HCB: Many-Splendored Quick Bread

October 17, 2010 by Monica in Baking, Baking Club, Bread, Cookbooks, Desserts, HCB, Vegetable

See the title up there?

The key word is “quick”.

This bread is super quick, as in get everything ready and then, boom, before you know it it’s in the oven and driving you crazy with heavenly smells.

At least that is what happen when I decided to make it this past Friday.

Yep, you read it right, this past FRIDAY. As in, after a long day at work, I got to baking. Can you tell I had a hard week?

Because I totally did.

Very hard week, in total need of full therapeutic intervention.

So I got home and knew that if I did not turn on the oven and got busy, I was going to have a meltdown.

Baking, my anti-drug.

And this was the perfect prescription.

The Bake Brownies

October 13, 2010 by Monica in Baking, Cookbooks, Desserts, Sweets

I baked my first set of brownies when I was about 10 years old and we had just moved to the US. We did not have anything like this dense cake in Venezuela, so upon my first taste of them, I was pretty hooked and ate A LOT of them. And of course, like any 10 year old – my first brownie batch came from none other than a box.

I just cringe writing that. Oh, if I could only go back in time and teach my 10 year old self a few things…

GCC: Menu 2 - Ricotta and Arugula Roulade and Quindim

October 10, 2010 by Monica in Appletizers & Snacks, Baking, Cookbooks, Cooking Club, Desserts, Entertaining, Gutsy Cooks Club, Savory

And its week two of the Gutsy Cooks Club.

Our inaugural week was such a success, not only in participation but the choosen recipes were a total hit with the club. Most of us are putting them on the repeat list. I was also happy to see most of us get “gutsy” with the recipes by changing things around and getting creative.

That is the spirit guys!

And here we are in week 2. These choices were actually ones that got my attention when I first got the book and was browsing through it, because a savory roulade? Really? And if there is anything that I like more is changing sweet staples into a savory spin off. This was perfect; I have done so many sweet rolls before, so I was looking forward to it.

The best part of it is that my mother’s birthday was Sunday and I cooked a whole lunch for her, and this fit right into the menu nicely. I was not even trying to make it fit, but this tells you how good this would go with any type of menu.

The roulade was pretty easy to put together, in fact I was so surprise how easy it came together. And the taste before it went into the oven to cook was good. So I was all sorts of exited.

This was going to be good, I thought…