If that sounds pretentious or immodest, please understand that I have a ton of baking fails as well, so whenever things go my way, I get super excited. This is one of those times.

This cake is autumn in a pan. When you bake it, your house will smell ah-may-zing. If we’re getting technical, this cake is the combined glory of cocoa, banana, pumpkin, and chocolate chips along with lovely fall spices like cinnamon and cloves. You’ve gotta bake it to believe it!

Before I get back to cake, I’m going to abruptly shift topic and talk about life 15 years ago.

As you all know, the 15th anniversary of 9/11 occurred two days ago. It occurred to me that I’ve never written down my own version of that day. You see, everyone has their own story about that day, just like people who were around the day that Kennedy got shot have stories. My story isn’t that interesting, but it’s mine. I wanted to write it down somewhere.

My original plan on September 11th, 2001 was to go to work and then move. As in, move into my first single-girl apartment ever in Washington, D.C. I’d never lived alone, and I had just started my job. Everything was new, exciting, and scary.

I remember being preoccupied by many mundane details. My futon was being delivered later that day, and I was hoping I’d make it back from my suburban high school to the new city pad in time to receive it. On the job end, I’d just started teaching high school seniors, and they were a tough crew. I was worried about it, and that’s kind of where I was mentally that day.

A lot of people remember a beautiful early September day. I don’t. I honestly was too much in my own head that day to notice anything. Well, until.

My problematic senior class had just ended when a student came back into the classroom and told me to turn on the TV. I had a typical teacher reaction; in other words, I said no. But he said, “You don’t understand. Please, this is important. Something is happening on the news.”

Something in his eyes made me reach for the remote and turn on the TV. The rest you know, because we experienced it together as a nation. Watching the first plane, then the second, followed by anger and confusion and worry. Hearing conflicting reports about which planes were touching down where. The Pentagon, the field in Pennsylvania. It all came together slowly and in a nightmarish, jumbled way.

Obviously, I didn’t move to D.C. that day. I moved on September 13th, where I looked around the undecorated walls of my tiny apartment and felt alone and afraid. New city, new job, new world. It was probably the most off-kilter I’d ever been at that point in my life, and the emotions alone had me in alt for quite a while.

That’s pretty much it. Not an exciting or distinctive story, but mine. I wanted to tell it sometime, and now I have.

Moving on to cake now seems absolutely uncalled for, but that’s the nature of life. It’s hard to know when to move from the serious to the frivolous, and it’s important to find balance in that spectrum.

This time of year, I find it comforting to bake with some of my favorite autumn spices: cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg. Another wonderful option is pumpkin pie spice. I don’t use that in this cake, but it’s also a great choice.

This healthier cake is butter-free. It also has hefty doses of both pumpkin and banana for extra moisture, so it’s a truly delightful experience. The chocolate chips don’t hurt, either!

Every September, I remember days gone by and look forward to the future. We all have memories and stories that make up who we are. Some of them are painful, while others are full of happy nostalgia. I hope that our more difficult times can help us appreciate all the good things in life that we’re lucky enough to experience.

If people’s reaction to them so far is any indication, then absolutely. I had these on my desk at work wrapped in foil, and someone actually opened the foil (they can see my baked goods coming a mile away) and ate a few. Then others joined in making happy noises. To me, that’s success.

I mean, there are other ways to be successful. But few ways are more rewarding than a chewy chocolate cookie with peanut butter chips inside!

Making cookies requires patience, mainly because most good cookies require a chilling period for the dough that ranges anywhere from a few hours to overnight. And they say that patience is a virtue, but I’ve never believed that. Maybe patience is a good attribute in a baker, but in life, it can really backfire.

Patient people can miss out on opportunity. If you spend time waiting for the perfect moment, it can easily pass by and become obsolete. There’s rarely a right time (though some times are more right than others) to have a baby, ask for that promotion, take a dream vacation, or start a food blog.

When I decided to start JAB over two years ago, the timing could not have been less opportune. I was still in a sleepless haze from having three kids very close together, my job was as demanding as always (being a teacher is not a low-stress field), and I knew little about food photography and nothing about running a website.

I could choose to be embarrassed by the missteps I’ve taken along the way. My early photography was abysmal, and it could be better nowadays. I don’t spend nearly enough time on social media promoting JAB, but it’s not a strength of mine. And I could be more actively pursuing sponsorships and business, or editing my cookbook.

But see, I’d rather not be patient and give JAB everything I can without having a nervous breakdown. It’s far from perfect, but I do work that I’m proud of, and I keep learning more. So if patience is a virtue, the only way I can prove that is by continuing to work on something that takes time to get right.

Speaking of that, when you make these cookies, the dough chilling is NOT optional. If you don’t do it, you’ll be sorry. These cookies tend to be on the chewy/crispy side as it is, and not chilling them first will make them bake up as flat as pancakes.

Now that Friday and the weekend loom, I’m certainly not patient about getting my sugar fix on, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Thanks to JAB, I always have treats on hand and inspiration for future posts. Patience might work sometimes, but it’s overrated. Live in the now!

I’ve taken out the raisins and seeds and put in chocolate chips and cocoa. As a result, I’m a very happy girl right now.

The bread itself isn’t sweet (except for the chocolate chips here and there), but there’s a lovely chocolate flavor throughout that makes this quite a wonderful St. Patrick’s Day snack!

Now that the Oscars are over, can I get in on the controversy? Hey, better late than never.

Back in the day, I got really excited about the Oscars. Hey, I was a kid. I didn’t overthink the situation. All I knew was that the fashion was fun and that for a few hours, I could watch celebrities hobnobbing and performing. It was just a fun TV night.

As you know by now, this year things got really heated. There’s no doubt that equal representation in Hollywood (in the movies themselves or at the awards shows) has not yet been achieved, and I am duly upset about it. But there’s something else about all awards shows that bothers me.

Why do we give actors so much screen time for recognition? I mean, we’re talking endless hours of airtime, media coverage, and money that gets poured into awarding people who have made it in the television and film industry. They’re all talented, so I’m not trying to hate on their craft. But why are they the heroes? Why do they get all those moments in the sun?

People risk their lives every day (or actually give up their lives) to save humanity, and I don’t see them being recognized or rewarded. Heck, they’re not even paid that well. Instead, people who pretend to be heroes, who play the part, get all the credit. It’s so much more glamorous to play a firefighter who dies to save others than to actually be one.

The real heroes have been taught not to expect appreciation as a matter of course, and that’s the way it is. But the way we celebrate Hollywood is positively obscene. Do you know about the gift bags that Oscar nominees receive? Some publications have estimated the worth of these gift bags to be around $200,000 each. Really? Is that necessary?

And that doesn’t include the expense of the show itself, or the parties, or the fashion, or the salary bumps that the world’s most successful and well-paid actors receive once they win that gold statuette. I’m not all about the money (I did go into teaching, after all), but that’s just insult to injury when you consider how much time and attention is spent on rewarding people in show business.

Okay, rant concluded. Deep breath. Soda bread.

Every year on St. Patrick’s, someone brings a soda bread into the office. It’s the standard issue soda bread, which has a lovely flavor and texture and goes perfectly with butter. I enjoy it, to a point. But man…those caraway seeds. Not my thing.

What I’ve done here is probably super not okay with traditional St. Patrick’s Day revelers, so I apologize. But I had to. The bread gets a shot of cocoa and some chocolate chips. And it’s not hard to put together at all. The video is the proof!

This bread is simple to make and accessible. Nothing fancy going on here! Nope, we save that for the Oscars. They can have the overdone display of exclusion and artificial emotion. I’ll keep it real with the baking!

And these are quite lovely, even though the word “healthy” appears in the title. Chocolate, banana, and no butter or oil. Plus, there’s a Greek yogurt protein kick in there. Can we all cheer?

I almost called these brownies. That’s how fudgy they are. Have I ever mentioned how difficult it can be to name some recipes? Or children?

With every single one of our children, we didn’t name them until they were born and we could look into their faces. I had a hard time committing anyway. Being a teacher made it a lot harder.

You see, I associate names with people. And while I really enjoy most of my students, I didn’t want to name my kids anything that I’d associate with my workplace. It’s just nice to keep home and work as separate as possible.

As a result, my kids have fairly obscure names (with even more obscure spellings) and while their names fit them quite nicely, it wasn’t an easy process. Names are so dang important. What if a kid gets the wrong one?

Forget about real people. Character names bug me, too. When Big from Sex and the City finally got a name in the last episode, it was “John.” Really?! John? That’s the best they could do for him? It was so unbelievably frustrating.

If you could name yourself, what would it be? Feel free to let that marinate, or share below! No, this is not that game where you come up with your accidental stripper name. This is you deciding what you would have been called, had it been your choice.

If this cake had a choice, it might ask to be buttery and full of fat. Actually, no, it wouldn’t. When I brought this to work, not only could people not believe that it was healthy, but almost everyone also asked for the recipe. Here’s a video tutorial, but see the full recipe below as well:

Aside from its health benefits, this cake (almost brownie) is super simple to make. Without butter to cream (and no oil either), it’s just mixing ingredients together. Have I mentioned that this cake is also gluten-free?

The only danger here is that you’ll convert to healthy cake and miss out on the Valentine’s Day splurging. Nah, I’m not really worried about that. But this is really good, whether it’s named right or not. In the end, it’s the taste that matters!

When I was a kid, my dad would pick us up after school and on simpler days, we’d go straight home. But sometimes there were errands to run, so we had to go out and about. While I hated errands, it usually meant I got to pick out an after school candy bar. For years, that candy bar was Baby Ruth. Those chocolate-covered peanut and caramel bars have a great deal of nostalgia for me.

Which kind of got me to thinking. I rarely bake with Baby Ruth bars, and that’s a crying shame. So today, I’ve remedied that neglect. They’re getting their very own brookie!

For those of you who are way behind the trend, a brookie is a fantastic mashup of a brownie and a cookie. It’s one of my favorite combinations, right up there with pake (pie and cake, a combo I fell in love with thanks to the show Drop Dead Diva) and pookies, a pie and cookie combo. Mashups don’t just belong in music, after all. They hold up even better in dessert. If you want to learn more about them, read my friend Dorothy’s amazing cookbook. She has some rocking recipe mashups!

Mashups also extend to other areas of life. Like the spork. You know the spork, right? That miraculous blend of spoon and fork? Why in the name of all that’s holy don’t cutlery sets (the real ones, not the plastic) come with sporks? They’re the only answer to the question, “What is the best way to eat an ice cream cake?” Duh! Spork!

Another mashup I love is the skort. I know that sounds incredibly dorky, but hear me out. As the mother of daughters, it’s so great to have them wear something that looks like a skirt, but has shorts underneath for when they inevitably do a downward-facing dog pose in front of a crowd. See, little girls love to show off their fancy underpants. The skort stops that from happening.

In fact, the skort is so awesome that I found a couple of really chic ones (no, I’m not kidding) on sale at Athleta. They look like miniskirts, but really, they’re miniskorts. I look cute, and I don’t have to worry that someone is looking up my skirt when I’m not sitting with my knees clamped together.

So if you haven’t gotten it by now, I love mashups. And these Baby Ruth brookies are no exception. The bottom layer is a brownie made with real chocolate. That happened because I ran low on cocoa, so I made it up as I went along. It worked! Brownies are forgiving, and now you have the recipe below. The top layer is a cookie dough, and it’s run through with chopped fun-sized Baby Ruth bars. If ever there were an appropriate name for smaller candy bars, it’s “fun-sized.” What marketing genius came up with that?

If you haven’t spent much time thinking about the joy of mashups, you’d better start now. Begin with a neglected candy bar from youth and then branch out to cutlery and clothing. It’s the perfect way to reject having to compromise. Get something exactly the way you want it!

It’s fun to cook with cola. Did you know that cola makes a fantastic marinade for a hunk of beef? And it also makes a great cake ingredient. It just took me a while to get to trying the whole thing out, since we don’t keep soda in our house. More on that in a moment.

Instead of using straight-up cola for this cake, I used black cherry soda. Dr. Brown’s, to be specific. If you’ve never tried Dr. Brown’s black cherry soda, you are definitely missing out. Their cream soda is pretty amazing, too. But that’s neither here nor there. This cake, though? This cake is amazing. And the icing on top ain’t half bad, either!

Back in the day, I was a Coke fiend. Not gonna lie. If I didn’t drink soda, my thirst wasn’t quenched. Water was lacking, seltzer was gross, and unsweetened iced tea just didn’t cut it. Too bitter. As they say, though, the powers above have a sense of humor. I’ve been free of sugared beverages for several years now, and it’s been extremely educational.

To put it bluntly, I’ve waged a war in my house on sugared drinks. That might be a strange platform coming from a dessert blogger who celebrates taking extreme desserts and pushing them even further, but I reserve the right to be contradictory or even confusing, if that’s how people see it. The thing is, I can redeem ice cream. It has calcium! I can stand behind a chocolate chip cookie. Its nutritional value is pretty sparse, I grant you, but it still has the temporary benefit of assuaging hunger. And yes, I acknowledge that a handful of almonds would be healthier.

But see, you can’t cut out everything in life. If I’m not drinking my sugar, I’m going to eat it. In fact, the process of cutting sugar out of drinks lets me relax more around dessert. It also helps me feel a little better about my kids. According to modern wisdom, the epidemic of childhood obesity can partly be owed to added sugars, which appear most egregiously in sodas, juices, and sports drinks. They’re also lurking in other places, but I figure trying to do our part by encouraging mainly water and milk for our children is a start. We also eat whole wheat products and brown rice instead of white, but that’s another post for another day.

As you can imagine, when I walked in the door with Dr. Brown’s black cherry soda, Kenny was pretty surprised. He still sneaks out to drink Coke, or he orders it at restaurants. “Is that for me?” he asked, his eyes lighting up.

Lucky for him, the store was out of smaller bottles, so I had to buy a six-pack of cans. The whole recipe only calls for one and a third cups of soda, so he had leftovers to enjoy. And I enjoyed using the soda for something different. In this cake, the cola gets cooked on the stove and mixed with chocolate before being added to the batter. The resultant cake is light, fluffy, and very tall.

The icing is more of a glaze, and it’s made on the stove top, too. There’s some black cherry cola in there along with cocoa and other deliciousness. The top hardens, but when you eat the cake, it’s gooey underneath and adds more moisture to the cake. Talk about cola cake heaven!

This cake is a good candidate for a crowd, not to mention another accomplishment on my baking bucket list. It’s even worth buying soda for! In a cake, pretty much any ingredient can be justified. Why not?

I’m all about easy baking, but there’s no way to cheat a layer cake. Steps have to be followed. Still, making it as easy as possible is ideal, and this chocolate cake is three things: incredible, simple, and gluten-free.

If you’re a doubter, you need to try this. I served this cake at my daughter’s birthday party to a group of people who either openly or covertly believe that gluten-free baking is crap. This cake proved them all wrong.

It’s funny how people are so quick to form judgments and hold onto them, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Our country’s laws might indicate that somebody is innocent until proven guilty, but that doesn’t protect people from ordinary, day-to-day judgment.

We all do it, of course. We put people into categories: soccer mom, yuppie, player, punk. These first impressions usually stick the hardest, especially because we form internal judgments of people we don’t know, whether we’re standing behind them in line at Starbucks or passing them angrily on the road.

Every now and then, we’re lucky (or unlucky) enough to get to know someone better, and then we can undo some of that initial judgment.  But that first impression doesn’t ever fully go away, not with people or with cake.

Still, I’m asking you to keep an open mind here when I tell you that this chocolate cake is the best one I’ve ever made, gluten-free or otherwise. It’s dense, fudgy, moist, and puts other more popular cake recipes to shame. Even better, the cake can be whipped up in one bowl by hand.

To make this recipe, I doubled the base (which will make one bundt-sized cake). Out of that, I got three nine-inch cake rounds and enough batter for an 8-inch square cake. Of all the baked goods in my house that were around for my daughter’s birthday weekend, that little square cake went the fastest.

And the rest of it went into this My Little Pony-themed cake, which my daughter loved. See?

If you’ve judged gluten-free desserts too quickly, try again. This one will change the way you look at the world of GF dessert!

Nah, they’re too popular to miss me. And when I pass a scoop shop, I walk in. But at home, I’m too busy concocting fun ice cream flavors. This one is perfect for your summer celebrations because I think it’s totally original, plus it’s easy. Three base ingredients, everyone! It takes about two minutes to throw together.

You know what takes a lot more time? Like, a lot? Getting my hair done. Which is bizarre, because I have low-maintenance hair. It’s curly. But ever since the grays began popping out like overeager distant relatives who keep coming by to visit unannounced, I have to get it dyed every few months, which takes hours. And I should be doing it more often because the grays come back in a much shorter time. I’m just never up for sitting in a chair for hours on end.

When I was getting my summer fun shade put in yesterday (eggplant, woohoo!), the hair washing person began giving me my scalp massage and head rub. I always dread this part of the appointment. I know a lot of people enjoy getting their heads rubbed, but I have never been one of them. I mean, they’re not massaging sore muscles. Can they put that pressure on my quads instead? Or if we’re keeping it close to the hair, my completely f-ed up neck muscles?

But I always wonder if it’s rude to ask the head rubber to stop her good work, so I sit through it quietly and try not to think about anything funny, like what it must look like for me to be reclining in a massage chair in sweats and sneakers while a bored-looking hair washer rubs my forehead.

It’s awkward moments like this where I dream up ideas for baking, or even better, ice cream flavors. And this one is definitely worth trying.

To make this ice cream, you’ll need those Nestle filled chips, the cherry flavor. They’re so good. You’ll also need roasted salted walnuts. Those are your two mix-ins. But the ice cream itself is what I’m talking about here. Ready?

Cool whip. Sweetened condensed milk. Cocoa. That’s all, folks. Mix, fold in your chips and walnuts, and freeze overnight. When you wake up in the morning, you’ve got amazing chocolate ice cream with the best crunchy bits! It’s like a summer miracle. Heck, summer itself is a miracle. Ice cream just makes it better.

You probably can’t do anything to control those grays replacing the color in your hair other than face the stylist. And you definitely can’t do much about awkward moments other than take your mind elsewhere. So free your mind, and the ice cream ideas will follow!

Example: when I’m not sure what to bake, the answer is magic bars, pure and simple. Because no matter how basic a magic bar is, different flavors and combinations abound. And when there are Girl Scout cookies in the world, attention must be paid.

This is my one-year blogiversary, everyone. You’d think I’d be celebrating by popping champagne and downing one of my decadent desserts, and perhaps that will happen, too. At the moment, though, I’m feeling more contemplative than celebratory.

You see, blogging is kind of hard, if you keep it up. I have a demanding full-time job as a high school teacher, and I also have three small kids. Any attention I give Just About Baked has to be stolen time. That happens early in the morning before anybody is awake, late at night after everyone is asleep, or on weekends, when the kitchen suddenly becomes a whirlwind of spilled flour and sugar.

Through this year, Just About Baked has become stronger and is shaping into something that I’m really proud of. There’s still so much I want to do, and I’m not sure when that will happen. But I’ve learned something really important in life, and it applies to my blog. Ready for this wisdom?

Forget perfect. Try good enough.

You see, I’m never going to be perfect, not in anything. I’ll never be the perfect wife, the perfect mom, the perfect teacher, the perfect person. And my blog won’t be, either. My pictures could use some improvement, I am guilty of the occasional typo, and I have left ingredients out of recipes. Sorry, folks.

Those transgressions alone are enough to shut down many a food blogger. But that’s not going to happen here. I can’t learn or grow if I quit, and unless I accept that my blog, as it stands, is good enough. I will keep working and trying, and that’s all I can do.

So on this one-year anniversary of Just About Baked, I’ve gotten pretty serious. But I also want to say thank you to all of you who read and support my blog, who write in lovely comments, and who compliment my crazy ideas, like this one. After all, why not make a Samoa more of a delight by adding it to a chocolate graham cracker crust topped with coconut, chocolate chips, Samoa pieces, and condensed milk?

See? Magic. Even magic doesn’t have to be perfect. So happy blogiversary to me, and here’s to being good enough. Let’s all raise a magic bar to that!

But later. Because now, I’m doing yet another tricked-out version.

See, while the basics are fun, tricking anything out is exciting. Like my bathtub. A few years back, I decided that the only room left in the house where I could potentially get any privacy was the bathroom. It has a lock and all. Very fancy.

So we had the existing tub ripped out and it was replaced by a jet tub with lots of bells and whistles. As it turns out, life with a jet tub is better than life without. Was redoing the bathroom in amazing red glass tile necessary? Nope. But I’m very happy. Red is great, both in tile and in food. That’s why raspberry jam rocks.

How’s that for a transition? See, these tricked-out brownies start with a fudgy base, but then a layer of raspberry jam goes on top, followed by a layer of oatmeal cookie dough. They all go so well together.

I made these brownies for my mom. My mother hosts a lot of meals for company (see, her small child days are over, thus the time to host), but she doesn’t enjoy baking dessert. So, I baked it for her. And she likes healthy stuff, so I put the oatmeal on there to pretend that it was. Hint: it’s not.

From what I gather, people ate them. And then ate some more. So, mission accomplished. You know that chocolate and raspberry are a great combo, but add the oatmeal and there’s some nutty sweetness that blends in just fine.

Let’s face it: fancy, tricked-out brownies are a lot of fun. I might get back to basics soon, but for now, I’m just having a good time cranking out more ideas!