nlbarber

I've joined one of the myriad Internet groups that bake with each other--someone or the group picks a recipe, and everyone bakes it. In my case the project is to bake all the cakes in Rose Levy Beranbaum's new cookbook, Roses's Heavenly Cakes. I've been a Beranbaum fan for a long time--my shelves hold the Cake Bible, the Bread Bible, the Pie and Pastry Bible, plus some of her smaller cookbooks, too (call 'em the non-biblicals). One family standard, a roast chicken stuffed with spicy (think jalapeño) matzoh brei is from one of those.

The way this particular bake-along works is that the leader, Marie of breadbasketcase and heavenlycakeplace picks a cake a week, and announces the schedule a few weeks in advance. If you want to be part of the bake-along, you commit to baking at least 2 cakes a month. (Not that there are consequences for not making it except perhaps having your blog taken off the list of links.) And then you blog about it, preferably on Mondays, when Marie posts her blog entry. The first 10 of us to sign up got free, signed copies of the cookbook as a bonus. Marie baked her way through the Bread Bible back in 2006, but without company--that was the start of her breadbasketcase blog. She started on Heavenly Cakes before it was published (Rose sent her an ARC), and then she and Rose announced this bake-along right around the publication date.

I decided to set up a separate blog for it--I have been posting cooking and baking here, but there's lots of other stuff too, not of interest to the other cake-bakers. If anyone wants to check out the cakes I've done so far (5 of 'em, I think), my blog for it is Bread&Cake&More. I will probably put most cooking and baking posts over there from now on, but will try to remember to make a note here when a post goes up there.