Lopez - Weeknight Baking: Recipes to Fit Your Schedule

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Weeknight Baking is a cookbook with recipes for baked goods, desserts, and sweets that do at least one of these things:

Come together quickly

Most recipes in this book have an Active Timethe time in which you are actively following recipe instructions like prepping and chopping ingredients, mixing batters and doughs, or decorating cakes and cookiesno longer than 30 minutes, and usually much less than that.

Or come together quickly over a few nights.

That being said, there are desserts like cakes and pies that you really just cant make in 30 minutes! For more time-intensive recipes, Ive split up the steps over the course of a few days so youre only actively working for 30 minutes or less each day. Youll still end up with a dessert thats as delicious as one that required you to spend all day in the kitchen baking.

Use ingredients you have in a well-stocked bakers pantry

Most of the recipes in this bookwith the exception of a handful that take advantage of fresh seasonal ingredients, or those meant for specific dietary restrictionsuse ingredients every baker should already have in the pantry or fridge. Ill teach you which ingredients are worth always having on hand so youll always be ready for spontaneous weeknight baking projects.

Or can be easily substituted with other similar ingredients.

But I also know weve all found ourselves in a pinch, either running low on ingredients or forgetting to put an item on our shopping list. Ill show you which ingredients you can substitute for others to avoid a last-minute rush to the grocery store.

Store well for baking, decorating, assembling, or serving in the future

Many of the recipes in this book will produce doughs, batters, frostings, and even whole cakes and pies that keep well in the refrigerator or freezer. You can have a fresh-baked treat in your hand in 15 minutes or less, all thanks to the batch of cookie dough in your freezer or the bowl of muffin batter in your fridge.

Or are made with parts that do.

Breaking up a recipe into different parts that all store well helps you manage your time in the kitchen. You can decide when to start and finish every baking project.

My hope is that when you flip through this book, youll find these time-saving qualities in classic, accessible recipes to match your cravingslike chocolate chip cookies, fudge brownies, and banana bread. Because its usually the simple stuff I crave most on a weeknight, and I suspect thats the case for you, too.

Along the way, youll also find lots of advice on baking methods and techniques to help you become a more efficient baker. But these tips wouldnt exist without the years I spent balancing my traditional nine-to-five job with my popular baking blog, Hummingbird Highso lets rewind.

Several years ago, on a cold and blustery November evening, I had an idea that would change my life forever. It was Sunday night and I had just moved to Denver, Colorado, where I had accepted a new job as a financial analyst at a prestigious consulting firm. I was supposed to be pulling together some reports that my boss wanted the following morning. But instead of working through the necessary spreadsheets, I was dreaming about cupcakes.

I first started baking cupcakes during my sophomore year in college as a way to procrastinate from schoolwork. In the kitchen, with the smells of browning butter and caramelizing sugar wafting from the oven door, it was easy to forget about homework and other looming deadlines. Id invite my friends and classmates to enjoy the baked goods. We would sit around the table, with a cupcake in one hand and a can of cheap beer in the other, gossiping and venting about minor dramas. It was then that I realized that baking made me happy: it was a way for me to bring all my friends together quickly (since none of them ever turned down a fresh cupcake), and it allowed us all to escape, however briefly, from the stresses of our lives.

A few years after I graduated, I found myself in the kitchen again. At that point, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life; only that, at the end of the work day, I wanted to bake. I didnt like my job that muchmy workplace was the kind of high-stress, super-competitive environment that inspires books like Liars Poker and movies like The Wolf of Wall Street. Although baking helped me unwind, I felt lost and lonely. I wished I could have an honest conversation with the friends Id left behind to ask them for advice on how and when to change career paths. I remembered us all back in our tiny dorm kitchen, passing a bottle of cheap wine around and snacking on cupcakes I had made earlier that day, offering moral support and good vibes.

It was this memory that inspired me to start my baking blog, Hummingbird High. I began with a project that gave my blog its name: chronicling my adventures baking all the recipes in The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook, my favorite cookbook at the time, and adapting those recipes to work in Denvers unforgiving high-altitude environment. Soon, I graduated to writing recipes of my own. Recipe ideas would hit me while I was running financial reports; I would furtively scribble them down in quick emails to myself. Later, I would spend my evenings developing and testing those ideas, photographing the results for my friends and family to see on Hummingbird High. Even after long hours at the office, I still had the energy to stay up late in the kitchen.

In that period of uncertainty, Hummingbird High brought me joy. At first, it was a way to distract myself from the misery of my day job, and it was an easy way to keep in touch with the faraway friends I missed so much. But as my baking adventures and projects grew more ambitious, strangers from different states and even different countries began to follow along. Readers would give me advice on troubleshooting notoriously finicky baked goods, and leave comments and photos to show me theyd tried my recipes at home. It was heartwarming and inspirational. I worked harder than ever to improve my recipes, along with my photography and writing skills.