baking | Dumplings & Doughnuts

“No no, Zoe, let mommy take a picture!”

Sweet potatoes are Zoe’s favorite vegetable these days. And since being a toddler evidently means learning to spit out peas and broccoli, I’m so grateful she’s still stuffing handfuls of baked sweet potatoes into her mouth with enthusiasm. I’ve mixed mashed sweet potatoes with quinoa, rice, yogurt and even lamb stew! She eats it all (knock on wood).

As I mentioned before, I love making baby (and now toddler) foods. But it’s a three-step process: 1) Buy the ingredients, 2) Cook the food, and 3) Freeze the food within 2-3 days. As the steps progress, I get more and more challenged. So, last night (or this morning) at midnight I realized I still needed to freeze a large bowl of baked sweet potatoes I had in the fridge. On my way to bed I stopped to diligently portion out the chunky potatoes into my cute freezer trays, only… they didn’t all fit. So, what to do with leftover baked sweet potatoes?

Bake muffins, of course! I adore muffins — they’re simple, easy, quick and cake-like without being cake. In baked goods, sweet potatoes are basically just sweet pumpkin, so I looked up “pumpkin muffin” recipes and chose one that looked easy and foolproof (it was midnight after all). I was delighted to find an old Gourmet magazine (Nov 2006) recipe written about on one of my favorite all-time blogs, Smitten Kitchen. (Aww, Gourmet… I could find that same magazine issue right now if I had to, lovingly tucked into one of my bookshelves). Continue reading →

If anyone should know that online recipes are fickle, fleeting and changing, it should be me. As a former online editor for several food websites, I know URLs are not permanent and access to favorite recipes is not guaranteed to last forever. So, that being said, I don’t know why I was so shocked when I did my normal google search for “my” banana bread recipe (actually an Emeril Lagasse recipe), the one I’ve been making for years, and it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Did I copy and paste it somewhere, did I save a file of it, did I print it out? No. All I had to go on was my habitual google search and a URL I dug up that led to a 404 error page.

But, it turns out I remembered a few of the key ingredients: vegetable oil, brown sugar and sour cream. (All combine to give this banana bread the moist richness that I fell in love with the first time I made it.) Searching through all the “Emeril” banana bread recipes out there, I thankfully found my match.

So here it is! I’m posting it here for me as much as for you — I’m not going to let this one get away again.

Continue reading →