Here’s something you don’t see all the time on today’s ultra-slick cooking blogs.  A confession:  sometimes, things don’t work out as planned. For Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day) this year, I decided to make one of those fabulous checkerboard cakes I’ve seen all over the Internet.  Sure, they sell special cake pans to make them, but that’s just kitsch, right? Special pans:  Who needs ‘em, amIright? Anyway, all the pans do is let you mix and match the bits and pieces a little more easily.  Surely, I can do that on my own, at home, with nothing more than my own ingenuity? Nope. You can’t really see from this picture how wonky and falling-aparty these cakes really were.  But don’t take my word for it… you can see the whole thing coming together (and/or falling apart) in this delightful real-life video

Most of the baking I do is pareve, and usually, I don’t mind.  But sometimes, I come across a baking or bread idea that absolutely must use dairy.  Must must must.  No substitutions.  Naomi Rivka is taking a baking course right now and she bakes a lot of dairy.  She’ll bring home the recipe and excitedly ask, “Can we make this for Shabbos?”  And I look at the kilo of butter or whatever in the ingredients and say, “Not this week, we’re having fleishiks…”  She keeps saying we can use margarine instead, and my standard line for this is: “Margarine is NOT pareve butter.” I think you’ll agree.  Margarine can be USEFUL in kosher baking, but it most definitely isn’t butter.  And when what you want is the flavour of butter – there’s nothing like it in the world – then what you need to start with is… butter. Like croissants.  I read about making croissants years and years ago.  You take a super-thin layer of butter, sandwich it b...

When you love baking as much as I do, you become an evangelist. After we moved to Israel, and our whole lives were topsy-turvy, the only time I felt like things were at all “normal” were when I was making bread.  Those breads were rudimentary at first – hey, we didn’t even have an oven.  But they kept me grounded.  I was so ecstatic when all our possessions arrived, including my gorgeous cast iron loaf pans, plastic dough bucket , and other beloved bakeware, accumulated over the years.  It was time to get my hands floury and really start baking again. I love how centered and grounded baking makes me feel, but can’t help wondering why other people seem to think it’s hard, or complicated, or just not something they have space for in their lives.  We all have time and space to make bread.  Sure, it takes a while, but very little of that is active prep time.  A bread that takes 36 hours from start to finish may have less than ten minutes of actual st...

It’s no secret that I’ve been searching years for the perfect pareve cinnamon bun.  When I saw this recipe , for a Giant Cinnamon Roll Cake, mentioned on a facebook group last week, it looked sort of perfect – simple, low-key and kind of pretty, to boot. I didn’t use the dough recommended in the recipe – I just made my regular challah dough a bit sweeter than usual. ROLL IT OUT.  Roll it out into a “rectangle” (okay, not exact, but you can tug at the corners gently to make it prettier). SPREAD YUMMINESS.  The cinnamon spread was easy, and I was impressed that it didn’t have a ton of margarine in it.  I used butter-flavoured.  Use fresh cinnamon, if at all possible! TIME TO STRIP. Now, you’re supposed to cut the dough into nice, neat strips.  Theoretically, the recipe asks you to use a ruler and make sure they’re equal so your “cake” doesn’t look all lumpy and bumpy.  My philosophy is that it all tastes the same anyway (probably not t...

I wrote on here back in June about my deep-seated, irrational NEED for a piecaken.  If you don’t remember, or have no clue what that is, you can read about it here . So today I did – kind of.  Except it was an utter disaster, the most cr*ptacular confection I think I have ever confected. And in case anyone thinks I am some kind of Superwoman who never blogs her failures, here ya go, in delicious step-by-step horribility… Starting out on a promising foot with a delicious pie.  I used a sheet of malawach pastry for the top crust, rolled thin.  I’ve done it before and it actually makes a pretty decent, flaky / tasty crust.  Oh, inside this there is cherry pie filling.  And I cut proper vents, four of them, right in the middle. The top crust wasn’t attached perfectly at the edges, as you can see… …but that still doesn’t exactly explain what happened when I went to “decant” the pie on top of some of the cake mix.  Oh, yeah, did I mention I wh...