As many things as I have mastered over the last year and a half of perfecting my baking, one seemingly simple thing that has managed to elude me is streusel topping. I have tried multiple different recipes with different ingredient ratios and butter temperature all over the map from right-out-of-the-fridge cold to just short of melted. But no...

Nothing says Christmas like eggnog. We've made our own, and now we are baking with this popular holiday drink. This Christmas morning you can drink your eggnog for breakfast as well as eat it. The bread definitely has an eggnog flavoring to it, but it's not overwhelming or overpowering, and the texture of the bread is really smooth. My...

As I'm sure everybody knows, today is 12/12/12! Pretty cool day numerically speaking, but... Today is also my birthday! Last night we went out to a fabulous dinner at Shiro's in Seattle, the premier sushi restaurant in Seattle. This amazing sushi chef trained at an elite restaurant back in Japan. For Dustin's birthday last month, we visited...

Even though sweet potato puree is very reminiscent of pumpkin puree, which I love in baked goods, I had never thought to put it into a muffin. I've been saving this recipe for a cool, fall week in Seattle ever since I saw this recipe for sweet potato muffins in my Good To The Grain cookbook last summer. I added ginger because I love the flavor...

I really love making quick breads to have for fast and easy weekday breakfasts. My favorite recently was the pumpkin cider bread I created— so moist and delicious. This recipe for apple bread from Penzeys makes your whole house smell like you are baking an apple pie, so I decided to modify the name. Whereas the pumpkin cider was light and...

I remember eating King's Hawaiian Sweet Rolls from the grocery store as a kid every once in awhile and thinking they were the best rolls I'd ever eaten because of that sweetness. Now that I've grown up and tasted a lot of good bread, I know those prepackaged rolls are most definitely not the best rolls ever, but I decided a homemade version of...

Lately I have seen numerous recipes for pumpkin ale bread, but given that we just bought some pumpkin cider, I thought making pumpkin cider bread would be a fun, and slightly sweeter twist on the pumpkin ale bread. I was really impressed at how my experimentation came out. This bread was super moist, flavorful, and low-fat. I frequently get...

Okay, there is no way these pretzels can outshine the fresh-from-the-oven pretzels from Brave Horse Tavern. I'd need to buy some rye flour to even begin to compete. But these pretzels blow anything you can buy at a ballpark out of the water. Here is a link to the recipe I used for the dough that has nice step-by-step instructions and...

From pancakes to pie, I've been a little obsessed with peanut butter lately, and I hadn't made banana bread in forever, so I figured it was time to make peanut butter banana bread. But this couldn't be just any peanut butter banana bread. It had to be moist and dense, (sort-of) healthy (i.e. using whole wheat flour and no oil or butter), and...

I made these muffins watching Jenn Kessy and April Ross beat Brazil to make it to the finals of the women's beach volleyball during the Olympics a few weeks back. The match was pretty intense, and the Americans were the definite underdogs, but they came back to take down the number one team! I was super into watching while I was making these...