Welcome to another rendition of my Latest Recipe Testing series!
Never have I been in the kitchen so much, so often, and with so many flops. It’s a numbers game. I’m currently testing recipes for right now, for the holiday baking season, and for my cookbook. So, I’m bound to have more recipe disasters, right?
Over the past several years, as the holiday baking season becomes more and more prominent on my website, I’ve learned that I won’t be able to keep up unless I have a stock of content ready to go. My website sees the most website traffic from September through December, and I want to take advantage of the desire for fall and holiday baking! Last year I published about 30 brand-new recipes during that time, and I plan for the same amount of content this year.
I already have 4 done!
So right now, my team and I are balancing recipes for 3 different time frames. It’s been hard to mentally organize when jumping between decorating Valentine’s Day cookies for now, photographing pies for Pie Week later in the year, and developing new recipes for my cookbook, which won’t come out until 2024 or 2025.
We dedicate 1 week per month to each of the 3. That’s the best way I’ve found to compartmentalize all this content!
Bran Muffins That Don’t Taste Like Cardboard
One of the first projects I worked on this year was my recipe for healthy bran muffins. I played around with the amount of wheat bran, flour, and liquid a few times until I reached a nice balance of hearty and soft, without tasting like cardboard. (Always a nice bonus.)
One of the test batches was tasty, but the batter was quite thin and the resulting muffins were squat and greasy. Adding a little more flour bulked up the batter, and the final batch was a success.
Saucy Blueberry Sauce & Lemon Cheesecake
The first photo in this post is my blueberry sauce topping. This one didn’t need too much testing, as I used the swirl from this blueberry swirl cheesecake and topping from this blueberry cream cheese pie as my starting point. I added considerably more water so the sauce is, well, saucy. 😉
I also have a new recipe for lemon cheesecake on my site. For this recipe, I used my key lime cheesecake as the base, and infused the sugar with lemon zest for extra flavor. This was easy to test as well—I love making cheesecake.
The Incredible Shrinking Cake
I developed this chocolate raspberry cake primarily for the raspberry filling, by popular demand. Over the years I’ve received lots of requests for a raspberry cake filling recipe, and now the answer is… yes, I have one!!
I based the chocolate cake batter on this recipe for dark chocolate peanut butter cake, but accidentally used 8-inch pans instead of 9-inch pans. While this usually isn’t a big deal—just need to adjust the bake time—I actually overfilled the 8-inch pans, which did nothing in my favor. The cake layers baked up in the strangest way and looked like brains. Totally unintentional, but maybe I’m onto something for Halloween? LOL.
The cakes rose up, sank down in the centers, and finished with sad crinkle-wrinkle centers. The lesson here is: don’t overfill your cake pans, and use the recommended cake pan size.
Baking does require using your brain (especially when doing the math for cake pan sizes and conversions!), but cakes that look like brains were definitely not what I was going for.
Great news… you can bake a non-brain cake by following my chocolate raspberry cake recipe. 😉
Strawberry Cream-Filled Chocolate Cupcakes
My recipe for chocolate-covered strawberry cupcakes was originally published in 2018. I recently changed the chocolate cupcake batter so it matches my cream-filled chocolate cupcakes. (Which are quite possibly the best cupcakes I’ve ever made, and I stand firm on that.) The updated batter simply bakes up stronger, and holds the strawberry buttercream a little better. They’re deeply chocolatey and extra moist. Like Hostess cupcakes, with a strawberry twist.
If you loved the old version, the batter matched these chocolate cupcakes!
Getting a Head Start on Sally’s Cookie Palooza 2023
I’m really excited to publish a recipe for gingerbread cookie bars later this year. My first batch was supremely flavorful and spiced (just what I wanted!), but the texture was completely off. They were fluffy and cake-like, as if you were eating a heavy square of gingerbread cake:
I had a good feeling about the cookie dough, though. It’s similar to my chewy chocolate chip cookies, and so I decided to reduce the flour and bake the dough in a larger pan. The bars were thinner, which made them flatter and chewier. This is just what I wanted: dense, chewy, moist, spiced, perfect.
That recipe is coming in December. Told you I was getting ahead!
Still on a ginger molasses kick, I decided to bake a batch of these white chocolate chip molasses cookies in hopes to update the photos. Well, I forgot to set the oven timer, took a phone call, forgot they were in the oven, turned the oven off, then 2 hours later preheated the oven for something else.
As my assistant, Beth, and I went to put some bread in the oven, we found a baking sheet of lumpy hockey pucks. The cookies baked as intended, and then continued their oven journey as the oven cooled down, and preheated again. I’m sad to report that they did not survive the whirlwind adventure.
Oven timers… time and time again… prove to be useful. 😉
Q: Have you had a recipe fail lately?
Cookbook Sneak Peek
My next cookbook is well underway, and it’s untitled at the moment! This baking cookbook will be my biggest yet. 100 baking recipes divided among chapters including yeast bread, breakfast, cookies, cakes, quick breads, cupcakes, and more. The book will be mostly new and exclusive recipes to the book, and will also include a handful of the most popular recipes on my website. It will be nice to have them professionally printed in a tangible book!
My manuscript deadline is a year away, and then the book will continue in the editing and design phases before heading to print. Thank you in advance for your patience. This is the first time I’ve written such a large manuscript, while simultaneously managing employees, operating a large website, and raising kids!
And trying to find time to rest and recharge so my creative juices continue to flow!
The latest cookbook recipe I tested was a spin on my buttermilk biscuits. Think bacon, spicy honey, cheddar cheese, and chives. My knees actually went weak at the first taste. And you’ll enjoy recipes for soft jalapeño bread, deeply chocolate cheesecake, another recipe for chewy molasses cookies (I’m on a kick!), and you can bet these popular banana muffins will make an appearance. I can’t wait to share more with you! Stay tuned.
I love these behind-the-scenes posts! Thinking about holiday baking… I don’t know if you take recipe requests, but I’ve been looking for a good gingerbread scone recipe for AGES and cannot seem to find one. I know anything you put together for us would be amazing!
Hi Steffi, We’ve never tried a gingerbread scone! You could try adding spices and molasses to our master scone recipe, and reducing the liquid and sugar, but it would definitely take some testing to get right. Let us know if you give it a try or find a recipe you love! In the meantime, here’s our favorite gingerbread muffins recipe if you’re interested.
How do you prevent the edges of brownies from getting so hard? I love your website
Hi Sally, it’s normal for the edges of brownies to be a bit chewier than the inside of the brownies, but here a few tips to help. A lighter colored pan can help the edges from over baking. And if you notice that happening, feel free to tent the brownies with a piece of foil towards the end of bake time. That will prevent the edges from over baking while allowing the middle to continue baking through. Hope this helps for next time!
Wow! Thank-you for the update. So cool to learn about what goes on behind the scenes. And I will say, that your’s and your team’s hard work and dedication really shows. I have never seen such well written, thoroughly tested and precise recipes on any other blog/recipe site. The care and effort, and proof-reading, really shows. Thank you guys so much!
Thank you so much Cath! I am sharing this feedback with my team, too. We appreciate it so much!
I can’t believe you’re testing for December recipes! Now that’s planning ahead. 🙂 I recently made your cookie dough cupcakes into a cake and it’s one of the best recipes I’ve made from you so far!
I need to try it as a cake!!
It was so tasty! Thanks for all you delicious recipes! 🙂
Thank you for showing some fails! They make me feel better about my flops. Recently I baked a cake in a too-small spring-form pan. I knew it was too small, and I should just have scooped some batter out, but it overflowed. Ugh! Thanks for the encouragement and awesome recipes!
Happens to us all. I’ve gone against my instincts in the kitchen before plenty of times, too!
Sally – I love your recipes! I recently had to bake a king cake for the first time and was hoping you could do a version on your site! Seems like something that would be right up your alley and that you would do beautifully!
Side note – just baked your buttermilk biscuits and they were out of this world amazing and easy too!
Love those biscuits! I usually use King Arthur Baking’s King Cake recipe. It’s wonderful, if you need a suggestion! https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/mardi-gras-king-cake-recipe
I love your recipes but my son and daughter in law are vegan so I’m wondering if you could experiment with more vegan options?
Hi Elizabeth! Our website focused mostly on traditional baking recipes, but we do have a section of naturally vegan recipes that you may enjoy browsing. Hopefully you can find a few new recipes there to enjoy!
Sally thank you for all your recipes !!!! I love then all
Sally I love your recipes! Do you have any gluten free recipes in the works or modification recommendations to make current recipes gluten free? I am struggling to find decent gluten free recipes and I figured If anyone had a solution it would be you! Thank you!
Hi Marcia! Admittedly, our team does not have much experience baking with gluten-free flours. Although some readers report using an all-purpose 1:1 gluten-free flour in many of our recipes with success, you should expect slightly different results anytime you substitute ingredients. We do have a growing section of naturally gluten free recipes — hopefully you can find a few new ones from there to enjoy!