Summer Baking

 

Now that it's more or less fall here in L.A, I wanted to round-up the best desserts I made over the past summer.

1. Peach pie*

I know I'm bragging here, but this was the best pie I've ever made and one of the best I've had.  I used the full five-hour Baking Illustrated recipe.  Some of their recipes are needlessly complicated (I'm thinking here of their Dutch apple pie recipe, where they add a lot of time-consuming extra steps that actually make the pie worse) but this time, it was really worth doing it the hard way.  I think one of the key things was using potato starch as a thickener instead of the usual tapioca, the consistency was really good.

2. Smores bars
By contrast, these are incredibly easy, and great for summer because they don't require baking.  It's just a Rice Krispy treat only made with Golden Grahams, marshmallows, and chocolate chips, perfect for parties and bake sales.  The recipe I linked to suggests dark chocolate chips but I prefer milk chocolate - I love dark chocolate but it overpowers these bars and besides, milk chocolate comes closer to the classic original Smores.

3. Pink lemonade bars
I loved these bars from Smitten Kitchen - the pink color comes from pureed raspberries.

4. Coconut thumbprint cookies with salted caramel centers
I made these for Hot Dish and they were a big hit.  I made the first batch way too big, though, they are very rich and a little goes a long way.

Now on to fall!  Tonight I'm making pumpkin cinnamon rolls.

* Page 193.  I'm too lazy to type it all out but if you want the recipe let me know and I can scan it for you.