holiday « A Woman Sconed

Cookie of the Month: Dusting up celebratory tradition

By rahoward, on May 4th, 2020

I never needed a wedding (or any special occasion) to enjoy a Mexican wedding cookie. Just eating one of these buttery little orbs, its crumbly texture dusted with the cooling sweetness of confectioner’s sugar, was cause alone for celebration.

Long a fan of this cookie, a tradition in Mexico (and other places) at . . . → Read More: Cookie of the Month: Dusting up celebratory tradition

Cookie of the Month: Feeling the (red-hot) love via bars

By rahoward, on February 12th, 2020

It probably sounds strange that when it comes to Valentine’s Day, I think of sugar cookies, not chocolate. Maybe I have holiday goodie dissociative disorder, but my Feb. 14 tastes run directly back to childhood, where, along with white embossed cherry suckers and chalky conversation hearts, there are sugar cookies, too, that I . . . → Read More: Cookie of the Month: Feeling the (red-hot) love via bars

Traveling — via cookies — for the holidays

By rahoward, on December 29th, 2019

Every year, as the holidays approach, I study countless cookbooks and recipes that share cookie traditions from other places, and for awhile, I’m overwhelmed in trying to choose which cookies I’m going to make. At a certain point, it gets to be too much — I get behind, and I have to narrow . . . → Read More: Traveling — via cookies — for the holidays

Bread of the Month: Nodding toward nog in scones

By rahoward, on December 24th, 2018

I love the tastes of eggnog…in more than just egg nog. That quintessential combination of cream meeting nutmeg and spice with a bottom note of rum (extract), is appealing to me in any number of things — cookies, truffles and other candies, and in the traditional holiday drink itself. So, given my . . . → Read More: Bread of the Month: Nodding toward nog in scones

Slicing and baking through the holidays

By rahoward, on December 23rd, 2018

I’ve been pretty obsessed with slice-and-bake cookies for…awhile. Like many things I become obsessed with, I spend most of my time obsessing and not enough time doing. Every Christmas cookie season, it has been my aim to have a catalog of cookie logs in my freezer, ready to go, so that I would have . . . → Read More: Slicing and baking through the holidays

Baked Sunday Mornings: Toying with toffee

By rahoward, on December 2nd, 2018

I was but a wee lass when I started making toffee. My sister, about five years older than I, was in her early days of home ec class (do kids still take home ec class?) and came home one day with some stapled sheets filled with all sorts of candy recipes on them — hard . . . → Read More: Baked Sunday Mornings: Toying with toffee

Bread of the Month: ‘Bubbling’ with garlic and herbs

By rahoward, on November 29th, 2018

In the 1990s, I had the pleasure of frequenting an Italian restaurant in the community where I lived in Southern California. It was a smallish, but lively place near a golf course, with most of its seating in a walled-in, covered patio that stayed comfortable all year long. It was here that I got hooked . . . → Read More: Bread of the Month: ‘Bubbling’ with garlic and herbs

Poaching pears, cranberries for a festive pie

By rahoward, on November 27th, 2018

Every year I try to try out at least one new pie recipe at Thanksgiving. Despite all our warm weather fresh ripe fruits and berries really laying the groundwork for summer to be the season of pie, it is the Thanksgiving holiday, like no other, where pies are the star on the holiday dessert table.

. . . → Read More: Poaching pears, cranberries for a festive pie

Baked Sunday Mornings: Making whoopie pies with pumpkin

By rahoward, on November 18th, 2018

For those of us with limited experience — eating or baking — whoopie pies, we may wonder what all the fuss is about. Sure, they look terribly inviting — plump-soft cookie-cakes sealed together with a creamy filling…a whole lot to love. I had perhaps resisted in making them because they seemed too complicated or . . . → Read More: Baked Sunday Mornings: Making whoopie pies with pumpkin

Baked Sunday Mornings: Dipping in the lightest caramel

By rahoward, on November 4th, 2018

I made the Vanilla Bean Caramel Apples from the Baked Sunday Mornings recipe roster a little ahead of schedule. It was mid-October, and I was in full fall-enthusiasm mode. It had been many years since I had made caramel apples, and I was itching to get to it! And here’s one observation: amid all the . . . → Read More: Baked Sunday Mornings: Dipping in the lightest caramel

“People ask me: "Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way the others do?" . . . The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry.”
--M.F.K. Fisher

"It was in a yellow limestone church in Stockdale, Kansas, a crossroads town, that I sat dreaming during summer Sunday sermons, not of heaven or hell, but of the good dinner to come."
--Clementine Paddleford