Jennifer Moorman's Blog, page 25

Cooking Through "The Baker's Man": Chocolate Chip Cheesecake Brownie

Sometimes when you need a bit of comfort, sharing a dessert with a good friend, while you’re both tucked away in a bakery’s corner booth surrounded by the smell of baking cookies gives you that. Sometimes when you need a bit of comfort, you don’t want to pick only one dessert from the menu. You want two or three. Why can’t you have that?

One day when Lily needed a break and didn’t feel like choosing between her favorite bakery desserts, she asked Anna to create something new that would give he...

Cooking Through Fiction: Mickey Mouse Club

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Birthday cakes are personal and normally bought or baked with a special someone’s likes in mind. They are sometimes brought to a table with candles blazing like a fire (this happens as you grow older). Sometimes they have sparking candles that you can’t blow out, and the crowd thinks it’s funny, but you keep trying to extinguish the flames anyway.

I’ve had all sorts of birthday cakes through the years. My favorites are usually chocolate, but I wouldn’t turn down a birthday cake, especially if...

Cooking Through Fiction: Honeysuckle Jelly

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One of my favorite heralds of summertime is honeysuckle. It’s like one morning, the shrubs decide it’s time to show off and welcome honeybees and butterflies, and they burst into bloom overnight.

The hills and sides of the road and backyards are covered in honeysuckle, either planted or wild. The air outside is full of the sweet scent, and I can’t help but open the windows and let it all into the house.
The smell of honeysuckle reminds of when I was a little girl, and my family and I strolled down the road to this patch of empty land that bloomed with honeysuckle every summer. We’d stand there grinning and sucking the sweetness from the flowers like hummingbirds. This year was no different—the honeysuckle went crazy, and I rolled down my car windows as I drove home every day, smiling and thinking, Welcome back. 

In Honeysuckle Hollow, Tessa receives a package containing keys to a dilapidated mansion with a mysterious past. The one decision her heart is whispering her to make is seen by others a reckless, impulsive mistake. Will she follow her heart?

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Honeysuckle JellyYields: 7 half-pints (4 cups)Level of Difficulty: Average
Ingredients4 c honeysuckle flowers4 c boiling water c lemon juice4 c sugar1 pkg liquid pectin
How to Make
Prepare the flowers by removing the tiny green tip at the base of the petals.Next, bring 4 cups of water to a boil in a large saucepan, turn the heat off, and then add the honeysuckle flowers you’ve gathered and allow them to steep for about 45 min., stirring occasionally.Strain the flowers from the liquid. You need t...

Cooking Through "The Baker's Man": Peanut Butter Cookie Pie

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As the end of the school year approaches, kids become fidgety and excited for the freedom of summertime. Their eyes become brighter and their smiles wider. They skip up the sidewalks in Mystic Water and chatter about upcoming vacations and days spent exploring around Jordan Pond.




Anna bakes up the school children’s favorite candies in all sorts of sweets. One of the town’s favorites is her Peanut Butter Cookie Pie, rich and chocolately and decorated with favorite peanut butter candies.

You don’t have to be out on summer break or a kid to enjoy this treat. Have you been longing to remember that feeling of excitement for the free days of summer, the late-night giggling during slumber parties, and riding your bike on hour-long adventures? Enjoy a slice of cookie pie, take a seat on the bakery’s patio, and remember.
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Peanut Butter Cookie Pie
Ingredients c unsalted butter (1 stick), melted1 large egg1 c light brown sugar, packed1 tbsp vanilla extractheaping c creamy peanut butter1 c all-purpose flour12 to 14 mini peanut butter cups c peanut butter M&Ms dash of salt
How to MakePreheat oven to 350F. Spray a 9-inch pie dish with cooking oil; set aside.In a large, microwave-safe bowl melt the butter, approximately 1 minute. Allow to cool for 1 minutes.Add the egg, brown sugar, peanut butter, and vanilla, an...

Cooking Through "The Baker's Man": S'Mores Brownies

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Fall is a beautiful season in Mystic Water. People gather around fire pits and bonfires and laugh, tell stories, and make S’mores. But what about in the spring and summer when the heat starts rolling in and you’d burst into flames if anyone so much as a lit a match around you?
That’s when Anna starts baking S’mores brownies. She knows when people are longing for the changing leaves and the crackling flames that the next best thing to a campfire S’mores is a brownie version.So when you can’t ha...

Giveaway: Enter to Win a Copy of Honeysuckle Hollow

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Cooking Through "The Baker's Man": Cheesecake Waffles

[image error] I love breakfast. I could eat breakfast for any meal—I’m not picky. Give me grits and eggs for lunch; pancakes for dinner; waffles for a snack. I’m also not ashamed to admit I could eat cake for breakfast.

Tessa Andrews, one of Anna’s best friends in The Baker’s Man, is with me on having cake no matter what time it is. In fact, she told Anna one day that she wished she could combine two of her favorite foods—waffles and cheesecake—into one mash up.
This set Anna thinking and creating and baking...

Honeysuckle Hollow — Available for Pre-Order on Amazon

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Cooking Through "The Baker's Man": Pear Pi Day Pie

[image error] Mystic Water is a whimsical little Southern town where magic floats on every breeze and is baked into every treat. Some townsfolk might complain about small towns, saying everybody knows your business, your college professor will call your daddy and tell him you skipped out on class, and boredom lingers around every corner because there’s nothing to do.
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Many others will argue that Mystic Water is the perfect place to live, a place where anything is possible. One of the charming aspects of living in Mystic Water is that Anna O’Brien, the local baker, knows when it’s your birthday, and she’ll surprise you with your favorite treat.
[image error] One of Anna’s patrons has a birthday on March 14, which is also National Pi Day.  The first five digits of pi are 3.1415, which is perfect since that’s the date on which National Pi Day falls this year! So, in honor of Richard’s birthday, Anna baked him a fun Pear Pi Day Pie to celebrate two special days at once.  Here’s to Richard, to mathematicians, and to pi pie lovers everywhere!

Pear Pi Day PieServes: 8–12 Level of Difficulty: Pi carving, average difficulty; interior pie, e...

Cooking Through Fiction: Moby-Dick

[image error] There are a few books that have first lines that when read aloud are immediately recognizable. For example, this next one:

Call me Ishmael.  Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. 

You guessed Moby-Dick, correct?
Many of us are fanatics about something. Music, sports, books, food. Captain Ahab, captain of the Pequod, was a full-blown, maniacal fanatic about the great, white whale: Moby Dick. And can you blame him, knowing that on a previous voyage, the whale bit off Ahab’s leg? He must find the whale. He must kill it. He has one singular focus, but does he succeed? [image error]
In chapter 15, titled Chowder, Ahab and Peleg enjoy a homemade New England Clam Chowder.

However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the apparently cheerless prospect before us.  But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained.  Oh! sweet friends, hearken to me.  It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuits, and salted pork cut up into little flakes! the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. 

While eating this chowder out of my mama’s wedding china (which is probably a wee bit fancier than how Ahab dined), I realized that I’ll never be as fanatical (filled with an excessive and single-minded zeal) as the most “ungodly, godly” man, Ahab. It’s too bad he wasn’t fanatical about New England clam chowder. This soup is good!

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Ahab’s Clam ChowderServes 6–8Level of Difficulty: easy
Ingredients2 tbsp unsalted butter1 medium onion, finely diced2 celery stalks trimmed, quartered lengthwise, then sliced into ¼–inch pieces3 tbsp all-purpose flour2 c chicken stock2 (10-ounce) cans chopped clams in juice1 c heavy cream2 bay leaves1 lb Idaho potatoes, cut into ½–inch cubes4 slices of bacon, cooked and chopped into small piecesSalt and freshly ground black pepper
How to MakeHeat the butter in a large pot over medium-high heat....