Category: baked goods

gluten-free bread for communion

Anyone who’s lived a gluten-free lifestyle knows how hard it is to find a bread free of wheat. So, recently tasked with finding a gluten-free bread for communion, i.e., one sturdy enough to dip into liquid without dissolving, I test two recipes, comparing quality and costs with store-bought varieties. Here’s what I find.

gluten-free bread for communion

Where do you go when you need a bread you can offer the masses? When you want loaves you can break and hand out? Given that, according to a study discussed last year by Niall McCarthy at Forbes Magazine, some 3.1 million Americans follow a gluten-free diet, a number that has “tripled since 2009,” finding a bread sans gluten is a good place to start. Read More

5 Reasons to Bake Pretzels with Walter the Baker

This post on five reasons to bake pretzels with Walter the Baker is part of a series of articles on cooking with kids. Cooking with kids forges bonds, grows skills and makes the world of food more fun–but, for many busy parents, knowing how and when to include kids in the kitchen isn’t obvious. // Do you have a story or suggestion from your own experience to share? Contact me here.

baking pretzels from Walter the Baker

Cooking with kids is a hot topic today. It discourages picky palates, according to registered dietician and freelance nutrition journalist Janet Helm, who says “children are much more likely to try something new if they’ve had a hand at preparing it.” Getting kids in the kitchen can grow math and vocabulary skills, according to children’s health and development site KidsHealth. Even British celebrity chef and restaurateur Jaime Oliver, advocated for it, in his 2010-11 ABC TV series, Food Revolution, while he tried to reform American school lunch programs and change kids’ eating habits.

But, as with many good ideas, the biggest challenge is knowing where to start. So here’s a suggestion: Bake pretzels with Walter the Baker.Read More

Blueberry Buckle Doughnuts, Doughnut Cookies or, Doughkies

This article on blueberry buckle doughnuts (or doughnuts meet cookies, i.e., doughkies) is the third post in a series of make-ahead mornings, batch breakfasts designed to save you time. Also in this series: breakfast panna cotta and a closer look at smoothie packs.

blueberry buckle doughkies

Built like a doughnut, baked like a muffin and crunchy enough that their bite can be heard across the room, these doughnut hybrids are like doughnut meets cookie: doughkies?Read More

Healthy Pumpkin Muffins for Toddlers or Anyone

This is part four in a Cook the Cookbook series featuring Margaret Rudkin’s The Pepperidge Farm Cookbook, published in 1963. Also in this series: Intro, Venison Vegetable Soup, Will the Best Pie Crust Please Stand Up? and Pepperidge Farm bread.

healthy pumpkin muffins for toddlers or anyone

At first glance, the fourth chapter of Rudkin’s book strikes me as the strangest, departing from the linear storyline of her life to feature her interest in old cookbooks. As if to explain, she writes that she developed this interest while in the food business. In fact, knowing her hobby, on the twentieth anniversary of Pepperidge Farm, her employees surprised her with a copy of the world’s first printed cookbook, with a scroll signed by each one. Read More

Pepperidge Farm: The Bread That Launched a Business

This is part three in a Cook the Cookbook series featuring Margaret Rudkin’s The Pepperidge Farm Cookbook, published in 1963. Also in this series: Intro, Venison Vegetable Soup and Will the Best Pie Crust Please Stand Up?.

Homemade white bread from Pepperidge Farm's Margaret Rudkin

Like most middle-class American children of the ‘80s and ‘90s, I grew up on goldfish crackers, Milano cookies and other foods branded with that famous red banner displaying the Pepperidge Farm name. When choosing a recipe from this third section of Rudkin’s book, however, dubbed “Pepperidge Farm,” I decide to go basic. If bread could grab her doctor’s attention, launch Rudkin’s foray into the food business and be the impetus for a business now known around the world, perhaps it will appeal to me, too. Read More

Will the Best Pie Crust Recipe Please Stand Up?

This is part two in a Cook the Cookbook series featuring Margaret Rudkin’s The Pepperidge Farm Cookbook, published in 1963. Read the intro to this cookbook’s series here and part one here.

pie crust made with butter and coconut oil

Before Margaret Rudkin wrote the world’s first cookbook to land on the New York Times Bestseller list, she was a mathematics and finance major who joined the working world and met the man she’d marry, Henry, at a job. They wed in 1923, three years before they’d, “to live a real country life,” buy 125 acres of land in Connecticut and name it Pepperidge Farm.Read More