2013 Blog Goal

I know that the premise of my blog is about living life spherically and moderately, but I want have a baking focus for this coming year. I'm frustrated with the challenges of baking gluten free but since I now need to do so, I want to get good at it. Its not so much about eating baked goods, but rather that I just plain like baking whether I eat the results or not - baking is fun!

I have a cook book that I love because it is so much more than just a cookbook: its a course in fine baking. However, its traditional glutenous baking. In The Secrets of Baking: Simple Techniques for Sophisticated Desserts, Sherry Yard actually EXPLAINS the science and reasoning behind the recipes and teaches how the technical details create superior baked goods. From ganache and caramel to pound cake and cookies to brioche and laminated dough Sherry Yard is an excellent teacher in addition to being a head pastry chef and having worked in some of the greatest restaurants in New York, LA, and San Francisco. No matter if you bake gluten free or not, I HIGHLY recommend the purchase of this book as an essential for any baker's kitchen library.

So, my goal for 2013 is bake my way through this cookbook, converting the recipes to gluten free as I go, and hopefully with appetising successes. I will share the converted recipes here, as well as writing about the science behind successful gluten free baking along the way.

I'm also going to try to do this while losing the weight I've gained this year - a difficult challenge when baking regularly, for sure! But I will succeed at this second goal by keeping to the original premise of this blog and living life spherically and moderately, including a healthy balanced diet - I'll do my best to also share healthy meal recipes intermittently.

There are thirteen chapters in this book, so its reasonable to do about one chapter per month, but there are a lot of recipes in some chapters so I might go over into 2014 if I have to, especially if cost of ingredients gets to be a challenge. I'm also not necessarily going to go through the cookbook in order. I will do each chapter at a time, as the recipes in each develop from one another and that will be important to the learning process, but I'm not going to feel like doing all the super sweet chapters back to back - can we say sugar coma! I don't think that would be very healthy for me. Plus some are more suited to summer time, like those recipes that have lemon pudding and the chapter on fruit, especially since I would like to keep to buying fruit in season, to help reduce the environmental consequences of imported off-season fruit (plus local and in season just tastes better). While other recipes are more suited to winter, like cookies during the holidays and warm donuts and brioche to warm us on cold winter days.

I'm thinking I will start January with the chapter on brioche, as I have recently been struggling to find the perfect gluten free bread recipe so that I can have toast and sandwiches again without the insane prices of grocery store loaves.

I hope you all enjoy this journey I'm about to embark upon!

Now, if only I could find a sponsor to supply me with a standing mixer!