Weekend Baking

Today, Kate shares a recommendation for a cookbook that provides inspiration for baking projects with her daughter:

“I have loved to bake for as long as I can remember. Cooking - dinners, real meals, nutritionally well balanced and all miraculously ready at the same time - isn't necessarily my thing, but baking is one of my refuges. My mother started me on simple sugar cookies and carrot cakes when I was in preschool, and I've carried the love - for the flour, the sugars, the whiff of vanilla, the hand-feel of kneading dough - through my life until now, when I can spend weekends with my own toddler baking.

Baking is one of the ways that I show love, and I'm trying to teach my daughter how to bake affection right into the cookies and muffins and breads that we make together. I have recipes that I've collected and recipes that I go to over and over again, but there is a particular happiness in finding a new recipe that sounds good, tastes even better, and brings a smile to the faces of those you most cherish.

I recently stumbled upon The Weekend Baker: Irresistible Recipes, Simple Techniques, and Stress-Free Strategies for Busy People by Abigail Johnson Dodge, and spent several intensive weeks sampling her recipes for cookies, breads, and other treats. They were, invariably, good. Some were excellent. All reminded me yet again of how nice spending a weekend morning with an apron on and flour all over the counter feels, as well as the particular satisfaction of making a multiple-rise yeast bread that actually does rise and come out like something worthy of jam and peanut butter. Whether you dip or dive in, Dodge's book will make you enjoy being a baker any day of the week and not minding spending the short winter days in the kitchen.”