Adventures in Baking

One of the things that I enjoy most is sharing quality time baking with my daughter, so I was very excited, back in August, when my mother gave me three of her Gooseberry Patch Holiday cookbooks. I can't help it, I take comfort in reading cookbooks. I just love them!

My daughter and I went through all of them together right away and began flagging the pages of both the sweet and savory recipes that we thought would be fun to try together.

Just going through the books together, in itself, was great fun. I had some of those post-it flags, that she calls staffs... (she thinks they look like a Shepherds staff). As we went through the books, my daughter placed a "staff" on all of the pages containing recipes that looked good to us. We used pink and yellow for the sweets and blue to mark the savory dishes.

When my daughter and I bake together we make very simple, yet delicious treats. The recipes made from scratch are also very simple and most of them have been passed along by family members. I also have some favorites from the Food Network stars.

When we make cakes, cupcakes, brownies and muffins, I typically use a store bought mix, but then dress the recipe up a little or just have fun decorating. For instance, just a couple of weeks ago we made a boxed brownie mix, but then my daughter lined Reese's Peanut Butter cups, up and down the pan, after I poured the brownie mix in it. It was delicious! Another time we made store boxed cupcakes but then "mixed it up a little," like my daughter says, and decorated them with M&M's.

I made sure that all the recipes we flagged from the Gooseberry Patch books were simple. Well, they looked simple. This is going to be an adventure but one that I would like to share with you! I hope that you will try some of the recipes that I share, both new and old.  I hope that you enjoy the old ones and that we both enjoy the new ones too!!!

There is a comments section on my blog, so if any of the recipes look good to you, and you end up trying them out, I would love any feedback that you have. Also, if you have any simple recipes that you would like to share with me, I'd love to try them too.

So as not to make this a super long post, I am going to share today's adventure in a separate entry.