My sisters and I would be enlisted to help with some recipes, and eventually, were turned loose on our own to make our own recipes. My personal specialty became the timeless No-Bake Cookie, or as my family calls them, Brown Bumpies. The ball really got rolling in December of 2004. While driving home from southern California to Phoenix for Christmas, the transmission of my old Mitsubishi Galant ("R
oxanne", for those of you who may remember her) decided that the only forward gear that was going to work was third gear. And so, Roxanne was laid up in a shop in Phoenix for two weeks having her transmission rebuilt, and I was stuck at my parents' house with nothing to do. And so, my mother suggested that I take care of the family Christmas cookie list. I began to gather recipes - some from the family recipe tree, others from what was back then the wild frontier of Google - and one thousand, two hundred ninety-six cookies later, I had filled the needs of not only my parents' Christmas cookie list, but my own as well. I didn't stop there, of course, and as time passed, I continued experimenting. Thousands of cookies, brownies, muffins, cakes, cupcakes, pies, and breads later, I found myself a student at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity. Wake Div has Coffee Hour every Thursday at 11:00 AM, and when Shannon Martin sent out an e-mail to the student body at the beginning of the year asking for baking volunteers for Coffee Hour, I signed up. Over years one and two at Wake Div, I brought in numerous different recipes. My baked goods became so ubiquitous at Coffee Hour that when year three rolled around, it was decided that Coffee Hour should be my work study. Then, one Thursday during year three, I made cannoli. I posted the recipe online, Shannon saw it, and suggested that I should create SO GOOD IT'S GAWNE. And so I did. And once you taste my baked goods, I think you'll agree... they're so good, they'll soon be gone.
