Sweet Gifts

Danielle of Habeas Brulee is hosting Sugar High Friday #41 and has chosen Sweet Gifts as the theme. This is perhaps the easiest theme for SHF ever. I love to bake for other people. Be it for special occasions, birthdays or holidays, it’s all good. But most of all I like baking for others for no reason at all. I’m not going to lie though, sometimes I have ulterior motives… It’s much harder to dislike someone if they’ve baked you a sweet treat.

While perusing the blogs one day I saw a recipe for Coconut Toffee Almond Crunch Cookies that looked too good to resist. That combination of flavours sounded just about perfect to me and I knew I had to make them. After tasting a couple fresh from the oven I determined that these were the type of cookie that made people like you, great for bringing to work. Everything seems so much better when you’re handing someone an amazing cookie. Arrive late to work? One cookie. Need to take the weekend off? Two cookies. Want your co-workers to be nice to your? Three cookies. Handing in a resignation letter when three other people have just quit and the store is uber-busy? Tin of cookies. See, if everyone worked on the cookie system, life would be so much easier.

Next up on the sweet gifts list is Cinnamon Raisin Bread. It was a request that I got quite a while ago. It was at a time when I was experimenting with baking 100% whole wheat bread and didn’t feel like making a white loaf to fulfill this request. The person who made the request didn’t care much for whole wheat bread so I didn’t bother trying to make a whole wheat version out of the dough I was using. Fast forward a few months and I received another request for Cinnamon Raison Bread. As luck would have it, lately I’ve been baking bread from the absolutely wonderful book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois and had a batch of Soft American Style White dough in the fridge that was easily turned into a loaf of Cinnamon Raisin Swirl Bread. Unfortunately the person who made the initial request will not be getting any, but there’s nothing I can do about that. This bread will still be a sweet gift for the second requester.

I have been the lucky recipient of some sweet treats lately as well. Warda of 64 Sq Ft Kitchen decided that for her blog’s first birthday she was going to give away some fabulous Pierre Herme Chocolate Sparklers. Her daughter picked me to be the receiver of these delicious cookies and I was thrilled when they showed up on my doorstep, still intact, with only one broken cookie. Thanks Warda, they were great!

That wasn’t the only thing that showed up on my doorstep, I recently received a copy of Quick & Easy Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey. There’s a catch to this one though, I don’t know who it’s from! It arrived via amazon.com so there’s no return address and the note that accompanied the book simply said “Enjoy!” I am most certainly enjoying the book and have already made Banana Halva, (which admittedly doesn’t look all that appealing, brown banana goo doesn’t photograph well, but it’s delicious) and have plans to try out all sorts of things from this book. But I can’t figure out for the life of me, if I won this book somehow and forgot or who might have sent it. So to the person who sent the book, a million thank yous!

I’d like to believe that I’m maintaining a sweet gift equilibrium. If I keep putting out good karma, eventually it will find its way back.

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Cookies + Bread + SHF