Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

Baking was one of the first things I learned to do in the kitchen--a pan of brownies, a tray of chocolate chip cookies, muffins, quick breads. (When I went off to grad school in another town, my mother was convinced that I'd starve because she thought--mistakenly--that all I knew how to cook were blueberry muffins! Unbeknownst to her, I’d also mastered meatloaf, spaghetti with marinara sauce, and white-cut chicken). Transitioning from cookies to pies is a significant step, but not an impossible one. I usually turn out a couple of apple pies during the fall and winter, and a few peach pies (possibly my specialty) in the summer. In the last couple of years, I've added lemon meringue to the roster. Every pie presents its own challenge, but lemon meringue can be especially demanding because there are three separate layers to assemble, and if one of them is "off," the whole pie suffers. It could be a burned or still-doughy crust, lemon curd that's too runny or...

Happy Thanksgiving, Readers!  While you wait for your pies to cook and the house is filled with delicious smells of cinnamon and pumpkin, sit back and enjoy tales of our best or worst Thanksgivings. Share your own memories in the comments section.  As always, readers, we are thankful for you! My favorite Thanksgiving story is when my son went back home to have Thanksgiving with his friends, but my mom, daughter and I had the most fun. We had the traditional lovely turkey dinner and it went downhill after that, although in a totally funny, wild, crazy, and memorable way. Kind of like the way I write. Anyway, I’d had roof damage in storms a couple of weeks earlier, and I didn’t realize it, but the roofers had covered the chimney with roofing paper because I’d lost my chimney cap. So here I’m trying to start a fire in the fireplace with one of those 6? hour burning logs and lo and behold, the smoke begins pouring into the living room. At the same time, my...

Visiting the local farmers' markets is one of summer's most enduring pleasures. Right now, the stalls are overflowing with beautiful fresh produce, the kind of which you only see during this season: asparagus, corn on the cob, tomatoes, and just about every variety of berry or stone fruit imaginable Strawberries are unquestionably the star of early summer--plain, with a dollop of cream, sliced on top of shortcake biscuits, folded in a crepe, made into preserves (although a chapter from Elizabeth Enright's classic Then There Were Five nipped any temptation I might have had to try home canning in the bud). Just looking at them, brilliant and scarlet in their little baskets, makes my culinary fingers twitch, and I suspect I'm not the only one! Although the one thing I almost never do with strawberries is bake them--why mess with perfection? Cooking in our kitchen is reserved for stone fruit, which succeeds strawberries in the spotlight around the midsummer mark....

If any of you have read Demons Like It Hot , it's not hard to see that one of my other big hobbies is baking. I absolutely love anything that has to do with baking. I will admit though, the cleaning? Not so much. Tomorrow would have marked my grandmother's 100th birthday. I like to say that I got my baking genes from her. I still am trying to master her secret pie crust recipe though. I think I'm almost there. During the holidays I turn into a regular Betty Crocker wannabe. I think I'm trying to keep the baking tradition alive. A couple weeks back, I watched the Today show where blogger and author, Emily Schuman was a guest. She showed some fun and exciting ways to celebrate Thanksgiving, one of which were pumpkin pie pops. Although, she did mention you could use other fillings as well. One of my personal mottoes is "everything is better on a stick." So, with that in mind, I decided I'd give it a go. To make things a little easier, I bought prema...