On the final Friday of each month, I take a look back at all the things I loved and put together this list of recommendations for you: the Friday Finale. It might include the best book I read, a particularly impressive recipe I tried, or the best thing I streamed this month. I hope these standout moments from my month inspire you to make some time for yourself looking forward!
If nothing else, I’m at least going to keep posting these monthly favorites! April was a bit too busy on the work front for blogging, but I did make time to bake almost every week. It became my most relaxing form of self care, so when I thought about what to feature in this month’s Friday Finale, a baking roundup felt like the most natural choice. I’ve also tagged all of these bloggers’ Instagram accounts because food porn is an art form, and they are at the top of the game!
I loved everything on this list, and I hope these recommendations encourage you to get back into the kitchen if you also consider flour-covered surfaces to be your happy place! FYI, some of these recipes were more advanced/involved than others, and I’ve included my own leveling for them below, too.
This one was my very first bake of the month, which I completed during my lunch break on April 1st! It was also my first time trying out one of @grossypelosi‘s recipes, and I was not disappointed. The Rainbow Bread was subtly sweet (thanks to the juice of an entire orange) and dense like cake, and it’s likely the most Instagrammable bread I’ve ever made in my life.
There was a bit of kneading involved, so I would say this recipe is a medium difficulty level. Definitely not too involved compared to other breads I’ve made, but might take a little longer for baking newbies.
If you’ve been here a while, you know I’m obsessed with Tieghan Gerard and everything she does over at @halfbakedharvest. I have her first cookbook and her second cookbook, and I regularly scroll her blog for dinner ideas. Her recipes are consistently easy to make and fantastically delicious, and these Chocolate Chunk Chai Banana Muffins were no different!
This recipe gets an easy on the difficulty scan. You put everything together into one bowl, mix it up, then scoop it into muffin tins. I found the chai spices to be very mild compared with the chocolate chunks, so if you’re looking for more of that flavor, you might want to fiddle with those ratios a bit. Overall though, I have exactly zero photos of the finished muffins because they were gone in flash.
I saved these Tea Shortbread Coins to Pinterest literal years ago, and I’m so glad I finally took the time to make them! The recipe includes three different flavors: Earl Grey, Matcha, and Masala Chai. Initially, I was going to choose one and go with it, but I ended up baking all three, which was absolutely the right decision. The Earl Grey were the most true to flavor for me, though they might be because the matcha powder I had access to wasn’t the strongest so I missed out on the depth of the Matcha ones. The Masala Chai were good, too, but Spencer thought they tasted more like gingerbread than chai. (Honestly, a lot of the spices overlap between those two flavors, so…?)
Overall, I would give this recipe a medium+ difficulty because it was more involved than the Rainbow Bread but doesn’t deserve a hard difficulty. It’s just a bit more difficult than medium. Shortbread can be difficult to form, so you probably won’t have perfectly round coins like the blogger. I didn’t either, and let me let you in on a little secret: They taste the same regardless of shape!
Share your baking recommendations with me! I’m always on the look out for new recipes.
P.S. I featured other recipes I love from Half Baked Harvest is these monthly favorites posts: February 2019, February 2020, and February 2021.
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