Happy Valentine's Day! We're having a lazy morning (with fresh squeezed blood orange juice) followed by a brewery visit and (apparently amazing) pastrami sandwiches for lunch. Tonight we are celebrating by going downtown to watch the Kings play win. Last night we celebrated by making the most delicious pizza we've ever created at home using some...

When we visited Boston a few months back, we toured (and devoured lots of chocolate) at this wonderful chocolate factory called Taza. In addition to more traditional chocolates, they make a Mexican inspired chocolate with a really unique, kind of grainy (but definitely not in a bad way) dark chocolate. We came home with many discs of that sort...

I made this cake to celebrate my own birthday the night before. I spent my actual birthday giving my 251 research talk in front of my area's department, which is sort of like our version of a master's thesis defense. And it was the last day of the quarter for the year. Needless to say I was a little preoccupied and wanted an easy, homemade...

The very first time I made gingerbread cookies from scratch, it was quite the disaster. I randomly searched for a gingerbread recipe on the internet and decided upon this one entitled "The Most Wonderful Gingerbread Cookies." Sold. These are definitely some of the best gingerbread cookies that I've ever had. I even upped the ginger content a...

It's almost "officially" summer! Ice cream is perfect summer dessert, but since that's tough to bring to a party where everything has to sit out, I tried to think of another dessert that would capture the essence of summer. Then I remembered seeing kettle corn cookies at Trader Joe's, and thought sweet and salty kettle corn would be an awesome...

Eating these cookies warm from the oven is the perfect way to cozy up on a winter's afternoon. Granted it's not really winter where I am. I think we dipped into the mid 60s today. While the rest of the country is freezing (apparently every state including Hawaii experienced freezing temperatures!) , LA is enjoying its usual beautiful, perfect...

Today is Dustin's birthday (welcome to your mid-20s!)— check back tomorrow for his special birthday dessert! To celebrate Halloween yesterday, we made oatmeal cookies. Oatmeal raisin cookies are gross, well the raisin part anyway. So we replaced raisins with chocolate chips. Instantly better. To make them festive, we pressed white chocolate...

I hadn't been planning on making chocolate chip pumpkin cookies, seeing as I had just made pumpkin chocolate chip muffins. But I couldn't resist when I saw a recipe for chewy pumpkin chocolate chip cookies from Sally's Baking Addiction. I've made pumpkin cookies before when I was a less experienced baker, and they were cake-y along with pretty...

Cookie batch number 2 for the new student BBQ were simple, soft baked sugar cookies studded with lots of sprinkles. I wanted a fairly simple cookie that pretty much everyone likes and would provide a nice contrast to the salted caramel chocolate chip cookies of yesterday. I also thought sprinkles would be a fun and festive way to celebrate the...

I've been on a bit of a cookie binge lately. Right before school started, our incoming class of students threw together an impromptu BBQ to get everyone together and be social. I wanted to make a good first (baking) impression on my classmates, so I wanted to bring a couple of different homemade cookies for everyone to nosh on, the first of...