About

I know that while I am writing this there aren’t a lot of people out there who will read it, but I hope that eventually I can join the great community that is pastry blogging.  But before I get carried away, I want to explain why I am doing this.  I love to bake.  My secret dream is to become a pastry chef.  Now that I finally graduated college with a degree in Political Science and Middle Eastern History (whose bright idea was that?) I can get on my way.  I want to start culinary school soon, but as my husband (the one who came up with the name for this blog) is finishing up his masters and teaching degree, I have to wait a bit.  In the meanwhile I am trying to teach myself through example and baking as much as I can.  Unfortunately this has not helped my diet at all, but this is what I love to do – who loves to diet??

My husband, Rocker Dude (check out his radio show at www.rock4rookies.com), is being super-supportive and is encouraging me in everything, the only problem is that all he wants is a chocolate chip cookie – forget pies, cakes, bundts, brownies,  tarts, etc. just give him a cookie and he is happy.  When I proudly show off my latest creation, he looks at it and says, “Good job, now do we have anything to snack on in the house?”  So I am writing this blog so that maybe other people can appreciate what I am doing.  It will also push me to make sure that I actually make something every week and not flake out.  Good luck to me!

A little note on my baking style.  Because I keep kosher I don’t mix milk and meat.  In my kitchen, I have a meat oven and a dairy toaster oven.  Due to this, I bake very little dairy and modify most recipes so that they will be pareve, neither dairy nor meat.  This means that I substitute margarine for butter, non-dairy cream for regular cream and soymilk for milk.  Obviously if you are using these recipes, you can use the dairy option, but here you can see that baked goods can still taste delicious without butter.

A while back I actually did an experiment where I made two pie crusts, one butter and one margarine.  I then baked the exact same apple pie in each and tested the difference.  You could definitely tell that there was a difference, but the margarine one was actually flakier and still tasted delicious.

I know that margarine and all the artificial stuff in the non-dairy cream can’t be healthy for me, but one has to make compromises sometimes.

Come join me and experiment too!