"bake" news and stories

As I said yesterday in my post about the ham and cheese pasta bake, there are few things more comforting than a baked pasta dish. This Polenta Lasagna with Portabellas and Kale is a nice illustration of this point, although it doesn't quite use pasta, substituting polenta for the more traditional noodles. It also shows that you don't need cheese to have satisfying comfort food because the dish, made by Susan from Fat Free Vegan Kitchen, is completely dairy-free. The dish is made by first making the polenta, spreading it into a thin layer on a baking sheet and leaving it to set up in the fridge. Once it is firm, it can be easily sliced into noodle-like layers. The filling is made with garlic, kale, mushrooms, marinara sauce and "cheese" sauce, which uses ingredients like tofu, cashew butter and soy milk, as well as a number of spices and some corn starch, to add a creamy mouthfeel to the filling. If you're not vegan and don't want to go through the trouble, adding a bit of ricotta in place of the "cheese" sauce would make this a lovely vegetarian dinner.

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On nights when you don't really feel like cooking, pasta is always an easy fallback. Now that people seem to be less terrified of having a few carbs in their diets, pasta is slowly returning to its position as a pantry staple. It only takes a few minutes to cook and you can make an infinite number of sauces, from 5-minute light tomato sauces to rich, slow-cooked ones. If you have an extra few minutes in your evening, it doesn't take too much more work to turn a regular bowl of pasta into a comforting baked pasta dish, with an oozy topping of cheese than gets browned and ever so slightly crusty on top. Just about any baked pasta dish is a welcome meal on a cold winter day.

Chocolate pudding cake is an intensely satisfying, yet simple, dessert. As it bakes, it separates into two layers - a tender chocolate sponge-type cake and a very rich chocolate sauce/ pudding base - so the cake needs no accompaniment unless you want to throw a scoop of vanilla ice cream into the bowl, too.

The second best thing about this cake (the flavor is the first, of course) is that it is incredibly easy to make because it is mixed in the pan that you bake it in. This means that cleanup is minimal and that you can have a delicious, from-scratch dessert on even a very busy weeknight. Not that you shouldn't have it at other times, as well. Any excuse is a good one for chocolate pudding cake.

I am a big fan of my Baker's Edge pan and use it just about every time that I bake bar cookies or other treats I might ordinarily use a rectangular pan for, including brownies and cheesecake bars. The pan's unique design allows for more even cooking and a higher crust-to-center ratio for baked goods. Cooking for Engineers set out to scientifically test the pan in a side-by-side bake off with a 9"x13" rectangular pan. Their goal was to test the evenness of the cooking, as compared with the standard pan, and to see how the crustier batch appealed to tasters.

The Baker's Edge cooked very evenly and produced pieces with appealingly chewy edges (unlike the hard edges that can result in regular pans), but the brownies weren't quite as popular with center-piece lovers as the brownies from the larger, more traditional pan. A few batches later and C for E found that a slightly shorter baking time made the whole batch of Baker's Edge brownies just like center-pieces.

Their overall verdict was that the pan worked extremely well, with the only real drawback being that it was difficult to get out the first piece. Of course, as the chef, having a sample piece for yourself isn't such a bad thing, is it?

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If you have ever visited Hungry Girl's website, you know that she is a huge fan of Vitalicious products, but even though she talks them up a lot, she's certainly not the only one who enjoys them. The company is growing by the day because, since we all watch what we eat from time to time, their healthy and very tasty snacks are a natural option for anyone looking for a quick bite to eat. And what could be better than a low calorie/low fat, high fiber, vitamin and nutrient fortified snack that also tastes good?

How about one such snack fresh from the oven?

Vitalicious has just introduced a line of baking mixes that will allow you to bake up your favorite flavor - Deep Chocolate, BlueBran, Sugar-Free Banana Nut, and Deep & Velvety Chocolate VitaBrownie - at home. All of them can be made in regular muffin pans to turn out 2 or 4 ounce snack cakes, but you can also order some silicone VitaTop pans if you prefer to stick with the company's signature snack shape.

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