Welcome and Cheers to What Delicacies Lay Ahead!

Welcome! This blog has materialized out of a calling I feel to compile favorite recipes, writings on what baking/cooking means to me and stories of recipe accomplishments. I am not a professional pastry chef, but I have a love for baking borne of childhood kitchen memories and a thirst for new culinary challenges.

I grew up baking and cooking with my mother in our kitchen. We loved to put music on, don our aprons and make whatever special recipe was called for at the next social gathering. Baking was a time to dance, a time to eat and a time to enjoy each others' company. When my mother suddenly passed away last October, one of the first possessions of hers I took home was her box of family recipes. It contains butter-smeared recipe cards with the old school designs on them, passed down from my grandmother all the way to me. Having lost her, I felt called to relive our times in the kitchen by baking in my little apartment. In short, I was reminded to enjoy life and live it to the fullest- to "eat the damn cake" as another blogger has put it. (Eat the Damn Cake!)

My mother taught me that more butter makes everything better, that it is ok to eat raw cookie dough (it hasn’t killed me yet) and that nothing says lovin’ like something from the oven. I went off to college thinking that everyone knew how to make cookies from scratch and gained many friends in the dorm kitchens.

I remember one year my mom and I fell for the perfect-looking gingerbread house we saw in one of our many home magazines and resolved to recreate it. We spent hours mixing the dough, eating the dough, baking, constructing and decorating the house. The end result was a beautiful house that was entirely inedible. The icing and siding was so hard we would break a tooth if we tried to eat them. But it really didn’t matter to us that we couldn’t eat it. We enjoyed each other’s company making it, laughing at each other covered in flour and goofy from consuming too much icing.

And so I embark on this journey, here chronicling past and present culinary attempts. I will close with one quote that inspired this blog-

“No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.”
― Laurie Colwin

May we continue to bake with joy, surrounded by the wisdom and passion of cooks who came before us.

*Note: Any recipes that are not my own will be provided along with the link or name of their source.