sent it in to my daughter's preschool for snack with some apples and the kids all loved it, the parents who tried it loved, my skeptical sister-in-law, who took one look at the strange color and raised her eyebrow at me, loved it!  Basically, everyone loves it!  So go grab yourself a pack of Oreos, some white chocolate chips and a jar of peanut butter and get started.  It's super easy and quick and well worth the 5 minutes it will take you to make and the extra 10 it will take you to tear apart your cupboards looking for a lid for the jar you put it in! Crush up ...

I'm sure many of you know that yesterday was St. Patrick's Day.  A day for eating strange green foods and putting shamrocks on everything and of course drinking ridiculous amounts of alcohol.  Although I over course, like a good Irish girl, did all three, here we will talk about the eating green stuff part cause this is a food blog after all! A friend of mine recently brought to my attention that my experience is sorely lacking in one baking craze that is super popular right now, cake pops.  Until a few days ago, I had never made them...thought about it once, but I decided it wasn't worth the time and effort for the occasion. She of course begged me to do a post on them though because she wants to make them for her daughter's birthday.  So, being the wonderful friend that I am, I spent my day off working on cake pops.  I learned a few things...one, I seriously have no patience with disobedient baked goods and two, cake pops aren't all that hard, they are...

As I said in my last post, we had two birthdays in our family last week and as such, it fell to me as the baker of the house to make their cakes.  No store bought cakes or mixes for my family!  No way, no how!  Anyway, my mother-in-law decided that she wanted an angel food cake.  A plain one...with nothing on it...how BORING!!!  Sigh, but she was the birthday girl and I guess she could have a silly, boring, nothing on it angel food cake if that is what she wanted.  I'm such a good daughter-in-law...she should know how blessed she is!  : D One note here...I hate to admit this but I screwed this cake up!  And as much as I would love to pretend like I know all about baking and cakes, I knew nothing about angel food cakes when I made this one and I didn't not turn the pan upside down to cool like I was supposed to, so mine sank a little bit, not too much but some.  So, sorry Dianne, that your cake was not perfect.  Maybe you don't have the...

So this week was a busy week for baking in the house...we had two birthdays in two days and, being the good little daughter-in-law and sister-in-law that I am, not to mention baker, I volunteered to make the cakes.  I asked both of the birthday girls what they wanted and they decided on an angel food cake and a blueberry cake.  We will get around to the angel food cake...honestly I am not a fan and was not so excited about that one.  Plus I promised all the girls at work that I would post the blueberry cake recipe like a week ago, so I guess I had better get on that!  LOL My sister-in-law loves, loves, LOVES blueberries.  She would eat blueberries for every meal honestly, so the fact that she chose a blueberry cake was not really a surprise.  This of course meant that I had to find a recipe, since I didn't already have one.  After reading a ton of different recipes and looking at lots of pics, I chose this one because i...

Today's post begins with a story.  A few days ago I had a customer come in looking for a tall cup of espresso. Not just a doppio (that's 2 espresso shots for those of you who don't speak Starbucks)...no he wanted 12 ounces of espresso, something that would normally cost him a pretty penny.  One store had told him it would be $15, another said $10.  Well, we decided to be nice and only charge him for part of his drink and send him on his merry way, end of story.  Well, until he walked into our store on Sunday with yummy looking slice of tiramisu that he brought for us.  Now, normally I would not eat something that a stranger brought in for me, but seeing as this was kind of one of those paying it forward nice gestures, I decided to take a chance and try it.  It was amazing and when it was gone I was sad and wanted more.  Now one of the classes at my other job was having an end of the quarter potluck and I had planned on bringing cupcakes...but I was cr...