Bake with abandon!
When I was a kid there were three kinds of salt in my little world: Rock, kosher and table. That was it. The only specialty salt was Morton’s. Their slogan —When it rains, it pours.— gives you an idea of how simple life was back then. …
My shoulder’s ache, my fingertips have callouses, and the daylight hurts my eyes. But The Messy Baker is written, filed electronically and a 292-page, double-spaced paper copy is beating up all the Christmas cards as it pushes its way to HarperCollins in Toronto. I have …
If you read my 2012 Culinary Bucket List, you’ll see I have a lot of baking to do. In case a from-scratch cake is on your list, I thought I’d start the new year off with some baking tips I learned from Camilla V. …
Last week I had the pleasure of taking a truffle and bon bon making course in Toronto with Marissa Scibetta at Bonnie Gordon College of Confectionary Arts. For two glorious evenings I was the proverbial kid in the candy shop, weighing, heating, mixing, spooning and …
During the chocolate demonstration, Derrick made this decorative chocolate drizzle for Emily. As in Emily Richards. I’m not jealous. Really. After all, my name’s too long. And too hard to spell. So demonstrating chocolate script with “Emily” makes sense. I guess. After Derrick showed off …
This is me at chocolate class. While Elizabeth Baird looks mildly curious, I look like I’m about to have the “full bore lateral panic” my mother so often threatened. From my expression you’d think the macarons had started to dance about like extras in …
Growing up, cheesecake was a graham crust pressed into a 9 X 9 pan, slathered in a mixture of cream cheese and Dream Whip, and crowned with a can of blueberry pie filling. Or cherry, if the mood struck. I had no idea baked cheesecakes …
I’m on Kitchener CTV’s News at Noon talking about peaches. While they’re generously allotting me 5 minutes, the entire news hour isn’t enough time to tell you how much I love peaches. And just how much do I love peaches? Last year, I bought an …
I knew I was missing a step. Despite learning how to heat a pan to perfection and fire up the grill without burning off my eyebrows, I struggle with producing a medium-rare steak. Oh, technically, I know how to use the palm method to determine …