Popovers are among the first baked goods I was ever allowed to make on my own when I was just a beginning cook. I will always have a soft spot in my heart for their ease, tender insides and ability to absorb vast amounts of butter and jam.

From the looks of this picture, it appears that someone had a mighty good meal recently. Thanks to Tim for adding this tasty pic to the pool.

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that E from Foodaphilia had teamed up with Nick the Peanut Butter Boy and Kristina from The Chocolate Peanut Butter Gallery to create the first ever Peanut Butter Exhibition. They asked their readers to put on their thinking caps and send in recipes and pictures of the best of their peanut butter baked goods. They had 16 entries and while all the recipes sound delicious, they managed to determine winners for the first, second and third places. However, there are no losers, as how can you lose when you have a pile of peanut butter confections at the end of the day?

The three top recipes are, HolyCrapTheseAreAmazing Cookies by Susan from Susan at Sticky Gooey Creamy Chewy, Peanut Butter Cookies Loaded for Bear from Ferdzy at Seasonal Ontario Food and Exotic Spiced Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies from Dee at Choos & Chews. A complete list of recipe names and links (brazenly stolen from Foodaphilia)is after the jump.

Continuing in the trend I've established this week of featuring baked goods that are off-limits to me right now, I bring you a delicious-looking chocolate and vanilla pound cake (at least, I'm assuming that it's pound cake, based on the shape and tell-tale gleam of baked butter). Baked by Flickr user Eunnycjang, I would have a very hard time turning down a slice of this cake if it were sitting in front of me. Sadly, there's no blog post or recipe attached to this image on Flickr, so I can't tell you where to go make this beauty. However, if you've got a favorite recipe for a cake like this, shout it out in the comments.

Last Christmas, my mom decided that she wanted to make a batch of scones on Christmas morning. She looked through her cookbooks and scoured the internet, finally settling on a Cranberry-Orange scone recipe (I believe she got it off the internet, but I don't know the source). That morning, she quickly stirred up the batter in order to get it in the oven before the turkey needed to go in. When it came out, there was a line of people waiting for the scones, as they had filled the house with a hypnotically good smell.

This is the perfect recipe for a busy morning, because as long as you have buttermilk (you can also fake buttermilk by stirring a tablespoon of lemon juice into a cup of milk) on hand, all the other ingredients are fairly ordinary. You can even mix all the dry ingredients together the night before you want to bake them to hurry things along in the morning.

Brookline, MA has voted to stop using trans fats in their restaurants and schools.

The city becomes the third in the country to ban trans fats (used in frying and baked goods), along with New York City and Philadelphia. Boston and Cambridge are thinking about doing it as well.

At Trader Joe's the other day, I picked up a container of Dark Chocolate Covered Dried Cherries on my way to the checkout. Unlike chocolate-covered raisins, each piece was huge and there was clearly a high chocolate-to-cherry ratio. Chocolate and cherries are a great combination as it is, but Trader Joe's tends to carry some high-quality brands (under their store name), so I didn't hesitate to put them in my cart. My immediate thought was that they would be good in a cookie, so I baked up a batch to share with some friends. I used one of my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipes, which turns out cookies that are just sweet and buttery enough to be dangerously addictive, with a slightly chewy center and crispy edges. The cherries added some extra chew to the basic recipe and the chocolate brought it all together.

Starbucks is the latest chain to try to jump on the no-trans fats bandwagon, trying to demonstrate to customers how much they care about health and nutrition. Starting this week, approximately half of the stores in the US, including those in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon, will have zero trans fats on their menus.

The company says that they have been planning the switch for two years now and that their nationally distributed pastries, primarily seasonal items like the Gingerbread loaf cake, are already trans-fat free. The rest of their pastries are baked by regional bakeries, which Starbucks contracts to provide pastries for their stores. These pastries vary from region to region, as do the recipes for them, so not every supplier has yet made a switch, but Starbucks seems to anticipate that it will not be long before they do.

So, if you're not located in one of the aforementioned areas of the country, does that mean you need to worry about trans fats at Starbucks? Not where drinks are concerned. According to the nutritional information on their website, very few of their drink products contain trans fats and those that do have only a very minimal amount. The pastries, on the other hand, vary widely by region, but judging from a random sampling of regional nutritional data (offered by zip code on the Starbucks website) your best bet will be a muffin or loaf cake if you want to minimize your trans-fat intake without cutting out pastries all together, at least until your area is declared trans-fat free, too.

Today, the board of health in New York is going to vote on whether or not the city will ban trans fats from restaurants. If the ban passes, eateries will have until July 2008 to eliminate all but 0.5g of trans fats per serving from their food. Restaurateurs are anxious, many worried that the quality of their food - by which they mean the taste - will suffer if the ban is accepted. While we wait to hear the ruling, what are some common sources of trans fats in our food? Forbes has named their five worst offenders in terms of the amount of trans fats they contain. They picked prepared and prepackaged foods; stick margarine; and chips and crackers fried in partially hydrogenated oils. Many breakfast foods, from donuts to pancakes, contain trans fats because they are either fried in type of partially hydrogenated oil or are claiming to be lower in cholesterol, since maybe breakfasters worry about the potential health risks of adding butter to their eggs. The most surprising item on the list is the fact that they name kosher baked goods as being at a high risk. The reason is that they are more likely to use partially hydrogenated shortening in place of dairy ingredients, like butter.

Though the very height of the "low carb craze" has passed, millions of people still follow a low or reduced carb diet. A new study reveals that, though they are sticking to it voluntarily, at least 3 out or 5 low-carbers feel limited in what they are allowed to eat and regularly crave forbidden foods, which makes sticking to the diet that much harder. The number one thing that low carb dieters miss are baked goods (50%), followed by pasta (22%) and fruit (9%). More than 25% of respondents said that the prepackaged versions of baked goods and some mixes, though diet-friendly, were not worth eating under any circumstances.

The survey was commissioned by the baking-mix company Krusteaz, and coincides with the release of a new line of low-carb baking mixes, called CarbSimple. For the sake of all those poor, dissatisfied low-carbers, let's hope that the line turns out to be a good one.

But aside from promoting a new product, the results here indicate that the diet is not for everyone. If you constantly (or even frequently) feel that you are missing out, if baked goods of any kind - from blueberry muffins to sandwich bread - are at the top of your "must-have" list, the low-carb diet is going to be a tough one to follow and you might be better off choosing a different eating regimen. Picking one strategy that you can follow long-term - low carb or otherwise - will generally produce the best results because it is one that you can willingly and happily follow.

While reducing the fat in baking gets easier with time, especially after you practice with a few recipes and accept the possibility of failing every once in a while, you have to wonder how far you can push the limits. While there are fat free cakes, like angel food, the texture in those is decidedly different from that of a traditional cake, which you expect to be moist and tender, not airy. After much testing, cookbook author Sarah Philips, came up with a whole book of all-natural, low fat recipes (The Healthy Oven Baking Book). This cake is a variation on one of the recipes from that book - and it has almost no fat.

Some people have to avoid butter in their diets and to the die-hard butter fans, this seems like a sad thing. There are many valid reasons to do this, though, such as a doctor's orders to reduce cholesterol intake. There are also some people who simply prefer the taste of margarine, but though it might make an acceptable substitute on toast, margarine can't really compare to butter in baked goods - particularly in a butter cookie. Or can it? The Wall Street Journal baked up a few batches to find out.

The butter cookies made with real butter, the Land O'Lakes Ultra Creamy, came out on top. Land O' Lakes stick margarine came in second place, with a reasonable approximation of the taste and appearance of the real cookie. Unfortunately, the Land O' Lakes tub margarine did not fare as well, and though it had a similar texture to butter, the taste was nowhere near the real thing. Promise stick margarine did not do well, either, producing a cookie with little butter flavor.

I have actually had good results using Earth Balance "buttery spread" when baking, but the clear the solution is to stick to butter - not margarine - when it comes to baking.