This mom reveals the best desserts she’s ever made. Your family will love these recipes! Kate also gives us her most useful cooking tips that she’s learned over the years. Find out more in her interview with us.
There are so many desserts on your blog! Do you have any favorites?
For the most part, a lot of my favorite sweets are favorites not just because of the recipe, but because of some event or person tied to it. I love peaches, and this peach pie brought me back to my college apartment in 2001. Even though this black bottom peanut butter pie didn’t turn out exactly how I had expected for my husband’s birthday, the flavor more than makes up for it. My favorite cake is a three way tie – thirtieth birthday cake was the best cake I’ve ever had – baked’s sweet and salty cake for my thirtieth birthday, baked’s aunt sassy cake for my twenty-ninth birthday, and this white cake with blackberry buttercream because I love blackberries. I make a lot of cookies, but my favorite are these classic peanut butter beauties from Betty Crocker. And for all the banana lovers out there, my husband declared these banana cupcakes with honey cinnamon buttercream the best cupcake he’s ever had!
Peach Pie
Baked’s sweet and salty cake
Banana cupcakes with honey cinnamon buttercream
Where do you find your recipes? Do you read any cookbooks?
I find recipes all over the place. Of my thirty or so cookbooks, I have a few that I go to first – Martha Stewart’s Cooking School, Joy of Cooking, and for baking, any of the Baked books. Most of my recipes come from other bloggers, through feeds I subscribe to or pinterest. My mother also sends me a lot of recipes that she’s made and insists I also make because they’re so good as well as those that she hasn’t made yet and wants me to make first to try out!
What are your go-to recipes when cooking family dinners?
Since I had my son last June, we focus on quick, easy, and relatively healthy weeknight dinners. Stir fry is a favorite and one that can be easily varied. Paninis, chicken or pork cutlets with pan sauce, pasta with a simple sauce and a lot of vegetables, salads (my apple chicken salad with maple mustard vinaigrette is an all-time favorite), and burritos/tacos are on heavy rotation in our house. For more ideas and lots of variations on my favorites, check out my 90+ dinners under 30 minutes.
What are 5 cooking tips you can share?
My number one tip is to spend 30 minutes every week to meal plan. When my husband and I first lived together, it seemed like every night we didn’t know what was for dinner, didn’t have food in the house, and ended up eating a lot of junk late at night. Pretty quickly I decided to plan out meals. Now, we come up with the list of meals together each week – we usually plan six meals (with one night of leftovers or a meal out) – and try to evenly split them up so we take turns cooking.
Keep copies of frequently used recipes in a place you can easily access. The inside of my kitchen cabinet closest to the stove is covered in post it notes of simple recipes – biscuits, scones, stir fry sauce, Alfredo sauce, chai, and about a dozen others. They’re recipes I cook often and almost have memorized.
Find a great base recipe that you can easily vary. From one basic scone recipe, I’ve made whole wheat vanilla, banana with peanut butter icing, orange creamsicle, and coconut lime versions. The same is true for biscotti. With a base recipe from Tyler Florence, I have make dark chocolate and almond, chai, gingerbread, and holiday (white chocolate, pistachio, and dried cranberry) versions. The combinations are endless. Think about transforming them too – a favorite chocolate cake recipe can be a layer cake with peanut butter or cupcakes.
Keep track of the recipes your family really loves. My husband keeps a “good food list” in his phone. It’s about a dozen recipes and is literally a note with the name of the recipe and the source. Whenever we can’t think of anything good for dinner while meal planning, we consult the list and always find something.
Don’t be afraid to take a shortcut. Some nights we have a box of spaghetti with a jar of store bought sauce for dinner or scrambled eggs with toast. There’s no shame in that.
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Meet the blogger:
My name is Kate and I work part time at a non-profit, providing technical assistance to companies and doing a lot of workshops around environmental health and improvements. My son was born last June and I decided to return to work part time. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made and also one of the best. My husband Jason – who spends his day programming software – and I both like to travel and are excited to start traveling a lot more now that our son is older.
Kitchen Trial and Error started as a place for me to house my notes about recipes that I’ve made. I aim to tell readers about the good and not so good recipes out there. While I do have a couple somewhat challenging recipes – like homemade gnocchi and ravioli – the vast majority are relatively simple meals and desserts for weeknight cooking.
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