Baking Adventures

By now my loyal readers know that I love to cook and they have probably read about my various cooking adventures. Even though I love to experiment with cooking, one of the things I haven't done much of is baking. The first, little apartment I lived in had a very small and very old stove/oven. The oven seemed to take forever to get going, and it would take about two hours to make a simple baked potato. Now that I've been living in apartments with a real oven, I've been able to use it more often. I've used it for baking pastas and roasting vegetables, but it's only recently when I've tried my hand at baking.

I've made Baklava Bars and I'm at the point where I've more or less perfected those. One of the things I love about the Baklava Bar recipe is that it uses sugar cookie mix as a short cut. The recipe requires a few different stages, but it is still fairly easy.

I love banana bread but while looking online for banana bread recipes, I stumbled across a recipe for Chocolate Chip–Banana Muffins. This recipe also uses a handy shortcut, Bisquick mix, and is super easy to make. I've made it two times already, and everything has turned out great.

And recently I've tried to make another one of my favorites, corn bread. A few weeks ago I tried to make corn bread muffins from a box of Jiffy Mix. That did not turn out as great as I wanted it to. For one, it didn't make many muffins. After I ate one, I had an unusual feeling and taste in my mouth, and when I took a second look at the box I saw that lard was one of the ingredients. And, maybe I did something wrong, but those muffins seemed a bit dry and gritty; when I tried to put butter on the muffin, it crumbled in my hand. So today I tried to make corn bread from scratch. I had a recipe in my Betty Crocker cookbook and there was also a recipe on the canister of cornmeal. The recipes are more or less the same with the exception that one uses butter and the other uses vegetable oil. I made it with the oil this time and it turned out really good. It looks like corn bread, smells like corn bread, feels like corn bread, and tastes like corn bread. Yay! Next time I'm going to try it with the butter to see if it tastes different and see which I like better.