My specialty!

Pumpkin Bread (or muffins)

This is my recipe for my signature dish.

Mix together with a whisk in a small bowl (I use heaping amounts of all spices):
1 1/2 c flour
1 1/2 tea cinnamon
1 tea ginger
1/2 tea nutmeg
1/2 tea cloves
1 tea baking powder
1 tea baking soda
1/2 tea salt

Cream together sugar and pumpkin, mix in applesauce and oil (measure oil first and applesauce slides right out!), mix in one egg at a time:
1 c white sugar
15 oz can Libby's pumpkin
1/4 c natural applesauce
1/4 c canola or vegetable oil 2 eggs

Mix dry ingredients into wet with minamil stirrings. Pour in regular loaf pan or muffin tins. Line muffin tins with paper cups and squirt a little Pam inside for easy removal. If using a loaf pan, grease and flour well.

Mix together 1/3 cup white sugar and 1 tablespoon cinnamon, sprinkle on top of loaf or muffins. This makes for a crispy delicious top!

Bake at 325° for 50 minutes (loaf), 20 minutes (muffins); but make sure to check 5 minutes early for a clean knife, ovens very. Let cool, will be very moist!!

Sangria!

It's summer and what is more important than a great sangria recipe! I made this one for my mom, aunts, and grandma so it's base is white wine. I used the original recipe, but made quite a few changes as I went along. Here is my version, I obviously go for quantity!!

• 1.5 L bottle Chardonnay (added another regular size bottle the next day to the rest of the ingredients, still great, just stretching it out!!)
• 1 1/3 cup orange flavored vodka
• ½ can frozen lemonade concentrate
• ½ cup white sugar
• 5 peaches
• 1 ½ cup red grapes
• 1 ½ cup green grapes
• 1 cup orange-peach-mango juice

Serve over ice and it's delicious, a little on the strong side, but I like it that way! You can always add more juice to cut the alcohol or add less alcohol.

Lemon Meringue Delicious

It's summertime (in temperature although not in season) and during summer I actually prefer refreshing desserts to rich chocolate ones. Astonishing I know! To kick off the summer season I made one of my favorites, a lemon meringue pie. I love making pies because I feel there is so much technique invovled and its a skill not a lot of people can master!

Making crust is one of my favorite parts. I found this great pie crust recipe that makes 2 crusts (or one double) and is SO easy to roll out. I follow the recipe, but I add an equal amount of sugar to salt and add only enough ice cold water to moisten the dough. I only refrigerate for about an hour and everything turns out ok. I froze the other half for later.

I really like the recipe I used for the filling and meringue part too. I used to use my mom's Betty Crocker cookbook, but since I no longer have access, I need to look up recipes online and hope for the best! Since we don't have a zester, I used a vegetable peeler to skin the lemon and used the food processor to grind up the peel. I added about a tablespoon of sugar while pulsing to loosen everything up. - Lemon Meringue Pie Recipe

I added a teaspoon of cream of tarter to the meringue mixture and next time I would make 1 1/2 times as much meringue, I like there to be a full amount of meringue! Overall the pie turned out great! A little runny, but I think I will let everything cool for a bit longer before placing it in the pie crust and re-baking.

Ruth's B-day Cake

For Ruth's birthday Stacey and I took her computer to look at all of her bookmarks from allrecipes.com. This is a dark chocolate cake from the recipe below. I was running out of vanilla so I added chocolate chips for flavoring. The FIRST time I made the cake, I accidentally hit the stove dial, so the cake cooked at 500 degrees before I smelt the burning-ness. Luckily the second round was much better! For the frosting, I followed the recipe, but I doubled it and melted more chocolate and stirred it in, I figured you only turn 24 once, so why limit your chocolate intake! The decorations were made by mixing about 1 1/2 tablespoons of butter with melted chocolate chips. I used our new cake decorating kit to write and then make flowers. I put about 10 flours (or stars) directly on the cake and put chocolate chips in the middle. For the rest of the stars, I made them on parchment paper, froze, and then later added to the cake. The chocolate decorations had a great consistency.

The cake was delicious, very rich! We were smart girls and Ruth took about half of the remaining cake to work with her so we didn't end eating ourselves!

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Dark-Chocolate-Cream-Cheese-Cake/Detail.aspx

Welcome to Tracy's Bakery

Tracy's Bakery wouldn't be my first name for my establishment, but it's the one Lynn put on my apron, so I'm going with it!

I've been thinking about starting to keep a binder for awhile with recipes and notes about them, but that really isn't my style, this is. I'm going to post links to recipes I've used online, note my results and changes, post pictures of my creations, and hopefully start to develop my own recipes. Some day, I am going to have my own cafe, but first I need to practice, a lot!