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A May 2005 Bonus Newsletter,
The BB Summer Recipe 'Wedding' Collection
Summer weddings abound and this collection of recipes is by request of the many visitors to BB who have asked for one or another of my ‘best’ summer entertaining or wedding recipes. Here they are, in one package. Wedding in sight or not, these are super summer recipes to have on hand. Add a quiche or two, a grand Caesar salad and leeks 'n Hollandaise and you will have a feast they will talk about long after summer fades!
Stay tuned for the June issue!
Marcy Goldman Editor and Host www.betterbaking.com
Wedding Recipe Collection
Classic Poached Wedding Salmon Poached Salmon for a Wedding Wedding Devilled Eggs Bride’s Boon Ice-Box Rolls Italian Cream Cake Emily Dickensons Wedding Cake Emily Dickenson’s Wedding Fruit Cake Red Velvet Grooms Cake Groom’s Red Velvet Cake Tiramisu Wedding Cake with BerriesTiramisu Wedding Cake Pink Champagne New Year's Eve Cookies Pink Champagne Reception Cookies Wedding For Bella Biscotti Wedding For Bella Biscotti
Free Apple Pie Filling Cake and more – Special May Edition of Scent of a Baker – from electronics for Her to the Girlie Girl Finds on the “M” List
Hello Fellow Bakers and Friends of BetterBaking.com,
Just a short note to offer some extra recipe inspirations, including a freebie, Apple Pie Filling Coffeecake recipe, in case you have a post-Mother’s Day brunch planned. Speaking of which, some of you emailed saying you did not receive my Scent of a Baker Mother’s Day Scent and Gift Round-Up. You can check it out here:
http://www.betterbaking.com/viewArticle.php?article_id=91.
This most recent edition is huge! It is literally chock full of the newest in neat gifts such as the incomparable Creative Zen portable music maker, the best in fragrance from designers and perfume houses, as well as my personal favs in fragrance suppliers. You will also find some appliances of note and a miracle hair product (and dryer) that will transform your life (yes –no more bad hair days I promise) and the very best red lipstick on the planet.
On other fronts, I am hard at work on A Passion for Home Baking, my third cookbook and will keep you posted. Like all cookbooks, it is along process but this one will be a doozie. As selected recipes are tripled tested, (and more new, exclusive ones are created and added) go into the print collection of this cookbook, understandably, most of them, by publisher agreement, are removed from the website. That said, we all seem to agree that a print cookbook beats reams and reams of printed-out recipes. Preserve your printer, save a tree, and buy a cookbook.
As for the book, we have assembled a fine test baker team that is feverishly testing and fretting about extra calorie intake, while praising the goods they make. We are honored to have an editor/nutritionist/dietician Ellen Fuss (not fussy by nature but she is awfully exacting!). If we need more testers up the road, we will put out the call.
BetterBaking.Com Cookbook Almost Sold Out!
Random House Canada reports the end of their supplies of The Best of BetterBaking.com so if you were considering ordering a copy, now is the time. (try Indigo.ca in Canada, and Amazon.com or Ecookbooks.com in the States or in your local bookstore).
And in the BB Test Kitchen, I am finally testing Silpats more thoroughly for those who have been asking about them (and an ice-cream machine and a panini grill) for the baker's nitty gritty on these baker’s mats.
On a personal note, it is graduation time as my eldest son is off to a career in Jazz/Music at university in a couple of months, and all three sons prepare to take the diamond (which means I will be catering three baseball teams, aka the BB unofficial taste testers of summer). I am, playing hooky every chance I get which is rare but mostly, as always, baking, writing (trying very hard to get used to a laptop for my fiction work in my café writing days!) and currently on Tango Partner #11 who, it seems, also cooks. I think we’ll keep him. More fortuitously, he also dances rather well.
The extra recipes are also at the top of the Note From Marcy page.
Isaac Newton Apple Cake A freebie! Enjoy. Chewy Cinnamon Sticks Why resist? Also good with sundried tomato pesto Pull Apart Monkey Bread Company coming? Your turn at soccer? Yin Yang Cream Cheese Stuffed Brownies Gotta have something chocolate Starbucks Orange Oatmeal Scones Rustic, but sweet, orangey goodness in each bite.
As always, my warmest wishes and happy baking,
Marcy Goldman Editor and Host www.BetterBaking.Com
REGULAR MAY 2005 ISSUE
Cowboy Cookies !!!FREE!!!
Empire Biscuits
Golden Cracked Wheat Bread Old Fashioned Pie Tin Crumb Cake Drive Thru Chicken Crunch Tenders Dueling Apple Pie
The Essay Feature From Marcy The Go West, Young Baker, New Frontier Baking Issue
From the journal, aka a ‘blog’ of Emily Hawley Gillespie, Home on the Range, Cathy Luchetti
May 1878 “Felt blue today. Will bake some bread, pies and cookies. Children will read".
I am sitting here with freshly roasted (cast iron skillet), freshly ground (little wood mill with steel burrs) coffee. I have Wood Smoke incense burning (as well the softly churning Fabreze Scent Stories unit I am testing), and candlelight to warm the dreary day. Outside, overhead, there are a few flocks of Canadian geese making their way North. I have that twitchy cowboy feeling again. My heart, head and hands are all equally restless. I want to reinvent bread, conquer a better brownie and become the Jane Austen of the new millennium. It is that go west, young baker time.
May is that mother month thing too – what with Mother’s Day, spring flowers, spring marathons and such. In this issue, I salute the feminine feminists, goddesses, mothers/sisters/daughters/lovers among us, who, are often, coincidentally, baker gals as well. It all makes me think of May, circa 1800’s, when the West was being settled. My head fills with images of life on the Chisholm or Oregon Trail and the women who loaded up their wagons and installed entire kitchens in a mode of transport that for all their rustic origins, are the pre-cursors to the family van that grace the mall parking lot. Can you imagine baking without refrigeration, dry yeast, potable water and a steady 350 F oven? Can you imagine tending the home fires even if you would have preferred to be the one blazing the trail? One woman writes of losing twenty years of youthful vitality, ‘gobbled up by the oven’!
If you read the journals of those women, what is remarkable is that over 150 years ago, the ‘blogs’ are most often about their husbands not understanding them, appreciating them, their overwhelming domestic demands, or having ample opportunities just ‘to be’. You can read about Annie Greene who ran a ‘secret bakery’, hiding her success from a husband that tried to close her down (she won out). Other women, like Emily Hawley Gillespie (above), write repeatedly of their fatigue, their love of their families and their inner reflective worlds. What is most notable is that these voices from the past resonate with words and wisdom that could have been penned an hour ago. Any of these women would be someone you would want to call sister or friend.
Of course, the frontier is not just about baking or feminism – it is a concept. Just the word is sets your spirit revving. When I was younger, my ‘frontier’ was the stories I had yet to write, the recipes I had not made once, (let alone tweaked and perfected 20 times over), places to see, people to meet – you know the drill.
I wanted to capture the moon and bring it home. I still do and it is a low-grade whirring I spend a great deal of time trying to hush. Once it all seemed about a grander toss of a wider net to harness the wind. But life got way huge and ‘the more you know’ expands into the more one wants to know, exponentially. As you evolve there seems to end to what you can do or choose. Possibility becomes this organic thing that seems to have taken fertility drugs. Possibility seems to give birth to endless, more possibility, all mothered by Unfulfilled Potential. Only time seems finite. Plus –and this is a big plus: the proliferation of the various mediums, the Electronic medium being the hugest culprit, compounds it all.
As each previous generation has felt in their time, many of us similarly feel a agog and in a whirl with the Internet and the new technology. I figure in a few months (which is a decade in the new millennium sort of time), we will all wear bar codes and be scanned in order to quickly input financial, personal, and medical information, and you will be able to program and network every facet of your life, from miles away, with the touch of a mini-mouse, installed in your index finger in the delivery room when you are born. There are CNN specials, radio shows, and magazine features on how we all rush and must slow down and kids aren’t reading, etc. and how that must change back. But you know what? It ain’t gonna happen. Younger people do not notice the whirl as we do and that is as it should be. No, it will never go back….which might be in fact, why I like to bake. Bread is slow to change and acres of silpats, latex bakeware, mountains of faster yeasts, dry sourdough cultures and convection ovens with built-in TV’s and satellite radio are not going to speed up a slow-rise bread! It is a strange comfort. Fact is, I do not need a new horizon in bread – I can spend ten lifetimes, perfecting one recipe and still bake a new bread by the hour.
Everything is bigger and better and as my colleague Nigella Lawson would say, very ‘moreish’.. There are a million stories in the night, a trillion stories of the city, and then some zillion more voices all wanting their 15 minutes of fame. If you imagine all these competing voices, you also need to figure out (without stopping what you want to do in life) that it is not possible to have your voice heard or be visible in the way you might think you deserve or need to.
There is no middle class anymore –there is A list and the rest of the world – in a manner of speaking. You are either splatted or saturating the media for your brief expose or a larger than life personality (for good or bad) directing the ultimate reality show: This Life, These Times. For me, as a participant who needs to feel like the creative frontier is manageable, this means hacking off a tiny hunk of gold and mining it with the love and care things that are small but precious deserve. It is also a way to survive, but to also thrive and regenerate. Between not making the best sourdough in the world and Pillsbury Dinner Rolls, there are eons of choices and levels in-between. Knowing who and where you are and what makes you happy (which is what makes you successful) is cogent, savvy stuff. It offers me stillness in a racing world.
Similarly, the frontier of self-hood can be overwhelming – the roles we all have, the hats we wear and the techno era has made our to-do list formidable. What’s great about Endless Possibility and Unmet Potential is that it is creative and exciting. What is bad about it is that you never arrive. There is no finish line and that clamor of possibility segues into a contemporary cocktail – that unhealthy mix of two parts chatter of saturation and one part chaos of stimulation overload.
It’s taken me all this time to figure out a personal solution: in order to feel arrived, I mindfully have opted to lasso only half the moon; sometimes, only a fraction of a star. I keep to ‘the program’ whether it is a spat of domestic tasks or writing deadlines. Not always exciting stuff but it does offer the reward of that sense of being finished with something. Completing something, even small, results in serenity which spawns a bit of clarity and focus. This focus in turn offers a bit of new energy. Now order and focus don’t sound like the touchstones of creativity but they are. I do not have to write my novel all today or bake up every Definitive Butter Cookie all today. The bits and pieces I manage contribute to a mosaic, which becomes a mural. In the meantime, I am engaged fully – and reveling in a certain soulful harmony.
I haven’t stopped wanting to discover the frontier. I just no longer try to chase the horizon – lest I lose my energy or discover it to be, which the horizon often is, a mirage – sometimes, not even a mirage of my own making.
The story I tell myself lately, which is working (lately) is that I have opted to ‘live big in a small venue.’ Thing is, it was never about getting there; it is indeed, about the journey West of my own spirit. No more huge map with expansive borders. It is now about carefully going over where I have been, lovingly coloring in and shading the places I want to tarry over, making art of the details, not enlarging the outline or challenging the borderlands.
The greater frontier was never 'out there'. There is no there, there. The greater frontier, resides, as it always has, within. It is the landscape of my own passions and those passions, map or not, I can meet up with anytime I like. I know the terrain like the back of my hand.
Here’s to living big in a small venue, inventing frontiers in your own backyard, and forging your own trail. If I see you on the trail west, please wave. I will tip my toque and bid you Godspeed. Meet you at the A-Ok Corral, where the biscuits are hot, the coffee is scorching, and there is always an extra place set at the table. With spirit and stillness both,
Marcy Goldman Editor, Host, Maverick Baker www.BetterBaking.com
P.S. A Note From the BB Home Office This May 2005 Issue of BetterBaking.com was also brought to you by the efforts of Benjamin Goldman of Wheatland Publishing. We wish to thank Ben for his contributions, when he was our office intern and test kitchen associate on Take Your Son to Work Day.
Previous Monthly Essays from A Note From Marcy:
Essays to tickle your funny bone, wake up your inner baker, twinge on your heartstrings, or make you smile and say, Ive know the feeling; I know the place. If you missed an essay, or a season in baking or inner sensibility, we invite you to stroll through our archived Notes From Marcy.
- March 2018 A Note From Marcy - March 2018
- February 2018 A Note from Marcy - February 2018
- December 2017 A Note from Marcy - December 2017
- November 2017 A Note from Marcy - November 2017
- October 2017 A Note from Marcy - October 2017
- September 2017 A Note from Marcy - September 2017
- August 2017 A Note from Marcy - August 2017
- July 2017 A Note from Marcy - July 2017
- June 2017 A Note from Marcy - June 2017
- May 2017 A Note from Marcy - May 2017
- April 2017 A Note from Marcy - April 2017
- March 2017 A Note from Marcy - March 2017
- February A Note from Marcy - February 2017
- Betterbaking.com 2017 All Recipes Listing - January 2017
- January 2017 A Note from Marcy - January 2017
- December 2016 A Note from Marcy - December 2016
- Winter 2016 BB Best Gifts Round-Up - December 2016
- November 2016 A Note from Marcy - November 2016
- October 2016 A Note from Marcy - October 2016
- September 2016 A Note from Marcy - September 2016
- August 2016 A Note from Marcy - August 2016
- July 2016 A Note from Marcy - June 2016
- June 2016 A Note from Marcy - June 2016
- May 2016 A Note from Marcy - May 2016
- April 2016 A Note from Marcy - April 2016
- March 2016 A Note from Marcy - March 2016
- February 2016 A Note from Marcy - February 2016
- January 2016 A Note from Marcy - January 2016
- December 2015 A Note from Marcy - December 2015
- November 2015 A Note from Marcy - November 2015
- September 2015 A Note from Marcy - September 2015
- August 2015 A Note from Marcy - August 2015
- July 2015 A Note from Marcy - July 2015
- June 2015 A Note from Marcy - June 2015
- May 2015 A Note from Marcy - May 2015
- April 2015 A Note from Marcy - April 2015
- March 2015 A Note from Marcy - March 2015
- February 2015 A Note from Marcy - February 2015
- January 2015 A Note from Marcy - January 2015
- December 2014 A Note from Marcy - December 2014
- November 2014 A Note From Marcy - November 2014
- October A Note from Marcy - October 2014
- September 2014 A Note from Marcy - September 2014
- August 2014 A Note from Marcy - August 2014
- July 2014 A Note from Marcy - July 2014
- June 2014 A Note from Marcy - June 2014
- May 2014 A Note from Marcy - May 2014
- April 2014 A Note from Marcy - April 2014
- March 2014 A Note from Marcy - March 2014
- February 2014 A Note from Marcy - February 2014
- January 2014 A Note from Marcy - January 2014
- December 2013 A Note from Marcy - December 2013
- November 2013 A Note from Marcy - November 2013
- October 2013 A Note from Marcy - October 2013
- September 2013 A Note from Marcy - September 2013
- August 2013 A Note from Marcy - August 2013
- July 2013 A Note from Marcy - July 2013
- June 2013 A Note from Marcy, Baker's Stash - June 2013
- May 2013 A Note from Marcy - May 2013
- April 2013 A Note from Marcy Baker's Stash - April 2013
- March 2013 A Note from Marcy - March 2013
- February 2013 A Note from Marcy - February 2013
- January 2013 A Note from Marcy - January 2013
- December 2012 A Note from Marcy - December 2012
- November 2012 A Note from Marcy - November 2012
- October 2012 A Note from Marcy - October 2012
- September 2012 A Note from Marcy - September 2012
- August 2012 A Note from Marcy Baker's Stash - August 2012
- July 2012 A Note from Marcy Baker's Stash - July 2012
- May 2012 A Note from Marcy - May 2012
- April 2012 Note from Marcy, Baker's Stash - April 2012
- March 2012 A Note From Marcy - March 2012
- February 2012 A Note from Marcy - February 2012
- January 2012 A Note from Marcy - January 2012
- December 2011 A Note from Marcy, Baker's Stash - December 2011
- November 2011 Note from Marcy Bakers Stash - November 2011
- October 2011 Note From Marcy Baker's Stash - October 2011
- September 2011 A Note from Marcy - September 2011
- August 2011 (1) Note From Marcy - August 2011
- June 2011 Note from Marcy - June 2011
- May 2011 A Note from Marcy, Baker's Stash - May 2011
- March 2011 A Note From Marcy - March 2011
- February 2011 A Note From Marcy, Baker's Stash - February 2011
- January 2011 A Note from Marcy - January 2011
- December 2010 Baker's Stash - December 2010
- November 2010 Baker's Stash - November 2010
- October 2010 Note from Marcy & Baker's Stash - October 2010
- September 2010 Note from Marcy & Baker's Stash - September 2010
- August 2010 Baker's Stash - August 2010
- July 2010 Baker's Stash, A Note from Marcy - July 2010
- June 2010 Baker's Stash - June 2010
- April 2010 BAKER'S STASH - April 2010
- March 2010 Baker's Stash, A Note From Marcy - March 2010
- 2003-2007 PAST ISSUES Note from Marcy & Recipes - February 2010
- January 2010 Baker's Stash - January 2010
- December 2009 Baker's Stash - December 2009
- September 2009 Baker's Stash - September 2009
- April 2009 Bakers Stash - April 2009
- March 2009 Baker's Stash Baking With Mom, Feminist in the Kitchen and some Retro - March 2009
- February 2009 Baker's Recipe Stash - February 2009
- January 2009 Baker's Stash - January 2009
- December 2008 Baker's Stash - December 2008
- November 2008 A Note From Marcy - November 2008
- September 2008 Baker's Stash - September 2008
- A note from Marcy - December 2007
- A Note from Marcy - February 2007 - An Oreo Love Affair
- A Note from Marcy - January 2007 - When Bakers Cook, Recipes deChef
- A Note from Marcy - December 2006 - Shortbread and Other Favorite Things
- A Note from Marcy - November 2006 - Thank Goodness for Pie
- A Note from Marcy - October 2006 - A Salute to Chocolate Chip Cookies
- A Note from Marcy - September 2006 - The Back to School Carrot Cake Issue
- A Note From Marcy - August 2006 - The Sourdough Magic Issue
- A Note from Marcy - July 2006 - The Annual BB Picnic Issue
- A Note from Marcy - June 2006 - The Bountiful Berry Issue
- A Note from Marcy - May 2006 - Pride and Pastry or Tea With Jane
- A Note from Marcy - April 2006 - The Breakfast Baking Issue and Fresh Starts
- A Note from Marcy March 2006 Passion - Gettin' Some - March 2006 - Havana A Heat Wave, Baking with A Latin Beat and The Passion Play
- A Note from Marcy - February 2006 - Memoirs of A Geisha Baking, Valentine’s Sweets
- A Note from Marcy - January 2006 - The You're Toast, A Salute To Slicing Loaves and More
- A Note from Marcy - December 2005 - Bake It Forward, Gift Baking Issue
- A Note from Marcy - November 2005 - Open Hearth Hosting or Guess Who's Coming For Dinner
- A Note from Marcy - October 2005 - It All Happens for a Reason or Sometimes Bread Just Doesn't Rise.....
- A Note from Marcy - September 2005 - Baking By the Code
- A Note from Marcy - August 2005 - The Tao of Pie
- A Note from Marcy - July 2005 - The Journey of the Journal plus Twix Bars!
- A Note from Marcy - June 2005 - A Pastry Chefs Trial by Cheesecakes
- A Note from Marcy - April 2005 - When Harry Met Salad
- A Note from Marcy - March 2005 - Baking with an Irish Broque; A Romance in the Dairy Queen One Fine March
- A Note from Marcy - February 2005 - She Just Doesn’t Get Him, Valentine’s Day Rebuttal and Cupcakes Galore
- A Note from Marcy - January 2005 - The Art of Changing and Making Space in a New Year
- A Note from Marcy - December 2004 - The Shall We Dance or Shall We Bake, Holiday Baking Issue and an Ode to Dance
- A Note from Marcy - November 2004 - The Bread and Soup Issue and How A Canadian Became Americanized (sort of)
- A Note from Marcy - October 2004 - The Field of Dreams Issue, Baseball and the Baker
- A Note from Marcy - September 2004 - The Catcher of the Rye Issue, What Falls Away, the Sweet Taste of Forgiveness and Letting Go
- A Note from Marcy - August 2004 - It’s All Greek To Me Issue and The Evils of Multi-Tasking
- A Note from Marcy - July 2004 - The Gone Fishin’ Issue/Summer in the River City, A Baker’s Musical
- A Note from Marcy - June 2004 - The All That Jazz Issue, How To Scat and Improvise in Wheat
- A Note from Marcy - May 2004 - The Bread and Roses Issue, Goddess, Feminist or Feminine…and Fudge
- A Note from Marcy - April 2004 - Waiting for Happy, or If I Won the Lotto
- A Note from Marcy - March 2004 - Meet You in the Bookstore, My Love Affair with Books
- A Note from Marcy - February 2004 - Sweets for the Sweet, a Valentine From the Baker
- A Note from Marcy - January 2004 - How To Eat Right or Resolution 2004 – How Not To Diet
- A Note From Marcy - December 2003 - The Sugar and Spice Issue
- A Note from Marcy - November 2003 - How To Weather the Weather, or Keeping Cozy in Late Fall
- A Note from Marcy - October 2003 (Part 2) - They Laughed When I Got Up To Bake, Hotel School Trials
- A Note from Marcy - October 2003 (Part 1) - How I Got Into Baking, A Baker’s Beginnings Part 1
- A Note from Marcy - September 2003 - Welcome To Wheatland, a baker’s fantasy or Camelot in Flour
- A Note from Marcy - August 2003 - Notes on Homemade Krispie Kreme Doughnuts
- A Note From Marcy - July 2003 - Memories of Summer Music Camp or Baking to Birdland
- A Note From Marcy - June 2003 - How to Play Hooky in Summer, An Urban Adventure
- 2003-2009 Note from Marcy Archives
- May 2017 Big Product Review Feature
- February 2009 Baker's Stash
- Karine Joncas Cosmetics
- April 2011 A Note from Marcy, Baker's Stash
- October 2008 Baker's Stash
- May 2010 Baker's Stash
- Archived A Note from Marcy 2003 - 2017
- February 2009 Issue Baking by Heart Copy
- March 2009 Baker's Recipe Stash
- April 2009 Baker's Stash
- Archived Newsletters, A Note from Marcy 2004 - 2017

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