Paralyzed By Too Many Decisions

I understand it must be hard for some of you to select a single Dorie recipe to make when they’re all so amazing. I’ve already given you over 50 to choose from and today I’m giving you five more. In the face of so many possibilities, it’s easy to become paralyzed by choice. Do you start with an ice cream? A cake? A tart or pie? It’s simply too hard to choose. All decisions come with positives and negatives, (although in the case of choosing one Dorie recipe over another, even the negatives aren’t actually bad) but which one will make you the happiest? And how do you go about weighing the options? Do you take a baking approach and measure everything out exactly, weighing each detail to the decimal point? Or do you take a more free form cooking approach where you can add and subtract values like spices.

A few days ago I posted a story about a girl who has a terrible time making decisions. That same girl has an even more difficult time making decisions when too many of them come at her at once. Making a chart and comparing one option to another isn’t so bad, but once you get up to five or six options you practically have to be an engineer to figure out how everything works. It gets even more difficult when certain decisions are dependent on factors that are out of your control. It really does become a math equation. Unfortunately, my decisions are quality and not quantity based so there’s no exact resolution to my problem, er, I mean, that other girls’ problem. I couldn’t possibly be talking about me… If your only problem is choosing which Dorie recipe to make, I’m happy to tell you, you won’t be disappointed with any of them. Close your eyes, open the book and make the first thing you see. Maybe it will be one of these:

Berry Surprise Cake pg. 273 Of course, if you go and decorate the cake with berries like I did, than it’s really not much of a surprise cake, now is it? It does hide my shaky icing job though.

Creamiest Lemon Cream Meringue Pie pg. 337 This page actually has the recipe for a lime meringue pie, but I’ve already made it once with limes, so I opted for lemon this time around. The creaminess makes it unlike your ordinary, run of the mill lemon meringue pie, and a million times better.

Fluted Polenta and Ricotta Cake pg. 200 I bought a case of figs and had no clue what to do with them. Ordinarily I probably wouldn’t have bought them, but they seem to be in the ‘in’ thing right now, so I hoped on that bandwagon, (they’re not in the title, but they’re in this cake, in case you were wondering). I’ve since also made fig brownies and I highly recommend it, you should also add a little balsamic vinegar, it adds a nice depth.

Crunchy and Custardy Peach Tart pg. 346 Why isn’t there a quaint country saying like “They go together like almonds and peaches”? Cause there should be. They’re a fabulous combination.

Blueberry Crumb Cake pg. 192 I had a pint of blueberries that needed to be used or frozen, so I opened up the book and scanned for blueberry recipes, this was the first one I found. I love the crunchy crumb topping.

Unlike myself, Valli of More Than Burnt Toast and Jaden of Steamy Kitchen are able to make decisions, they handed out Droolworthy and Thinking Blogger Awards respectively and I was the lucky recipient of one of each. Thank you girls! Now if you could solve my other problems, that would be great…

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Cake + Pie + Tart + Baking + Dorie Greenspan