Apple pie’s harder than it seems I’ve always had trouble with apple pie; I’m not willing to use cornstarch as a regular ingredient because I don’t understand how to make cornstarch. My apple pies tend to come out saggy like this one in the picture, and runny. You can solve both those problems with this …
Tag Archives: baking
Chocolate chip cookies
With some shortcuts to make it easier I’ve cut some corners here over the usual recipes, and it doesn’t hurt the cookies at all! I think these are about the best chocolate chip cookies you’ll find anywhere. How to make chocolate chip cookies: Preheat the oven to 375 F. Put two sticks of butter in …
Chocolate streusel
A fancier chocolate cake This is a more complicated chocolate cake, although considerably simplified from the New York Times recipe I started from. It has a lot of ingredients, but nothing complicated about putting them together, and it cooks pretty fast. What about the frosting? This really, really doesn’t need frosting, especially if you eat …
Brownies
We always used brownie mix… For years I kept three or four boxes of brownie mix in the house all the time, so the kids could make brownies whenever they wanted to. It was 99 cents a box, it was the simplest possible recipe, and it made something they loved. What could be better? But …
Blueberry pie
Unlimited dessert The first term I was at college, once I realized that at college you could just take unlimited desserts and nothing else at dinner, I pretty much lived on blueberry pie and lemon meringue pie. The cafeteria blueberry pie was nasty, gluey stuff though, and once I gained fifteen pounds eating it, I …
Blackberry cobbler
Pick them yourself! Blackberries grow everywhere in Oregon – they’re invasive Himalayan blackberries, and if you don’t keep fighting them they’ll eat your house in a few years. But they do grow big, delicious blackberries in July. When I made first blackberry cobbler of the season, a couple of years ago, the kids were so …
Biscotti
Delicious cookies Biscotti are a kind of Italian cookie. They’re called “biscotti” because you cook them twice (“bis”) – once to bake the loaf, and again to toast the slices. How to make biscotti: Preheat the oven to 375. Grease a cookie sheet with butter. In a medium mixing bowl, mix 1 3/4 cups of …
Baked apples
Fairly healthy dessert Baked apples aren’t health food – if you want that, just eat an apple, which is also good! But they are better for you than pie and certainly better than cookies or ice cream. And baked apples only take a few minutes to put together, cook while you are eating dinner, and …
Potato chips
Why buy potato chips when you can bake them? Potato chips, as you can see from the ingredients list on the bag, are just potatoes sliced thin and fried with oil. You can do that at home, and have much better potato chips for a small fraction of the cost of store-bought ones. How to …
Candied carrots
Kids gobble these up The sugar, and the sweetness of the caramelized carrots, makes these a big favorite with kids. The biggest problem is that I get tired of cutting up carrots and never make enough of them, and then I have the kids fighting over them. But hey, kids fighting over carrots – that …