This morning, I completed June’s Daring Bakers challenge, the Danish braid, because we don’t have enough carbs in the house. What with the cake, the biscuits, the Tuesdays with Dorie scones. If not for Simply Orange, we’d have scurvy.

There are three things you should know if you decide to make this Danish braid:

1. The entire process takes at least eight hours. The dough rests in the fridge for five. So, you’ll need to set aside an afternoon or evening to prep the dough. The process isn’t all that intense, but you’ll be rolling and folding the dough four times, with 30-minute breaks in between. Plenty of time to catch up on the laundry, take a multivitamin, or watch way too much Law and Order. Guess which one I did.

2. If you’ve neither seen nor eaten a Danish braid before, it’s basically a glorified Hot Pocket® with buttery, flaky layers. You can fill it with roughly a cup of anything you like: ham and cheese, apples and almonds, Nutella and hazelnuts, spinach and feta, cherries and cream cheese. The dough recipe you’ll find at the end of this post makes two Danish braids. My first was cinnamon, sugar, and toasted pecans. The second was pepperoni, ricotta, mozzarella, Parmesan, and basil. If you decide to make a savory braid, use the given dough recipe, but leave out the orange zest, cardamom, vanilla, and orange juice.

3. The braiding is no big deal. A Danish braid is a laminated dough. Instead of combining the butter and a flour mixture, you keep them separate and fold the butter between the layers of dough. Your first one or two turns of the dough might look pretty ragged; just keep going. With every turn, the dough will get smoother. And, if you can lace your shoes, you can braid this dough.

Once you’re done, you’ll have two rich, buttery braids that look impressive, taste delicious, and contain 100 percent of your daily allowance of vitamins and minerals. And by “vitamins and minerals,” I mean butter. Enjoy!

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I love cobbler. When I was a kid, summer started when my Mommaw pulled the season’s first huge, bubbling, lattice-topped baking dish of peach cobbler out of the oven. She would let me eat it as hot as I could stand it, with a huge scoop (or two) of Breyers Natural Vanilla. And when I spent the night at her house, instead of oatmeal or scrambled eggs or Shredded Wheat, she’d let me eat peach cobbler for breakfast, saying, “It’s got all the food groups: fruit, flour, and fat.”

So, I bent the rules a little on this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe, mixed berry cobbler, chosen by Beth of Our Sweet Life. I used Dorie’s filling (five cups of frozen berries, plus sugar, lemon zest, and cornstarch), but instead of her biscuit topping, I substituted my grandmother’s pie crust on the top and bottom. It gave me an excuse to try a lattice top for the first time. And it will make an excellent breakfast.

Summer officially arrives in the U.S. tonight at 11:59 p.m.

This is the year we make friends.

Life’s too short to dread the humidity, chlorine, and mosquitoes big enough to rape a chicken. And the sweating. The sweating! No, I’m not going to focus on that.

Last January, Gourmet printed “What Is Southern?,” a previously unpublished essay by the late Edna Lewis, one of the South’s most celebrated chefs. Here’s the part that caught my attention:

“Southern is a hot summer day that brings on a violent thunderstorm, cooling the air and bringing up smells of the earth that tempt us to eat the soil. Southern is Tennessee Williams and Streetcar … Southern is a pitcher of lemonade, filled with slices of lemon and a big piece of ice from the icehouse, and served with buttermilk cookies.”

Now, there’s a vision of summertime in the South I can get behind.

I promised myself I’d bake buttermilk cookies for the first day of summer, and I did. Sweet and lemony, with a slightly tangy glaze. Cakey on the inside, crispy around the edges. They sneak up on you.

In fact, the experience was so nice, I’ve decided to kick off The Buttermilk Cookie Experiment: a summer of learning how to make classic Southern foods. Fried chicken. Biscuits. Fried green tomatoes. Peach cobbler. Lane cake.

So, welcome, Summer. Bring your appetite. Skip the swimsuit.

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I’ve lost my techno mojo.

Saturday morning, I baked this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe, a cream puff ring chosen by Caroline of A Consuming Passion. Monday night, I plugged in my digital camera, and the photos were gone. The next day, I baked another cream puff ring, took more photos, wrote another post, and our cable Internet connection went out. The cable came back; the post didn’t. Yesterday, I wrote another post. Added the photos. It didn’t save.

So, once more with feeling, let’s talk cream puffs.

Before you ignore the recipe link, let me warn you that you’ll be missing out on something amazing. You probably have everything you need for the dough right now: milk, butter, sugar, salt, flour, and eggs. You’re going to boil the liquid, add the flour, and stir the mixture until it makes a smooth dough that smells like really buttery grits. Place the dough in the bowl of your mixer, and paddle out the steam before you add the eggs.

To form the cream puffs, either pipe or spoon the dough into portions the size of a golf ball onto a prepared baking sheet. They’ll need to be about two inches apart. If your kitchen is really warm and things are looking messy, pop the entire baking sheet into the freezer for up to 30 minutes.

Once your cream puffs have baked and cooled, slice them in half and fill them with whatever you’d like: pastry cream, flavored whip cream, fruit, nuts, Nutella, chocolate, tofurkey. Then put the tops of the cream puffs back on, and dust them with confectioner’s sugar.

The hollow pastries can hold a surprising amount of filling, but once you add it, the meter is ticking. You’ve got approximately eight hours before they go soggy. Prepare to share!

P.S. I hope this post actually makes it to you this time. One, two, three … PUBLISH!

Internet, if you thought my baking week couldn’t get any weirder than the catfish cake, you would have been right. Until yesterday. That’s when I spent the day on a cake designed to look like a 2 1/2-foot male member as the final project for my Wilton Fondant and Gumpaste class.

Kidding! Or am I?

No, the cake was a special order for a client’s birthday.

So, I’m finishing this cake when I remember the deadline for the Barefoot Bloggers‘ first official assignment: Pasta, Pesto, and Peas.

I was in luck, because most of the ingredients are house staples: pasta, olive oil, mayo, garlic, spinach, peas. I picked what basil I could from the plants in the backyard (grow, babies, grow!) and made due with the pasta we had–a mixed bag of interesting shapes and unfortunate colors.

While the pasta boiled, I made the pesto (the smell!) and started prepping the other ingredients. I didn’t bother measuring the mayo–just used what was left in the jar. Ina’s recipe calls for defrosted spinach, but we had just the right amount of fresh, so I used it instead.

Even with the recipe cut in half, there was enough pasta salad to feed Lower Guam.

The entire recipe takes about 20 minutes. Plenty of time to grill some chicken, get the drinks on the table, and take a call from your grandmother asking if your cake is circumcised.

Bon appetit!

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It’s too hot. For complete sentences. Sleeves. Maybe breathing.

Perfect weather for a fruit tart.

Unlike the wholesome, humble, “American-as” pie, the tart isn’t afraid to show off her goods. You wouldn’t catch a tart dead in a fussy lattice cover-up or quaint maple-leaf border. Tarts go topless. They’re bold. Confident. Hard-wired for a good time.

A pie will pay your bail. A tart will sit with you in jail and say, “Wasn’t THAT fun?”

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie challenge is another one of Dorie Greenspan’s French favorites, La Palette’s Strawberry Tart.

The recipe is easy. Start with Dorie’s Sweet Tart Dough. While the crust is in the oven, grab a quart of strawberries and slice them into halves or quarters. Toss them with sugar, and add any extra flavorings you’d like. (Dorie suggests a splash of liqueur and a turn of freshly ground black pepper.)

Once the crust has cooled, spread it with a generous layer of strawberry jam, and top each slice with a tumbling spoonful of berries and a dollop of whipped cream or creme fraiche. Don’t worry about the berries falling off the crust. It’s not messy; it’s carefree.

As other fruits come in season, you can adapt this tart to other crust-filling-fruit combinations. Blueberries and pastry cream. Peaches and mascarpone. Raspberries and Nutella. Sautéed apple slices and caramel. Pears and ricotta. Feel free to mix-and-match.

If it’s true that we are what we eat, then by the time you finish a slice of Dorie’s strawberry tart, you’ll feel a little more relaxed. A little juicier. Two slices, and you’ll feel ripe and unruly. It’s mid-June. If you’re still wearing pantyhose, the tart says to stop.

Last year, I was at a total loss for what to give Jeff for his birthday. My brother-in-law, Taylor, had just scored a new-in-the-box PlayStation 3 from a police auction, and he gave it to me to give to Jeff. G-a-v-e. I paid him back the money he’d spent, but he never asked for it.

How much did Jeff like the gift? When I gave him the PlayStation, we were dating. Now, we’re married.

So, when my sister asked me to make a birthday cake for Taylor–a neapolitan cake topped with a huge catfish–I was all about it. Never mind that I’d never actually seen a catfish. Not without hushpuppies and tartar sauce.

Thank God for Google Image Search.

I started with three 9-inch cakes–one vanilla, one chocolate, and one strawberry–split and filled with vanilla buttercream, chocolate buttercream, and vanilla buttercream swirled with fresh strawberries. Then I crumb-coated the cake with vanilla buttercream and covered it in blue fondant.

While I baked the cakes and made buttercream, Jeff molded the catfish out of Rice Krispies treats. We let the “body” dry overnight, and then I wrapped it in chocolate fondant and sculpted the whiskers, gills, and fins the next day.

I held the cake on my lap while Jeff drove to Jenn and Taylor’s house. Rush hour traffic. Forty-five minutes. On the interstate.

I’ve never been so relieved to have something out of my car.

But the looks on their faces were worth it. Taylor was surprised. Jenn was beaming. My nephew, Logan, wanted the fish head, and his younger brother, Jackson, was pulling off the fondant and eating it by itself.

So, neapolitan? Check. Catfish? Check. A 200 proof sugar rush for the 3-year-old? Check.

My work there was done.

Happy birthday, Taylor!

We took these French Chocolate Brownies to a “Lost” season finale party Thursday night, and it’s a good thing the room was dark, so no one noticed exactly how many I wolfed down.

I needed something to supplement our dinner, which was a menu of Things That Are Difficult If Not Impossible For Me To Eat In Public. We’re talking corn-on-the-cob, which makes me obsess about my teeth. I think there’s something stuck between them. Can he see it? Maybe if I drink some water. Nope. Where’s a mirror? Maybe I can just keep my mouth shut all night. Is that a kernel?

And there were vegetables that had to be sliced with a knife.

Remember that scene in “Pretty Woman” where Julia Roberts tries to shuck an oyster and winds up hurling it across the restaurant? That’s me. That’s why I like to order things that stay put, like taters.

Anyway, I made a meal of these brownies. The crackly top adds a little texture to an otherwise completely moist, melt-in-your-mouth, fudgy brownie. Perfect for picnics, parties, and corn malfunctions.

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