Now, I'm sure most of the readers of this blog are seasoned chefs with tons of practice and experience. But even the best of us need a little reminder sometimes, even on the basics.

Bear with me - or skip over this entirely - if this is old hat to you, but if you need a little help, don't worry, we won't tell.

How to...

• Slice a pineapple
• Dice an onion
  
• Prepare an artichoke
• Cut and prepare butternut squash
• ...and acorn squash
• Poach an egg
• Bake at high altitudes
• Prepare and cook turnips

Cold (and wet, depending on where you live) winter weather tends to make us crave hot, hearty foods, but that doesn't do anything to diminish the appeal of something light for dessert after a heavy meal. In fact, a bright cirtus dessert can serve as a reminder that spring is still on the way - and the Lemon Cream Tartlets from Helene at Tartelette are very spring-like, indeed. The recipe comes from Dorie Greenspan's newest book, Baking: From My Home to Yours, and it is rumored to be one of the best lemon tartlet recipes out there, with an intense lemon flavor and silky smooth texture. The texture is due to the fact that an entire cup of butter is used to make the filling for only a handful of tarts, making it anything but light in fat and calories. One bite should make you be enough to forget the nutritional stats and just let you enjoy the heavenly flavor of the tart.

There are a lot of people who, as a general rule, eschew baking mixes. After all, why use a boxed mix when you can do it yourself and produce a better result? This standard may hold true when it comes to the average inexpensive store-bought cake mix, but there is a wide range of high quality, gourmet mixes available now that produced baked goods that will rival not only homemade things, but those from pro bakeries, as well. In fact, many of the mixes are coming from these pros to begin with. Jacques Torres has recently launched a line of baking mixes for several of his most popular chocolate treats: Pure Bliss Brownies, French Kiss Cookies, and Mudslide Cookies. The mixes are made in conjunction with King Arthur Flour and contain all the necessary basics for replicating the chocolatier's favorite treats at home, including a lot of chocolate. They retail for $12.95 each.

I sampled the end results all of the mixes at the SF Fancy Foods Show a few weeks ago, and while all three were excellent, the chocolate-filled chocolate chip French Kiss Cookies were probably my favorite. If you want to give one of them a try from scratch as a comparison, you can find the recipe for Jacques Torres's Mudslides here.

Zingerman's, the famous Ann Arbor delicatessen and foodie hub, is expanding its offerings with the opening of a new baking school. The Bake! baking school is part of Zingerman's Bakehouse, which is responsible for the indulgent pastries and artisanal breads that the Zingerman's group sells. The classes, which run from $40 to $125 each, all teach single skills and are aimed at imparting professional tips and techniques to everyday cooks. Scones, baguettes, strudels, pizza dough and sourdough breads are all topics that will be covered and the classes will vary in length based on the complexity of the subject matter and the time involved in making the product. Students can take one class or a series, depending on what skills they want to master. For those who want to do it all, the school is offering a "Bake-Cation," which is a four-day class that covers everything from quick breads to sourdough with homemade starter. Every single course is entirely hands-on.

At Trader Joe's the other day, I picked up a container of Dark Chocolate Covered Dried Cherries on my way to the checkout. Unlike chocolate-covered raisins, each piece was huge and there was clearly a high chocolate-to-cherry ratio. Chocolate and cherries are a great combination as it is, but Trader Joe's tends to carry some high-quality brands (under their store name), so I didn't hesitate to put them in my cart. My immediate thought was that they would be good in a cookie, so I baked up a batch to share with some friends. I used one of my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipes, which turns out cookies that are just sweet and buttery enough to be dangerously addictive, with a slightly chewy center and crispy edges. The cherries added some extra chew to the basic recipe and the chocolate brought it all together.

As I said yesterday in my post about the ham and cheese pasta bake, there are few things more comforting than a baked pasta dish. This Polenta Lasagna with Portabellas and Kale is a nice illustration of this point, although it doesn't quite use pasta, substituting polenta for the more traditional noodles. It also shows that you don't need cheese to have satisfying comfort food because the dish, made by Susan from Fat Free Vegan Kitchen, is completely dairy-free. The dish is made by first making the polenta, spreading it into a thin layer on a baking sheet and leaving it to set up in the fridge. Once it is firm, it can be easily sliced into noodle-like layers. The filling is made with garlic, kale, mushrooms, marinara sauce and "cheese" sauce, which uses ingredients like tofu, cashew butter and soy milk, as well as a number of spices and some corn starch, to add a creamy mouthfeel to the filling. If you're not vegan and don't want to go through the trouble, adding a bit of ricotta in place of the "cheese" sauce would make this a lovely vegetarian dinner.

On nights when you don't really feel like cooking, pasta is always an easy fallback. Now that people seem to be less terrified of having a few carbs in their diets, pasta is slowly returning to its position as a pantry staple. It only takes a few minutes to cook and you can make an infinite number of sauces, from 5-minute light tomato sauces to rich, slow-cooked ones. If you have an extra few minutes in your evening, it doesn't take too much more work to turn a regular bowl of pasta into a comforting baked pasta dish, with an oozy topping of cheese than gets browned and ever so slightly crusty on top. Just about any baked pasta dish is a welcome meal on a cold winter day.

Chocolate pudding cake is an intensely satisfying, yet simple, dessert. As it bakes, it separates into two layers - a tender chocolate sponge-type cake and a very rich chocolate sauce/ pudding base - so the cake needs no accompaniment unless you want to throw a scoop of vanilla ice cream into the bowl, too.

The second best thing about this cake (the flavor is the first, of course) is that it is incredibly easy to make because it is mixed in the pan that you bake it in. This means that cleanup is minimal and that you can have a delicious, from-scratch dessert on even a very busy weeknight. Not that you shouldn't have it at other times, as well. Any excuse is a good one for chocolate pudding cake.

I am a big fan of my Baker's Edge pan and use it just about every time that I bake bar cookies or other treats I might ordinarily use a rectangular pan for, including brownies and cheesecake bars. The pan's unique design allows for more even cooking and a higher crust-to-center ratio for baked goods. Cooking for Engineers set out to scientifically test the pan in a side-by-side bake off with a 9"x13" rectangular pan. Their goal was to test the evenness of the cooking, as compared with the standard pan, and to see how the crustier batch appealed to tasters.

The Baker's Edge cooked very evenly and produced pieces with appealingly chewy edges (unlike the hard edges that can result in regular pans), but the brownies weren't quite as popular with center-piece lovers as the brownies from the larger, more traditional pan. A few batches later and C for E found that a slightly shorter baking time made the whole batch of Baker's Edge brownies just like center-pieces.

Their overall verdict was that the pan worked extremely well, with the only real drawback being that it was difficult to get out the first piece. Of course, as the chef, having a sample piece for yourself isn't such a bad thing, is it?

If you have ever visited Hungry Girl's website, you know that she is a huge fan of Vitalicious products, but even though she talks them up a lot, she's certainly not the only one who enjoys them. The company is growing by the day because, since we all watch what we eat from time to time, their healthy and very tasty snacks are a natural option for anyone looking for a quick bite to eat. And what could be better than a low calorie/low fat, high fiber, vitamin and nutrient fortified snack that also tastes good?

How about one such snack fresh from the oven?

Vitalicious has just introduced a line of baking mixes that will allow you to bake up your favorite flavor - Deep Chocolate, BlueBran, Sugar-Free Banana Nut, and Deep & Velvety Chocolate VitaBrownie - at home. All of them can be made in regular muffin pans to turn out 2 or 4 ounce snack cakes, but you can also order some silicone VitaTop pans if you prefer to stick with the company's signature snack shape.

A good popover should be slightly crisp on the outside, tender and slightly custardy on the inside, and must be attractively puffy. There are specialty pans available for making them, but as with most specialty pans, it's hard to know whether buying them is worth the price. I don't make popovers very often, so I almost always use a regular muffin pan, as I did when I made eggnog popovers over the holidays. But the argument for using the specialty pans, neatly summed up in the above photo of the Fanatic Cook 's mile-high popovers, is compelling. The muffin-made popovers met the textural characteristics that are desirable in a popover, but they simply cannot compete when it comes to the towering heights that the specialty pan popovers do.

With this in mind, I would certainly consider investing in a popover pan if I made popovers more than once or twice a year. The results, clearly, are impressive and the pans don't take up that much room. I'll just keep them with my wide array of specialty and shaped cake pans....

Even without tasting these, it is easy to see that they are going to be delicious, especially if you have any love for either carrot cake or cream cheese frosting. Much like Whoopie Pies, these Carrot Cake Cookie Sandwiches have a cake-like batter as a base, which bakes into a moist and tender cookie that is then sandwiched with a thick, sweet, satisfying filling. This batch was baked by JenJen, from Milk and Cookies, who reported that they were just as addictive as they look.

Because the batter for the cookies is quite wet, the texture is very similar to that of "real" carrot cake and this helps it to blend easily with the filling. The cookies themselves are flavored with cinnamon, brown sugar, walnuts and raisins. The filling is a simply sweetened mixture of cream cheese and honey that is beaten until fluffy, although a more traditional cream cheese frosting made with powdered sugar, vanilla and a bit of butter could be substituted to take this cookie from snack to dessert.

Biscotti are a type of crispy, Italian cookies that are baked twice. The double baking, which is typically done by baking a log of dough once, slicing it, then baking the newly cut pieces, is what gives the cookies their crunch and gives them an unusually long shelf-life. While a regular chocolate chip cookie can be kept for a few days, biscotti can last for up to a few weeks.

Traditionally, biscotti were flavored with anise, but these days, they come in a wide variety of flavors. This photo shows a fresh batch of Nutella Biscotti, baked by Maya of, She paints the Kitchen. They used cocoa powder for a chocolaty flavor, nutella (of course), chocolate chips and, if you like nuts in your biscotti, chopped hazelnuts can be added as well. The recipe for the biscotti can be found here and they make the perfect complement for a cup of hot coffee, the chocolatiness of the cookie blending beautifully with the coffee as you dunk in each bite to soften it.

I am not a big fan of creamy things, including cream-based soups and cream-based drinks and desserts. That means that while I like the flavor of Bailey's, I just can't drink very much of it at one time. When I got a bottle of the new Bailey's with a hint of Caramel Irish Cream Liqueur, I loved the flavor (more than Jonathan did) and began to come up with recipes that would show it off. I settled on baking a batch of cookies, though the liqueur would do well in a cake, too.

To play up the caramel flavor, I used brown sugar in the cookies and stirred in a combination of white chocolate and butterscotch chips. The overall flavor from the liqueur was subtle, but noticeable, and the mix of sugar, chips and Bailey's was a winning combination. The cookies are on the softer/chewier side, so the chips actually stand out as adding a slightly firmer texture to the treat.

If Bailey's isn't your thing, or if you can't find the caramel, not to worry. I included some variations after the recipe:

These are not quite muffins, nor are the cupcakes. They are cup cakes. By this, I mean that they are individually portioned miniature cakes and do not quite fit into either of the two standard miniature cake categories. In spite of the semantic issue here, they look delicious. This particular batch of Plum Cup Cakes with Oatmeal and Almonds was baked by Zarah, of Food and Thoughts. The cakes are made with a combination of oat flour and plain flour, which gives them the sweet flavor of oats and a moist, tender consistency, without the texture of rolled oats. The recipe for these comes from the Italy-based food blog Lucullian Delights, but because plums aren't in season at the moment, you might want to bookmark it and come back to make the yourself later in the year, or simply try substituting another fruit (perhaps a berry) in place of the seasonal stone fruits. The cakes could be served as coffee cake for breakfast or brunch or with a small dollop of whipped cream for dessert.