Baking at Home: Cowboy Cookies and Luscious Lemon Cake

Part of our home culture revolves around baking. This goes back to baking with my sisters growing up. It was a great way to procrastinate doing homework. We often felt we liked the batter better so once we made Toll House Cookies and decided not to bake them, just leave the bowl of batter in the fridge. We were never able to finish it and eventually threw it out—so now I understand that "tasting" the batter is completely legal and there will always be something left.

My oldest is a master baker. I mean that quite seriously. At 12 yrs. old he wanted to be a pastry chef and would concoct amazing confections for us: Dobisch Torte, Cinammon Buns, Apple Pie, Lemon Merinque Pie, German Chocolate Cake.

The other day he graced us with Vegan Cowboy Cookies, from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar: 100 Dairy-Free Recipes for Everyone's Favorite Treats


As usual he made them with incredible care

 and they came out perfectly! These cookies have completely supplanted Toll House Cookies in my heart, by the way - richer, denser, more texture and variety in the mouth feel. Cowboy Cookies are the Toll House's older, more sophisticated big brother.

For more pictures of Amnon's fabulous vegan cookie skills, check out the article on my vegan cooking blog: http://tofucrossing.com/2011/01/11/an-ode-to-vegan-cookies/



Lately Fat Rabbit is going through her coming-of-age baking explorations. She has been very interested in an old cookbook I have from my grandmother, the old Better Homes cookbook with the red plaid cover which still exists as Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book 15th Edition: Gifts from the Kitchen (Better Homes and Gardens Plaid). This weekend she perused it for the perfect cake and chose the Luscious Lemon Cake recipe

And then she chose this frosting recipe.

The results were pretty delicious. But what I was most proud of was our own adaptation. The top layer stuck to the bottom of the pan (couldn't find second layer cake pan!) and so the icing got all tracked with crumbs—we decided to garnish with candied lemon circles to cover the damage, and working out of my head we figured out how to do this: Slice lemons, lay them in a pan, cover with water and sugar, and bring to a boil. We boiled the sugar water and lemons for about half an hour and then removed a set of delicious lemon circles.

As we worked on decorating the cake, and then on tasting it, we forgot about the lemonized sugar water in the pan. It was fun to discover it had turned into a delicious bitter lemon jam, with a lovely clear golden color, which we then ate on toast, and packaged the rest in an airtight container.

The final results: the cake and the lemon jelly