In the past few weeks my Facebook newsfeed has been heavily populated with people posting links to various recipes from Tasty, the food branch of Buzzfeed.  I’m primarily annoyed by these because of the way in which the headlines are written but also because rarely if ever do I see a recipe if I want to […]

One of the great things about having a sourdough starter is sharing it with others looking to get into bread baking.  It can initially seem daunting but I’ve noticed that pretty quickly people realize there is not much maintenance work involved.  The idea of refreshing the starter, which involves discarding most of the current starter, is […]

During our trip to France last summer every day my wife and I would gawk at the pastries in shop windows.  They seemed to be endless in variety and each one looked absolutely perfect.  We treated ourselves to plenty of them (including one at 10 AM before leaving for the airport on our last day) […]

Sometimes I have a hard time starting posts because I don’t have a story to tell about the recipe.  Normally I might just stumble upon a recipe a thought it looked good or wanted to experiment with a new bread.  Well, that isn’t the case today.  These chocolate cigars were inspired by one of my […]

Hello everyone!  Worried that I had abandoned you on your bread journey?  Nope, I’m back!  After 2 1/2 weeks honeymooning in France my wife and I returned home with full bellies and camera memory cards.  After starting in Paris we drove south to Dijon, Annecy, Aix-en-Provence, and Nice with brief stops in Orange, Avignon, and […]

Six weeks from today my fiancée and I will be married and on our way to France for 3 weeks.  Among many other things we will no doubt treat ourselves to the bounty of delicious bread and pastry the country has to offer.  One thing I don’t expect to find there?  Cronuts.  For those of […]

On Friday U of M announced the Mark Schlissel would become the 14th university president this July when Mary Sue Coleman retires.  Schlissel, like Coleman, has a background in biomedical sciences and currently serves as the provost at Brown University.  He also, as this totally-not-photoshopped-photo shows, is a big fan of Bakers & Best.  Welcome […]

It’s the time of year when mailboxes are stuffed with letters detailing the year’s adventures, so why not get in on the action?  56 posts and 7,900 visitors later, 2013 is in the books.  Here’s your Bakers & Best 2013 Year in Review! You knew 2013 would be good when it started with apple cinnamon […]

I decided to change up the Valentine’s Day tradition this year and not get real roses.  Instead, I made them!  I had a vague idea of this a few weeks ago and rightly figured that somebody else online had done it before.  I found some straightforward techniques to make the rose shape with apple slices […]

At some point in the last two years I had the misguided thought that making my own pastry would be a good idea.  Then I had the even more misguided thought to follow through on that idea.  While it certainly was a challenge, I think much like baking bread I was anticipating something far messier […]