u/CookieMonsteraAlbo

I immediately put this cake on my to-do list as soon as I saw it in Nicola Lamb’s “Kitchen Projects” Substack in February. As a frosting hater, I could get behind all the components - chocolate cake, whipped cream, chocolate shavings, and ripe bananas. I was so excited, in fact, that I made it for my birthday and just waited to post about it until now.

Making it my birthday cake was the right move. I loved this cake. I loved it so much that I made a variation on it a few weeks later skipping the banana and adding mint-flavored whipped cream (we inhaled it before we got a photo.) It may be my favorite new bake of 2026 so far? It was certainly the only one I’ve deemed repeat-worthy so quickly. It may be my birthday cake next year? I kind of want one right now just writing about it…

I remember when I first saw this recipe in the New York Times and was simultaneously amused, intrigued and unnerved. They did look suspiciously like meat for a baked good. I wasn’t quite able to overcome that slight revulsion and bake them until I saw the theme for this week. If nothing else, these cookies do recreate the look of mortadella.

Although they turned out spot-on in terms of appearance, flavor-wise, they were a total fail. The freeze-dried strawberries I used must have been tarter than usual, because these cookies were sour and not in a pleasant way. Plus, the macadamia nuts, which had smelled fine straight out of the freezer, immediately revealed themselves to be rancid on first bite. I fed exactly one more cookie to my long-suffering spouse to make sure he was tasting what I was tasting, and then the entire rest of the batch went into the trash.

These were a 10/10 in the “looks like mortadella” department and a 1/10 in the taste department.

One of my ongoing baking sub-projects this year has been working through 108 Asian Cookies by Kat Lieu, and this recipe is part of that initiative, as were my Gochujang and Strawberry Jam Chocolate Thumbprints from Week 20.

When paging through the book for the first time, these cookies immediately stood out to me because they featured what, for me, were all pantry ingredients. We cook a lot of Asian food at home, and I keep doenjang on hand for one of our favorite stir fries. It’s always a bonus to find a new use for something taking up space in your fridge!

In the end though, I do think I prefer the smoothness of miso for cookies. I didn’t love the little chunky, funky bits of doenjang in these. The chocolate also kind of overpowered everything else going on in these, as chocolate is wont to do. I do love chocolate, but it’s kind of a bully when it comes to other subtle flavors. Overall, these were fine, but I’m not sure I’d reach for them again.

These cookies were another offering for my monthly get-together with my friend and her five-year-old. I first made her tiger stripe cookies (orange and black licorice, inspired by Canadian tiger tail ice cream) when she was a toddler and deeply, deeply obsessed with Daniel Tiger. Nowadays, her television tastes have moved on, but she still enjoys an animal-themed cookie.

This recipe from Susan Spungen involves layering a chocolate dough with a turmeric-ginger one, and chocolate is the surefire way to the five-year-old’s heart these days. She has declared these her new favorite cookie and her mom has already requested the recipe.

I do wish the layering had turned out a bit more “wavy stripes” and a bit less “abstract bird”, but overall, I’m happy enough with how these turned out and they were a hit with their intended audience. Who can ask for more?

Every year, my father requests a pie for his July 19th birthday, so the timing for this challenge couldn’t have been better.

His favorites are cherry and peach, but since I can’t ever seem to find sour cherries by me, even at the farmers’ market, I almost always go with peach. In the past, I’ve done medleys of stone fruit, peach rosé, and peach Melba with raspberries, but my father is a man of simple tastes and frequently scoffs at my flavor experiments. This year, in deference to his wishes, I just went with plain peach and focused my creative energy on decorating instead.

In a move that is very unlike me, I did not follow a strict recipe for this pie, instead cobbling together techniques and ratios from several sources. The crust is my go-to from The Hoosier Mama Book of Pie. I combined peach chunks with lemon juice and sugar that I measured with my heart and left it to macerate. I then strained out the extra juices, combined a small amount with potato starch and nutmeg, and poured everything into the crust. Can I ever precisely replicate this again? No. Was it delicious? Yes.

I did have some issues with some of the decorative components sliding off the pie during the baking process, but overall, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I finally invested in a new metal pie plate that seems to have solved some of the “soggy bottom” issues that that always plagued me when I used my old Pyrex pie plate. I’m including a before and after so you can see the finished product versus the original vision.

As a planner, not knowing the options for this week’s bake until Saturday night was stressful for me. I considered making empanadas to represent Argentina/Spain but couldn’t bear the thought of doing hand pies this week and then pie again for “Crusty” week in a few days, so I decided to go with Toad in the Hole to represent England (even though they ended up getting eliminated earlier today before we got our dinner made.)

Sourcing English-style bangers turned out to be the hardest part of this challenge. A local gourmet butcher shop was supposed to have them, but they were out when we visited (maybe other people were also making English dishes this week to celebrate the team?). We managed to find Irish bangers at the nearest Wild Fork, so we went with those even though they weren’t 100% authentic.

This actually wasn’t a bad make ahead dinner - we whipped up the batter on Sunday night, let it age two days in the fridge, and put together the rest tonight. It was our first time making a Yorkshire pudding type dish, and I actually really liked it. I would 100% make this again, but probably in winter, as my husband thought it was “a little too heavy” for this 95 degree day. He did, however, note that the sausage distribution ended up looking a bit like Rocky from Project Hail Mary, so that was an unintended bonus.

My husband is in charge of all projects involving yeast in our house, so for this challenge, I gave him a choice between cinnamon rolls (my favorite) or tackling a project from Mooncakes and Milk Bread by Kristina Cho. He chose the latter, and he originally planned to make her miso corn buns, but had to pivot to this pizza bread when the stores near us were all sold out of fresh corn over the 4th of July weekend.

He’s always had good luck with the milk bread recipe from this book in the past, and things seemed to be going well until it went in the oven. Our oven runs a little hot, so I always set the timer to check on things about five minutes before the minimum end of the range given in the recipe, but that was apparently not enough on this occasion, because when I went to check on it, it was already beyond burnt.

My husband, bless his soul, said, “It’s cool! It looks like lava!” But outside of chocolate lava cakes, I don’t think anyone associates lava with something delicious and edible.

My inner perfectionist really wanted to just try again with a different recipe to have something less embarrassing to post, but we simply don’t have the time. C’est la vie.

Once a month, I have dinner with a friend and her five year old daughter, for whom I like to bake a special treat. The little one happens to love chocolate, and what child doesn’t love sprinkles?

I was a little bummed that the nonpareils lost a lot of their color in the oven. Apparently the sprinkles from Michael’s must be decorating sprinkles, not baking sprinkles, if that’s a thing. Anemic appearance aside, the cookies were a big hit with their intended audience, and any time you can make a child’s day, that’s a win in my book.

I was originally going to make strawberry shortcakes for this summer-themed challenge, both because my mom has been requesting them and because they would be another item to check off my to-do list in documenting my grandma’s recipes for a family cookbook. But then, I ended up with peaches on the counter that had passed over the elusive line between underripe and overripe before their intended use could be fulfilled, and suddenly, I had a pressing need to use up a few pounds of peaches in a hurry.

Cobbler seemed like the easiest solution, and I was able to find a relatively small batch recipe that called for approximately the number of peaches I already had on hand.

The biscuit topping on this was really nice - very tender and buttery, with pleasant depth of flavor from yogurt. Macerating the peaches before adding them kept the cobbler from drowning in juice, but if I had one complaint about the whole thing, it was that the peaches to biscuit ratio seemed low - it could have used maybe another pound of peaches at least. Still, it was very good and a perfect pivot to use up an ingredient that had a limited shelf life, without having to make a trip to the grocery store for additional supplies. Success!

This recipe has been languishing in my baking queue for almost seven years, largely because making cakes isn’t my favorite baking activity, but also because we rarely have enough people around to eat such a big cake. But, my husband had family in from out of town for Father’s Day, so I finally had the motivation and the audience to check this off my list.

This cake features lime cake layers, a limeade cake soak, raspberry mousse filling, lime American buttercream, and a raspberry curd topping. Despite the cake’s massive size, the tartness of the citrus and raspberry kept things feeling fresh and light - a perfect summer celebration cake.

It was a huge hit - I knew the flavor combination would be squarely in my in-law’s sweet spot and it did not disappoint. My husband even rated it the best cake I’ve ever made, finally unseating an exceedingly complicated lemon and white chocolate cake from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible that has been holding the top spot in his ranking since 2011. My personal tastes will always favor anything chocolate, but I’ll take the win!

I know pumpkin bread isn’t exactly a seasonal choice for June, but this recipe has been on my to-do list for ages, and pumpkin/chocolate is always a winning combo in our house. It was even what we picked for our wedding cake over a decade ago!

I have a much beloved pumpkin chocolate chip muffin recipe that is a family favorite, and I thought seriously about just making those this week, but I thought I’d use this challenge to force myself to try something new.

This NYT recipe yielded a moist, tall loaf with a nice crackly crust, but it was a little light on spices for me. I probably could have bumped them up to a whole tablespoon across the streusel and the cake itself, honestly. I also used Heilala spiced vanilla extract instead of plain vanilla, since I had some in the pantry that someone had gifted me. I don’t think it meaningfully impacted the spice levels. Overall, this was pretty good, but not a full 10/10 for me.

Clearly, I wasn’t alone this week in thinking of pizza for the 48-hour challenge. This recipe from America’s Test Kitchen is a household favorite but we rarely make it, because, well, it’s time consuming. 🤣

The sauce for this one, which contains anchovies (we use the paste), is especially savory and rich in umami, and we are not usually anchovies-on-pizza type people. My husband, the designated yeast whisperer in our house, made the dough on Friday night, we fermented it in the fridge until Sunday, and then assembled and baked it on Sunday night. As always, it was delicious and worth the wait, and we found ourselves wondering why we don’t make it more often, haha.

I knew as soon as I saw the theme for this week that I wanted to make Linzer cookies (even though my opinion on sandwich cookies remains unchanged - they yield half as many cookies for the same amount of work; therefore, I avoid them as a general practice.)

Me being me, I knew I wanted to find an unusual twist on Linzer cookies, so it took me a while to locate a recipe that captured my imagination but I finally found inspiration in Cookies: The New Classics by Jesse Szewczyk - a book that never disappoints when it comes to offbeat flavor ideas.

The pairing of manchego and quince is a Spanish classic for a reason: this savory cookie recipe was a complete banger. Despite how much I bake, I don’t actually have much of a sweet tooth, and I frequently give away most of my baking output. However, I ate an embarrassing amount of these. The few that were left went to work with my husband, where they were also snapped up in record time.

I will say, they were very delicate and crumbly once baked, but that just gave them a deliciously short texture. I honestly wasn’t expecting to like these as much as I did, but I would absolutely make them again. These are a serious contender for my top three recipes of the “52 Weeks of Baking” challenge for 2026.

I had a hard time choosing a recipe this week because I hate fresh berries. They are so inconsistent - some are firm, some are mushy. Some are sweet, some are sour. And don’t get me started on the seeds. I looked at options involving freeze-dried berry powders, and others involving jam, and eventually landed on these cookies because I’ve been working my way through Kat Lieu’s 108 Asian Cookies ever since I received it for Christmas last year.

Admittedly, the strawberry in these was very subtle. They mostly tasted like chocolate, with a kick of heat from the gochujang and cayenne pepper. The berries added a fruity background note that complemented the gochujang and rounded out the flavor profile. Overall, they were quite nice, and more importantly, my friend, the spicy baked goods aficionado for whom I baked these, gave them a glowing review.

My only critique is that the filling recipe made almost double the amount of filling I needed - I ended up rolling the extra chilled ganache into balls and making truffles, which were also very good.

Checkerboard cookies are one of my “white whales” when it comes to baking. They either spread and I lose the carefully created pattern, or all my best efforts at precision measuring come to naught and the pattern is wonky, or has gaps where the pieces didn’t fit perfectly together. Aren’t slice and bake cookies supposed to be easy?

Happily, I think these are my best effort yet - the shapes stayed fairly crisp and defined, they didn’t spread, and they even kept most of their square shape in the oven though the corners did round out a little. There are still a few gaps where the dough wasn’t 100% flush, but I’m super happy with the progress.

I’m not sure the cherry flavor really came through, despite using freeze-dried cherry powder - they mostly taste like amaretto/almond extract. But that’s okay! I’m considering these a major win!

This reduced sugar recipe from America’s Test Kitchen has been languishing in my baking queue since those fever dream months of 2020 when everyone was stockpiling toilet paper and other household supplies. At one point, I happened to mention to my husband that we were getting low on oatmeal, and, bless his heart, he decided to remedy that situation by buying a 10lb container from Costco.

We are a two-person household. We were never going to eat 10lbs of oatmeal, and we were socially distancing. I wasn’t bringing baked goods to the office. I wasn’t bringing baked goods to friend and family functions. It was just me, my husband, and 10lbs of oats.

So, for longer than I care to admit, I must have made every conceivable variant of oatmeal cookies, baked oatmeal, oatmeal muffins, and at one point, an oatmeal pie. I saved this Bundt cake recipe during my quest to use up all those oats, but it always fell to the bottom of the list because, well, low sugar just sounds like low joy, right?

I wish I could say this was worth the wait. It was okay - I probably should have used a strong, dark honey because it was really the only flavor. Instead, I (ironically) used my giant Costco bottle of raw honey because I didn’t want to use up my nice honey. The texture was a bit dense, though it was moist enough. It would probably be okay with fruit on it, but by itself, it’s just kind of blah.

I saw this recipe for “pancake bread” on the King Arthur Flour website a while back and immediately slotted it into my 52 Weeks of Baking planning document for Week 17. It was easy enough to throw together - I had all the ingredients on hand. And the end result was… fine. The quick bread was plush and moist, with a pleasant subtle maple flavor (even with the optional maple flavoring). Does it taste like pancakes? No, not even when slathered with extra butter.

Overall, it was good, but not great. We served it with a side of breakfast sausage, but I low-key wish we’d made actual pancakes. I probably wouldn’t make it again, but now I know!