After delivering the last two wedding cakes, I started flirting with the idea of an all-raw diet. Or meat-only. Anything that didn’t involve butter, flour, eggs or sugar. But then I remembered that my friend Kayte of Grandma’s Kitchen Table was hosting this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie baking challenge.  So, I decided to crank up the oven just long enough to bake a half-batch of her pick, Dorie’s Allspice Crumb Muffins.

Oh, I should have made the full dozen.

These muffins smell like Christmas morning. They’re light and cakey, with a crunchy topping that’s all sugar and spice. They are … scrumptious. In fact, you’ve probably got the ingredients right now, so bookmark the recipe here on Kayte’s site. Or pick up a copy of Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking: From My Home to Yours.”

As soon as I saw that this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie pick was a pie, I knew I was going to take it to my sister’s house. Because the last time I saw my nephews, they told me about how they never got dessert. How they couldn’t even remember the last time they had dessert. And then they performed a number from “Oliver!” and ran off to sweep chimneys and pick a pocket or two. Poor boys.

Oh, who am I kidding? Obviously, it worked. They look at me with those big saucer eyes, and I find myself driving an hour to deliver pie to my favorite miniature warlords/pie connaisseurs and hear about the grasshopper they saw that had the body of a beetle, the wings of a snapdragon and the head of Ben Bernanke.

So, what’s the difference between Dorie’s Creamiest Lime Cream Meringue Pie and a classic key lime pie? For a key lime pie, you whisk together the ingredients, pour the mixture into a graham cracker crust and bake. For Dorie’s pie, you heat the filling, let it cool slightly, pour it into a blender for processing, add butter, blend some more to make a buttery lime pudding, chill it for several hours, loosen it with a whisk, smooth it into a pre-baked crust (pastry or graham), whip up the meringue, run the pie under the broiler, let the pie cool and then refrigerate it for at least three hours. My only alteration to Dorie’s recipe was to top the pie with whipped cream instead of meringue, because that’s what the boys wanted. The saucer eyes! They own me.

If you’re a meringue fan or have a deep and abiding fear of sweetened condensed milk and/or instant gratification, then Dorie’s lime pie is the one for you. For the recipe, visit Linda of Tender Crumb, or pick up a copy of Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking: From My Home to Yours.”

Sunday afternoon, I fell down the stairs and sprained my ankle. So, when I took Henry the Wonderdog out the following night, I was hobbling along in the dark, looking down toward The Ankle to avoid any dips and sinkholes, and Henry lunged forward and pulled me face-first into a tangle of low-slung dogwood branches. Did I get any cool “Scarface”-type cuts to improve my street cred? No. I wound up with welts. Pink, puffy, itchy welts hovering over one eye and dancing down my nose. Like I took a beatdown from Mr. Bubble.

When I’m in a crippled, disfigured, lowly state, only one thing will help: bourbon. But when we’re out of bourbon, chocolate will do. Enter this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie pick: these small-but-powerful Brownie Buttons. You might get two bites from each one, but those bites will have a bittersweet chocolate punch you can’t get from a mini chocolate cupcake. Perfect for dunking into a nice, cold glass of milk while you prop up your ankle and watch Jeff take the dog out.

For the recipe, visit Jayma of Two Scientists Experimenting in the Kitchen, or pick up a copy of Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking: From My Home to Yours.”

Mom called this morning to tell me she was “sick of looking at that chicken,” so my apologies. We’ve been having technical issues on the back-end, which sounds like something that might require penicillin, but it isn’t nearly as exciting.

Anyway, here’s this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie pick, a Classic Banana Bundt Cake recipe given to Dorie by Ellen Einstein from Sweet 16th, a neighborhood bakery here in Nashville. This is the sort of cake Mommaw would bake just to have something to nibble on. The kind that would sit out on the counter in aluminum foil, and when someone made fresh coffee, we might have a slice. It’s not meant to be a showstopper, but busy-day cakes have their place. This one stays moist for days, with the tang of the sour cream balancing all of that banana sweetness.

Still, it’s a cake that begs for tinkering. Next time, I think I’ll a handful (or two) of chopped pecans. Or maybe I’ll split the cake horizontally, fill it with peanut butter cream and cover it with cream cheese frosting, like Sweet 16th’s Elvis Cake. Now, that’s a showstopper.

For this recipe, visit Mary of The Food Librarian, or pick up a copy of Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking: From My Home to Yours.”

In honor of this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe, Vanilla Ice Cream, Jeff and I decided to stop deliberating and actually buy an ice cream maker. I’d been making ice cream without a machine for months using David Lebovitz’s old-school method, and I was happy with the results, but they took several hours. So, we grabbed one of this particular home store’s ever-present coupons with visions of sugar cones dancing in our heads.

We were giddy.

We walked up to the display of ice cream makers, and there it was: The One. The same one we’d lusted over last year. And it was $10 MORE.

In the words of Our Lady Oprah, what I know for sure is that the Lebovitz method works. See this lovely, creamy, very vanilla ice cream? I followed Dorie’s recipe to the point where it required a machine, and then I chilled it in a bowl over an ice bath and slipped it into the freezer. After that, it was all my meaty biceps, a big wooden spoon and time. The chocolate pieces are Trader Joe’s mini peanut butter cups I stirred in at the last minute – before I could give in to the temptation of lining them up on the counter and snorting them. So, instead of instant gratification with the $50+ machine, we spent the afternoon at home, slowly tending our ice cream and wrapping up “Torchwood: Children of Earth.” It was a fair trade.

For the recipe, visit Lynn of Café Lynnylu, or pick up a copy of Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking: From My Home to Yours.”

You know it’s summer in the South when the churches start advertising that they’re “prayer conditioned.” The rest of the year, they call you to the Lord’s bosom. But summer is about escaping Satan’s armpit.

Here, keeping cool is a science, an art and a priority. When I was a kid, my parents had a wall-unit air conditioner in their bedroom. On those days when it was so hot you wanted to peel off your skin and sit around in your bones – when popsicles and bare feet weren’t cutting it – they’d let me and my sister run into that bedroom, close the door, flop on the bed and stay in there long enough to “let the sweat dry.” Pure luxury.

So, when I saw that the heat index was going to stay in the hundreds, I knew it was the right time to take on this Tuesdays with Dorie pick, a Coconut-Roasted Pineapple Dacquoise that requires several indoor hours of indoor work – whipping, folding, baking, melting, chilling, slicing, roasting, toasting, assembling and refrigerating. That’s a lot of quality time spent avoiding sweat. And the result is worth the effort. Crispy discs of nut meringue layered with a creamy white chocolate ganache and roasted pineapple slices that are sweet and still juicy. Surrounded with toasted coconut. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself scraping the dish and contemplating another slice, because all of those tropical flavors make this dacquoise seem surprisingly light. If you have people you need to impress this summer, or you want to look productive while you’re staying inside for a “Facts of Life” marathon, you really can’t go wrong with this dessert. Especially if your idea of heaven once included popsicles.

For the recipe, visit Andrea of Andrea in the Kitchen, or pick up a copy of Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking: From My Home to Yours.”

Some dads play golf. Some fish. When my dad needs to relax, he drives. Windows down, radio on. And not just around the block or around town. Once he drove all the way to New Orleans. He’d offer to take us out to eat after church, and three hours later, we’d wind up at Lambert’s Café in Sikeston, Missouri, reaching up for those “throwed rolls” like they were manna from heaven. But one of the benefits of Daddy’s extensive travels was that right as we started threatening to kill ourselves or each other if we didn’t get out of the van, he’d find a dairy dip. Some standing room-only shack that smelled like little burgers and fries and soft-serve ice cream. Daddy bought a lot of goodwill with that 99-cent cone.

I’d been planning on making my own ice cream this summer, so I was excited that this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe was Honey-Peach Ice Cream. What’s a baking group doing making ice cream? Who cares? Orange blossom honey. Georgia peaches. Whole milk, cream, sugar. I expected it to be good, but even the smallest bite blooms with the flavor of ripe peaches and cold, sweet cream. It’d be worth a three-hour drive, but it’s so much nicer to just walk to the freezer.

For the recipe, visit Tommi of Brown Interior, or pick up a copy of Dorie’s Greenspan’s “Baking: From My Home to Yours.”

So, I haven’t posted in more than a week, because we were vacationing with family in Arizona, home of the Grand Canyon and an IKEA. One of them was so vast and beautiful, I had to step back and catch my breath. The other was the Grand Canyon. Kidding! But can you buy a lovely blue bowl at the canyon for less than $3? I think not.

Anyway, the great thing is that you don’t have to choose between those particular wonders, you can enjoy them both. The same holds true for these Chipster-Topped Brownies, this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe. A brownie layer topped with a chocolate-chip cookie layer. What could be better, except maybe an IKEA inside the Grand Canyon?

For the recipe, pick up a copy of Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking: From My Home to Yours.”

In a previous life, I made tiramisu almost every day. A rich, creamy, boozy, fully-caffeinated tiramisu. One whiff, and you’d be awake for three days. It was a heavyweight. So, I was looking forward to trying Dorie Greenspan’s Tiramisu Cake, this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe, to see if you could get that tiramisu flavor in a lighter version, one without the hassles of soaking and balancing individual ladyfingers on their ends. Because creating that ring of vertical ladyfingers encircling the tiramisu, with exactly three ladyfingers per slice, was once the bane of my existence. They break. They shift. Swing low, sweet chariot.

On the other hand, Dorie’s Tiramisu Cake is made of two layers of light, buttery cake brushed with an espresso-Kahlua syrup and filled with a creamy mixture of mascarpone, whipped cream and a little espresso. There’s also a layer of finely chopped chocolate in the middle, mainly for color. The assembly is quick, and the cake is much lighter than the original dessert – both in flavor and in the fact that you can actually stand up after eating a slice. Coffee-lovers will probably want to double the syrup to truly soak the cake and amp up that coffee-and-Kahlua flavor. Also … I think it needs the ladyfingers. Next time I try this recipe, I’ll replace the top cake with a layer of delicious, delicate, Kahlua-carrying ladyfingers. Because we go way back.

For the recipe, visit Megan of My Baking Adventures, or pick up a copy of Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking: From My Home to Yours.”

I have a soft spot for wax museums. They’re overpriced and kitschy and when they’re not maintained, the wax guests quickly turn into a collection of has-beens, like a party at Elton John’s. Wax museums are on my mind right now, because the Hollywood Wax Museum is auctioning about 200 figures – from the good to the confusing to the completely unrecognizable. I mean, look what they did to Dolly Parton. She’s a MAN, Baby! A man!

With wax museums, quantity does not equal quality.

The same holds true for this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe, an insanely rich Chocolate Cream Tart, featuring a chocolate shortbread crust, chocolate cream filling and whipped cream sprinkled with chocolate shavings. If you try to wolf down a wedge, the experience will diminish to Robin Williams as “Popeye” territory. Too much. Way too much. But if you can limit yourself to a few bites, maybe even a small sliver, you’ll have a peak experience, like I did when I saw these hideous figures of Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. Ohmagah.

For the recipe, visit Kim of Scrumptious Photography, or pick up a copy of Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking: From My Home to Yours.”

***So, here’s The Most Important Question Ever: If you HAD to have a wax figure in your house, who would it be, and where would you put it? I’m thinking I could turn Mr. T in the world’s most awesome toilet paper holder, but Travolta is equally tempting.***