The Art Of Baking

My $150 D'Italiano Prize Pack giveaway is officially over and the winner of this great prize is Jennifer Martin ,  Congratulations!I will be e-mailing you shortly for your information and be sure to mail be back before 48 hours is up.Check your spam folder just in case! Anyways, I also like to send a reminder to everyone that their are some great recipes on D'Italiano's website that people have sent in for the cook off challenge.There are some really creative ideas and definitely a large recipe turn out.You can even vote for your favorites and try the recipes out for yourself.My favorite is a recipe for mini apple pies made with D'Italiano bread as the pastry.I really want to make that.Also I like to say good luck to everyone that has entered a recipe and I'm very excited to see what d ishes are in the final five. Everyone be sure to tune in on May 10th when the five finalist compete against each other with their creative recipe.It should be a fun night! ...

I've been on a baking craze since I got free baking ingredients with my gift card.This time I made a large batch of these lemon bars and they were super easy to make. I only made a couple changes in the recipe so it would work for me.All I did was use hard margarine instead of butter for the crust and eliminated lemon zest for the filling. It was a pretty basic bar with a thick, flaky crunchy sugar crust.The flavor was sweet and slightly buttery.The filling was smooth and light at room temp and overtime in the fridge the layer became thicker.However I noticed that if it sits out for a few minutes the layer begins to become moist again.The flavor wasn't that strong of lemon;however If I were of added the lemon zest it would of been more prominent.It also had a good balance of sweetness against the crust.Its basically a preference if you want really strong or a simple balance of flavors. These bars were super delicious and I have to warn people that they are su...

Just yesterday, I received a Love with Food sample box for all the confusion that happened with a free subscription I won.What simply happen was ,the blog owner thought Canadian viewers were allow to enter her giveaway.But when I won we both found out the website only ships within the states. So after contacting the site and figuring out what was going on.We found out that the blog owner made a mistake.However the CEO and co founder was very generous and sent me this box to make up for the confusion.So thank you very much  Love with food and I'm very excited to try out all these samples,may even review. In other good news,I finally stepped up my game in making muffins.This time I achieved round, bumpy tops and hardly any tunnels.I think my new baking powder is what really helped with the rising factor and keeping my bowl titled while folding at least 12 strokes.I even did this quite slow,nothing to fast.Also, when these were in the oven I kind of cheered when I ...

 Recently,I was given a really generous gift from Argyle Communications for helping them share about D'Italiano's Cook-Off Challenge and help set up a D'Italiano Prize Pack Giveaway , which is still going on till March 30th. If your not a friend of mine on my personal Facebook then you wouldn't of heard about this gift.Well to fill everyone in, I received a President Choice $25 gift card as a thank you gift for helping share about D'Italiano's Challenge.I was notified I would received a little something.But I never would of thought a gift card for twenty-five dollars.I was super surprised and grateful. So guess what I used that money towards? If you guessed baking, then your right.So what did I get myself? Well I was actually able to squeeze in six items with 2 dollars to spare. I chose first to purchase a must needed baking item,baking powder.Because mine was getting very old and started to chunk up.Worthless to use.Then I bought my favorite ing...

Recently, I received a Buy One Get One Free coupon for VH Steamers and It was actually the same day I got the deal for Kashi Crackers. For this deal,I first checked out the price for one steamer and it was about $3.50 for one.However I noticed in a Thrifty foods flyer they had them on for $2.99.So I kept that flyer and I price matched the product.I chose to get the Shanghai Ginger Beef and Teriyaki Chicken. I ended up with a lower price for one and the second free with the coupon.It was a pretty good deal since  most convenient products are pretty expensive and I was there just when the steamers were on for a good price.   When I got home, me and my sister tried out the VH Steamers.I had the Shanghai Ginger Beef and she had the Teriyaki Chicken .They were a frozen meal so all we had to do was remove the container from the box and microwave them about 3 1/2- 4 minutes.Now these bowl structures have two layers.One is a streamer that has the food substance and the...

Just recently I received a $2.00 off coupon for Kashi Pita Crisps or Crackers in the mail.On that day I went to Wal-mart and to my surprise these products were on sale for about $2.90.So they only cost a little over 90 cents with the coupon.Now these were definitely on sale and were coming off the shelves quickly.So the regular price is probably a little steep, but if with a $2.00 off coupon its a pretty good find, especially on sale.I got lucky with my coupon coming at the right time! Now at the time there were only 3 flavors, Regular Pita crisps,whole grain crackers and Fire Roasted Vegetables crackers. I chose the third one because I like some flavor on my crackers and it was a bigger box for the same price. The Fire Roasted Vegetables Crackers were crunchy and not to thick.They had a really strong scent to them and were savory,salty and quite peppery.Kashi did a great job of infusing the roasted veggie flavor into these crackers.There was lots of flavors for your...

Beginning of this week, I was craving moist banana bread and carrot cake.So guess what? I found a 5 1/2 star recipe for Carrot Banana Bread on All Recipes. I struck some luck in finding this combo of ingredients and easy direction recipe. There wasn't much to even change about this recipe. Beside doubling the recipe to make more delicious bread and eliminating the pecans.It was super easy to double everything and you can very well add any extra textures you want such as the pecans.It had easy to follow directions such as mixing the oil,egg and sugar in a large bowl and then mixing all the dry ingredients in a medium bowl.Then from their I had to slowly add the dry mix into the creamed mixture alternately with the mashed banana.Then stirring in the grated carrot.Pretty easy concept to follow and I can make a pretty awesome banana bread compare to muffins. It an excellent recipe and you will see that many say the same thing on the recipe comments.This is a sligh...