121DegreesC

Had to share, because yesterday it was 111 at my house and this sounds mighty fine perched in my kitchen right now.

PCI Auction Group has a number of things from their Dog Days Of Summer Restaurant Equipment Auction. Wish I lived closer, these two would be with me now lol. Great deals on everything to set up shop, such as a Vulcan 60 quart mixer, turbo fan oven, baking pans, griddle, coolers,…

Upcoming Equipment Auction: Bakery Restaurant Equipment

From PCI Auction Group, an Italian bakery restaurant equipment auction includes proofer, triple deck conveyor pizza oven, convection oven, prep tables, coolers, mixer, and more. Auction is held online and pick up is Manheim, PA.

Italian bakery auction item, picture courtesy PCI Auctions.

Italian bakery auction item, picture courtesy PCI Auctions.

Italian bakery auction item, picture courtesy PCI…

15 Best Sites With Free, CC0 and Public Domain Food Photography - If you're looking for food pics, this is the list to have.

For food writers, finding the perfect image that captures what you’re writing about can be tough. So, where do you go for food photography when you can’t shoot what you need? I’ve compiled a list of 15 high quality photography and image sites that have fabulous food images that can be used for any purpose. There’s a screenshot of the food categories so you can see for yourself what images the…

Strawberry Chiffon Pie Recipe: A cool and airy dessert perfect for a hot summertime day.

A new summertime favorite dessert of the family: chiffon pies. They are cool, light, and depending on the filling can be tame and sweet – or sweet and snappy.

I have fond memories of going to strawberry and cream festivals as a kid. To this day, when sit down and have a bowl of sweetened sliced strawberries and whipped cream or a little dish of fresh strawberry shortcake, it takes me back a…

Three Very Different Recipes for Apple Turnovers

Apple Turnovers with Cottage Cheese Pastry Dough | Renee Shelton, Pastry Sampler.

I’m celebrating National food holidays this summer and apple turnovers was last week. But if you think apple turnovers are things us Americans made up, Bernard Clayton Jr. has something else to say about them in his The Complete Book of Pastry, Sweet and Savory:

While apple pie is wholly American, a close French…

Ice Cream and Sundae Toppings using 7-Up Soda

Summertime is hot. It’s nice to cool it down with something cool and sweet like ice cream. How exactly National Strawberry Sundae Day is on July 7th is something I can’t find, but the fact that it’s on the first part of July is probably a factor. It’s a date in the middle of the summer. Me finding ice cream and sundae toppings using 7-Up as a major ingredient seems like devine intervention.

Here…

Chocolate Mint Wafer Cookies - thin crispy cookies perfect for layering and crumbling.

Wafer cookies – you know those types. The cookies that are thin and crisp and layer perfectly with ice cream for perfect little ice cream sandwiches or crumble up nicely over pudding. I didn’t realize this until I actually looked it up but July 3rd is National Chocolate Wafer Day. Probably the most famous ones are those flavored with a spot of mint and dipped in chocolate – Thin Mints Girl Scout…

Anise Drop cookies from 1907.

It was National Anisette Day a couple of days ago, and I put a few anise cookie recipes on the Pastry Sampler Blog with recipes from the 1950s and 1960s. An interesting one from my cookbook collection comes from 1907 so I’m sharing it here. It comes from Paul Richards’ Pastry Book, a professional cookbook of the time and the ingredients are measured in weights.

Anise Drops

These cookies are…

July 2nd is National Anisette Cookie Day, and in celebration of this sweet day here are some anise flavored cookie recipes to try. They come from my collection of cookbooks from the 50s and 60s.

What is anise? Anise or aniseed is the spice with a licorice flavor. Both the seed and the oil is used to flavor foods in cooking and baking. Aniseed, Pimpinella anisum, has a similar flavor to fennel…

Ozark Wild Huckleberry Pie and Hot Water Pie Crust (Ford Treasury)

You all know I’m a sucker for old cookbooks, and The New Ford Treasury of Favorite Recipes from Famous Restaurants(Amazon link) is up there in favorites for me, not just for the recipes and locations most likely long forgotten, but the book is filled with gorgeous paintings from different artists of the locations themselves. I have two versions of this book – an updated smaller, hardcover 1950…

Pinkston’s Health Loaf

There are many “health loaf” bread recipes out there. Most have a combination of flours and some have nuts, seeds, and other ingredients to boost nutritional values.

There is one original one, though, at least from what I can gather from a bread recipe box I was sifting through. This recipe I got from my mother in law, who is a recipe collector as well, and it’s a newspaper clipping from the…

Here’s a fun little freebie from Creative Fabrica: Tea and Cake Clipart and Patterns. Hand drawn pictures, digitally remastered and scanned in. For all your pastry and tea party needs: blogging, paper crafting, scrapbooking, picture graphics, backgrounds, and more. Free for a limited time.

What you get:

7 jpg files (300dpi, 12″)

19 png files (transparent, 300dpi, 12″)

4 each ai/eps files (CS3+ or…