New Direction

If you've followed my blog for awhile and if you've paid attention to the dates when I've baked something and blogged it, you've probably noticed that I've cut back on baking significantly this summer. I actually haven't done any serious baking for over a month now and have only dabbled in a recipe here and there since early July. In the past 6 years since I started my blog, that's a pretty long stretch for me.

That's a conscious decision and one I've been considering for awhile. I still love to bake and I still want to bake. There's no one big factor that made me decide to suspend or cut back on baking but a bunch of smaller things converging to the same decision point. It's summer and it's often too hot to turn my oven on. I'm training for a half marathon and would run faster and easier if I actually did (finally) drop the last 10 pounds; something that's hard to do when I'm mainlining fat and sugar every baking weekend. It's always busy at work so it's getting more and more difficult to find both baking and blogging time. And after almost 6 years of blogging, I'm losing inspiration on new things to bake and feel like I've been in a rut on my blog for awhile.

So all those things combined led me to decide to take my blog in a new direction for a bit. At first I thought I would just shut my blog down and let it taper off. I was really torn about that because I've spent so much time and energy over the past 6 years to build it up to what it is now and it feels like a shame to let that drop. And since I'm such a foodie, I still like writing about new restaurants and bakeries I try, both to give coverage to local places I believe in supporting and because I've gotten into such an ingrained habit to take pictures of my food and I don't know what else to do with those pictures. Ha, I know, I'm weird that way.

Therefore, I decided to still keep my blog up but focus more on local food places. If you don't live in the Bay Area, that might not be interesting to you unless you plan to visit here someday. But I hope it'll still have wider appeal than that by reminding people to try out different places in their local areas. I'm a big believer in supporting local small businesses and that's where I try to spend most of my dollars. So I'm going to write more about them and hope others support them too.

And you never know when I will bake something new and blog about it. I'll also try to curate some of my more popular recipes once in awhile so you all have easy access to the top recipes for chocolate chip cookies, snickerdoodles, brownies, cupcakes, cakes and so on, especially for holidays and other peak baking times.