Peanut butter chocolate chip pound cake.

I love trying new recipes. On a weekend night, with work early the next morning, I especially love a new recipe with only six ingredients that I happen to always have in the kitchen cupboards.

I found this recipe on Piece of Cake: Freshly Baked Stories, Recipes and Photos. I altered it a bit, using full size bittersweet chocolate chips that I had on hand. I love bittersweet chocolate with anything. This cake comes out moist and delicious. It does not have a strong peanut butter flavor, just a hint that makes you crave another piece.

Bridget: Irish Cream Cookies

Hi! I'm Bridget and I'm here to share my adventures in baking. On Saturday night, my husband requested cookies. Ready and willing to comply, I started to dig for recipes. Suddenly, he had a flash of inspiration: "Are there Irish cream cookies?" After some googling, I found that there were and after a few minor tweaks to the recipe I settled down to make them.

To the new year!

Hello! I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays! I certainly did as well as my ten day vacation. I did not enjoy returning to my day job though. One day... this will be my day job, one day.

I haven't baked anything new this year, but I was given the pasta making attachments for my Kitchen Aid stand mixer for Christmas. eeeeeee! I've made fettuccine and ravioli so far. YUM! (Pictures below.)

I've been thinking about my resolution for 2011. Reaching 53 new baking recipes was a wonderful goal last year but it greatly inhibited my health goals for the year as well. Once I'd found my wedding dress, I needed to maintain my weight at the mid-point of my goal to avoid alterations. Now that the wedding has passed, I need to focus on completing my weight loss goal. With that said, I will continue to strive to make new recipes and hone my baking skills, but I'm going to make a change to this blog to share the work. I'm adding a second writer!

Everyone, welcome Bridget! She is a dear friend and a fantastic writer and a cook/baker in her own right. Be sure to check out her blog, A One Woman Book Club.

Happy Holidays and Recipe # 52 - Pfeffernüsse

I did it! Fifty-two new recipes in 2010... well technically fifty-three. Woooooooooo gooooo me!

I'm pretty excited about this one. My husband's family is of German/Scandinavian decent and I wanted to make a holiday cookie this year that reflected that. Luckily for me, my favorite blogger posted many cookie recipes for December, one of which was Pfeffernüsse. It's a spice cookie that is like all the wonderful scents of the holidays made edible. I was also excited to use cardamom for the first time. This cookie is easy to make and I liked that I could make the dough a day ahead to spread out my holiday baking.The recipe can be found here: Confections of a (Closet) Master Baker.

Recipe #51 - Sweetheart Chocolate Mousse

Hello! It's a lazy Sunday in our house. We took the pooch for a walk, then walked to the grocery. I decided I wanted a decadent dessert to finish off the weekend. My thought was that it would almost take away the sting of having to go back to work tomorrow. Just nine business days of work and then I have a wonderful ten calendar days off to finish the year! Woo! 

Recipe #50 - Rugelach

Recipe number fifty. Can you believe it? It's been such an eventful year AND I've baked 50 new recipes that I've never made before. Just two to go! Go me!

This recipe came from my favorite blog, Confections of a (Closet) Master Baker. I'm sure I've mention Mr. Bullock-Prado's blog before. If you're not following it, you should be. Her writing is fantastic and her instruction just as wonderful. On her blog, she is celebrating Cookiemas, which I must wholeheartedly endorse. It's better than any holiday ever. EVER!

So with that, I give you rugelach.The only deviation from the provided recipe I took was in the jelly/jam flavors. One of my favorite places in the world is Stonewall Kitchen. They are based out of Maine but have expanded all over New England and Maryland. I made the rugelach with their Cinnamon Apple Jelly and pistachios and then also with their Wild Maine Blueberry Jam (we gave little jars of this as part of our welcome gift for our out of town wedding guests).

Recipe # 49 - Brickle Bundt Cake

Hey! The computer is back! We picked it up on Thursday and man, did I miss it!

So, moving on, this morning I baked a Brickle Bundt cake for T's brother's birthday. Pretty simple recipe. It's something his brother had mentioned a couple of times. Their mom used to make and T's brother really liked it, so I thought I'd try it out to surprise him!