It has been brought to my attention that my children are shamefully hard-done-by: most weekday mornings they must suffer through the burden of torturous breakfasts consisting of cereal, granola, porridge, toast, French toast, eggs, bacon, and occasionally, even English muffins. Oh, the horror! 

Hey folks. Sorry for the unseemly lack of posts; since I last posted I’ve stopped teaching fitness classes and started back to work full time (outside the home) and have been swamped with a daily routine of schlepping my eldest to school with the twins in tow, picking up the hubby each morning after he finishes teaching an early morning anatomy class, catapulting myself to the office, and then racing back home for dinner time, and collapsing after extracting my remaining drops of energy while kicking and punching my way through an hour of my mom’s Turbo Jam DVDs (love it!!).

Earlier this year I was asked to bake six pies (of the blueberry and apple varieties) for Select Nova Scotia’s winter television commercial campaign to help promote the use of locally grown food and produce within the province. And so began piepalooza at our house. This challenge got me over any residual trepidation I might have had about working with pastry and gave me a newfound respect for the humble, unassuming pie.

Peanut butter and chocolate: it’s a match made in candyland heaven, no? Yes. Perhaps the simplest and most enduring commercial manifestation of this tasty pairing is in Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups,  a peanut butter-filled chocolate candy created way back in 1928 by Harry Burnett Reese, a former dairy farmer and shipping foreman to Milton S. Hershey (yes, that Hershey).

A friend recently asked me how I choose what to make on my adventures in baking. Well, occasionally I whip up family favorites or requests, often I play around with tastes and textures in baking experiments, and sometimes there are recipes for desserts and confections that have long been on my “to bake” list. And then — increasingly as my baking prowess swells — there are those fresh and boxed treats that I come across in my daily trips to local food shops and down grocery store aisles when I taste and peer at the item, inspect the food’s list of ingredients and say to myself: “I can make that… and without all those nasty preservatives and unpronounceables, at a fraction of the cost.” And so I was inspired to make biscotti…