Around mid-July, I became obsessed with the idea of lemon and blueberry in baked goods. I know exactly what sparked it: I was driving home from work in Tucson and stopped off at a bakery for a blueberry muffin. I had some lemon Frut2O in my possession, and spent the drive drinking this nondescript blueberry muffin and my lemon water, marvelling about how much better that muffin tasted right after I took a drink, or how the aftertaste was just more blueberry-ish after taking a swig.

But I had a huge problem: nowhere in my rented kitchen was a muffin tin, or even a bread pan.

Woe!

So I waited, considering my options for breads and muffins and what would do me better.

Ultimately, I decided on a blueberry-lemon bread recipe found on epicurious, and just had to wait until I happened to have everything I needed to bake it.

As luck would have it, this coincided the same weekend I was gifted with a ginormous mutant zucchini, and I had to put the bread aside for a few days to deal with the squash. But now, it's 4am, and I couldn't sleep -- too jazzed up. I was hungry, and my sister (my roommate) is gone for the rest of the week, called into work unexpectedly. So I decided to make that blueberry-lemon bread to calm down, and while it baked away, unpacked and cleaned my apartment a bit. (As sad as it is that I've been here 17 days now and am not fully unpacked, but truthfully: I unpacked what I originally brought, and went to my parents' to pick up some more things they'd been holding for me, stashed in the room that used to be mine.)


Anyway: this is brightly lemon, with juicy blueberries. It's a great, sunshiney bread, good for a raining morning like today.

I went to visit the parents yesterday, and they said "Look at our giant zucchini!" and I said "Yum, zucchini bread" and they said "Oh good, you know what to do with it: YOU TAKE IT HOME!!"

So I did.

And it was good.

My sister and I spent about 90 minutes hacking at it with a cleaver, seeding it, and abusing my food processor.

I don't know how big it was, but I ended up with 10 cups of shredded zucchini and 12 cups of sliced zucchini, all of which is happily sitting in my freezer.

As it so happens, I also had 3 overly ripe bananas that I was going to turn into banana bread today. Instead, it was turned into zucchini-banana bread, and it is DELCIOUS!

I have been terribly busy with the holidays and finals and what not. But, none the less, I found time this weekend to do some baking.

A few friends and I are having a cookie exchange, and I wanted to get the most bang for my buck, and looked around the web for things to do with sugar cookie dough. I found alot of the same ol-same ol things (namely, sugar cookies or snickerdoodles, with the occasional chocolate sugar cookies thrown in), and then I ran into an article by Country Home that featured five - nay, ten - things to do with sugar cookies. (Oh, and the photo is Country Home's -- my camera's battery was dead when I finished the cookies.)

These brownies are so yummy, it's not even funny.

The secret, of course, is the great brownie recipe that it starts off with!

But really, this was basically my grandmother's Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte with a single-layer, brownie base rather than the multi-layer cake base she used, and made slacker style with a can of cherries, instead of hand pitted/sliced cherries. Shhh, don't tell her that I shared her secret recipe!