Filled with potato (ofc), onion, cheddar, and sour cream.

Inspired by pastry chef Lauren Schofield

Coffee and chocolate cake, whipped ganache

Recipe from "Dobre Dobre" by Laurel Kratochvila.

A delightful combination of flavors and textures! This bake took two days. On the first day, I prepped the bilberry filling, the pudding that gets whipped into the cream filling, and the dough. After a slow proof overnight in the fridge, I shaped the buns, waited for the final proof, baked, whipped the cream filling, and assembled!

There were many steps, but most of them were fairly straightforward. Most of the effort is in planning ahead to get the timings right. I wish I had taken the buns out of the oven two minutes earlier, but overall they turned out fluffy and light with just the right amount of sweetness and crunch from the pearl sugar. It took me two attempts to make the cream filling (I overwhipped the first batch, and it split), but the second batch was well worth the extra effort of a re-do. Bilberries are hard to come by in my area, so I used frozen. The recipe says you can use wild blueberries instead, but I wanted to try bilberries, and I'm glad I did! They are sweet and a little tart, and I will definitely make the bilberry filling again, just to enjoy on its own!

Recipe: https://jovialfoods.com/blogs/recipes/einkorn-focaccia

I wanted to try Einkorn flour and found this focaccia recipe. It went really well with a bowl of soup!

I used up some random squares of milk & dark chocolate, plus the remainder of a bag of pretzel crisps in these! Very straightforward and yummy (although the pretzel crisps were a bit stale).

https://www.modernhoney.com/kitchen-sink-cookies/

These are so good and I will absolutely be making them again, but now I just really want to make a pecan pie. Mmmm.

Recipe: Auntie Alice’s Top Secret Mini Pecan Tarts

I ended up going more with the "ingredient" end of the theme and used squash, corn(meal), and aronia berries.

My hometown of San Antonio has a days-long party aptly called Fiesta and part of that WAS (insert sad face) an event called Night in Old San Antonio or NIOSA. One popular food is chicken on a stick. My version is baked, not fried. First picture is mine, the 2nd for reference. The sad comment is that, as of now, it’s been cancelled for next year’s fiesta.

This is a very easy recipe that makes a rustic-ish, somewhat dense (complimentary) bread. We omitted the caraway seeds here due to allergies

Second attempt at these, first (winter Olympics week) was an absolute disaster!!

Recipe from goodfood

Went a bit too heavy handed on the extract, it's giving Shrek vibes - but delicious none the less! Sandwiched with toasted coconut, salted caramel and vanilla chantilly

My final persimmon was finally ripe enough for me to make this cake!

This cake was on my to-make list since last year. I ground the cardamom from the pods, but the cake wasn’t as cardamom-forward as I expected it to be, and the persimmons don’t pack a lot of flavor themselves, so I thought the cake wasn’t just okay. And it needs whipped cream!

Slicing each fuyu persimmon into eight wedges resulted in chunks that I thought were too big, so if you’re ever contemplating making this cake, I recommend that they be sliced thinner.

When you have a reputation for baking, people often assume you will bake for them, even without a lot of advance notice. I do tend to keep a few different cookie doughs in my freezer at any given time to accommodate last minute requests, but after all my years of baking, my flavor pairings tend toward the more unusual. I was recently given about 12 hours of notice that a particularly picky cousin was coming to visit, so I needed to whip something up that would appeal to someone with simple tastes that could be made using only ingredients that I already had on hand given the time crunch.

Smitten Kitchen came to the rescue with these peanut butter stuffed chocolate cookies. Could there be a more crowd-pleasing flavor combo? And despite the multi-step process of making the peanut butter filling, freezing it, and stuffing the cookie dough, these didn’t feel like a huge PITA to make. My cousin loved them, I loved them, and I especially loved not having to make another trip to the store.

With ham, basil, and oregano. Enjoyed at the local park down the street.

I actually had far too much cornmeal and honey to use so this week was great!

Blondies with…whatever! Rice Krispies, cornflakes, cheez its, m&ms, white chocolate, walnuts and chocolate sprinkles!