Beyond the Box: Baking from Scratch

Good morning (afternoon/evening/dusk), my lovelies! We've almost made it though winter! Spring is almost here! The days are getting longer, early flowers are popping up! Let's celebrate, shall we? Let's celebrate with doughnuts! You don't have to say it; I already know that was a pretty weak introduction. If you'd be so gracious, I'll give you my best excuse: Words are hard. Normally, if I may say so myself, I'm a pretty decent writer. Many who make this claim will also claim, as I am doing, that talking is much more difficult than writing. This presents itself differently for different people, but my sudden failing of words is more than just not finding the right  words. Most of the time, if I don't have something to say, I just don't talk. Fellow introverts can attest that this often unfairly paints one with a brush of coldness. Just because I don't want to make small talk with you doesn't mean I don't like you. (In fairness,...

Happy Valentine's Day, my dear readers! I love you all very much and hope you have a beautiful day, whether you're celebrating or not. As promised last time, I'm going to be making Mary Berry's Tiramisu Cake, featured in Dessert week of Series 5, which aired in the United States as Season 1 on PBS or can be found on Netflix US as Collection 1. It was a lovely episode that made me want to eat all the things (okay, all  the episodes of Great British Baking Show make me want to eat all the things, but you get my drift). The tiramisu cake was also featured in the Masterclass season that went with this, available on Netflix as Great British Baking Show Masterclass: Season 1, Epsiode 2, where you can see Mary Berry make it herself. I know it seems like we just did a cake recipe, since the Victoria Sandwich was only about a month ago, but tiramisu is such a beautiful, romantic dessert that I thought it would be nice to go around Valentine's Day. And since Valentine...

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you've all had some lovely and festive celebrations with the people you love most! Over the last month or so, we've been fortunate enough to catch up with so many of our friends and family to share laughter, memories, and (so much!) great food. Even though I haven't been posting regular updates here for you, I've been hard at work making great messes in my kitchen and planning where to take this blog and my fine readers over the next year. As much as I enjoy sharing original recipes with you, I can't deny the fact that those posts do not tend to see as much traffic as I would like. I may still do a few now and then (I know I have an update for my chocolate chip cookies in the works), but it is very obvious to me that what the people (or perhaps, web crawlers and bots) want are more posts where I try my hand at the Great British Bake Off/Baking Show technical challenges. Even when I took several months away from Beyond the Box,...