Blog Post List

This blog post list contains the most recent blog posts from The Messy Baker in reverse chronological order. You can also browse by recipe category or use the search function.

I am tempted to call this dish The Great Easter Meringue Salvage Operation, or The Waste-Not Rainy Day Face Saver. Instead, I’ll stick to phrases you might actually plug into a search engine -- Lemon Curd Eton Mess. The Eton Mess isn't a new or particularly innovative way...

I’ll happily orphan an egg white. Want French vanilla ice cream with five, six, even eight yolks? No problem. I’ll just pop the abandoned whites into the freezer and make an angel food cake when the mood strikes. Or maybe some macaroons. But ask me to...

Somedays you just aren’t meant to bake. Of course, those days are often when you have no choice. Take Easter weekend for instance. When you’re in charge of desserts and the only two items you are asked to bring involve meringue. And it’s wet and...

I often have a box of phyllo in the fridge - “just in case” I “need” to make appetizers. When I do,  I fold them into triangles, roll them into logs, and even stuff them into muffin tins for little “bundles”. When I’m too lazy to...

My grandmother wasn’t Grandma or Nanna or Nonna, any other such moniker. Everyone called her Town — short for Townsend, her last name. Like her nickname, she was unique and practical and easy to latch onto. I was obsessed with her and even though she...

I've decided to change the idiom from "watching paint dry" to "waiting for sugar to caramelize". It doesn't roll off the tongue, but it's a fair description of the process. This recipe for Burnt Caramel Nut Brittle calls for deeply caramelized sugar. While it doesn’t...

Spring arrived this week, slipping in quietly when we were distracted by the wind. Winter dragged its ungracious feet as it shuffled out the door.  As the last of the snow melted, a bland, brown, monochromatic world emerged outside my window. The lawn was brown. The...

How easy is this triple chocolate bark? I made it while putting together a dinner of roasted sweet potatoes, green beans and pan-seared chicken. I melted chocolate as I peeled, diced, and roasted the potatoes. As the beans steamed, I chopped the toppings. In between chicken...

These Streusel-Topped Hasselback Apples are like a Dutch apple pie without the fuss of pastry. A large, firm, sweet apple like Honeycrisp delivers best results but Mustu or Golden Delicious work well too. ...

Ignore the standard dictionary. It will tell you a clanger is a blunder, a mistake, and a conspicuous one at that. This pastry is anything but a dud. It’s a riff on an old-fashioned Bedfordshire Clanger, a long hand pie stuffed with spiced meat on...