homemade goodness on a Sunday

Maddie woke up in a cooking kind of mood & made these scrummy pretzels...from scratch. Yes, she did. The girl does like to cook. She's in the kitchen nearly every other day preparing something. Usually she's successful; sometimes her experiments go slightly awry. She's learning -kind of- to read the whole way through the recipe first -to make sure she has all the ingredients so she doesn't have to improvise (usually those are the concoctions that don't get eaten). And yesterday she learned the very valuable lesson of not placing anything on the back burner when the oven is turned on (trip to Bed Bath & Beyond is necessary for a new flour container thing...oops) This recipe is from a kid's cookbook my mom sent to her. The book has a not so attractive cover, but you know the old adage about judging a book by it's cover; it's become one of Maddie's go-to cookbooks when she wants to prepare something without adult help. Lately she's been using this book, written by the host of You Are What You Eat(one of our faves on BBC America.) And then there's this, the first cookbook I bought for her exclusive use. She's used it a few times, but the Betty Crocker is for sure her favorite right now.


half sweet, half salty



I was in a cooking mood too & spent most part of the afternoon preparing our "Sunday is dessert day" treat. From the Martha Stewart Baking Handbook, Apricot-Cherry Upside Down Cake. I had to make almond paste first, though, b/c it's not something that I readily have on hand. Thanks to Sunflower Market, I had an abundance of apricots (67 cents/lb!) and cherries. Although it was a bit time consuming, it was well worth the effort. Not the usual brown sugar & pineapple upside down cake. I had to double the ingredients b/c the recipe called for an 8"x3" round cake pan, which I didn't have. Couldn't fit all the batter in the 9"x13" pan, so it was a little flat. Delish, nevertheless!