Dot-Com Dishes: 14 Best Cooking Blogs of the Moment
Cooks' Little (Online) Helpers
Sure, the Internet is a vast resource for information on any subject you can think of. But how do you know what you're getting is credible?
When it comes to recipes, we did our homework and found the most popular, personality-driven cooking blogs, most of which boast gorgeous photography to boot. Our round-up includes sites that focus on baking, fresh produce, down-home cooking, sweets, and hilarious cake goofs.
Read on for a tour of the best cooking blogs of the moment.
Pioneer Woman Cooks
About: "I'm a desperate housewife. I live in the country. I channel Lucille Ball, Vivien Leigh, and Ethel Merman. Welcome to my frontier!"
Ree Drummond, a.k.a. Pioneer Woman, has won an enormous Internet following and a Food Network cooking show that airs Saturday mornings thanks to her sassy take on frontier family living with four children, a Basset hound, and a rugged "Marlboro Man" of a husband. Her recipes run the gamut from breakfast and breads to main courses and desserts, and she describes her cooking style as "cowboy-friendly."
Sample Recipe: Fresh Corn Casserole with Red Bell Peppers and Jalapeños
Bakerella
About: "I started this website to help keep track of my baking and decorating attempts. The site focuses on fun and easy baking. It's a place to explore recipes, desserts, decorating, and even photography, with a few giveaways sprinkled in along the way."
A playful how-to baking site, Bakerella focuses on colorful photography and step-by-step recipes for everything from sugared gum drops to peanut butter pie and decorated cake pops, Bakerella's signature confectionary creation.
Sample Recipe: Basic Cupcake Pops
Chocolate and Zucchini
About: Chocolate & Zucchini is a blog written by Clotilde Dusoulier, a Parisian woman who lives in Montmartre and shares her passion for all things food-related.
Clotilde explains that the name of her blog is a good metaphor for her cooking style — "The zucchini illustrates my focus on healthy and natural eating: fresh produce, artisan goods, and a preference for organic and local ingredients. And the chocolate represents my decidedly marked taste for baking in general, and chocolate, glorious chocolate in particular."
Sample Recipe: Yellow Zucchini Tarte Fine with Yogurt-Based Crust
Cake Wrecks
Tagline: "When professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong"
We guarantee you won't want to stop scrolling through this collection of cake-baking and -decorating snafus. According to the site's About section, a woman named Jen started this blog one night in May 2008 when she was bored. The cakes captured on her blog are rife with misspelled words piped in frosting, cakes with oddball themes, cakes whose decorators poorly interpreted the directions, and so on.
Related: 20 Crazy-Looking Custom Cakes
Cooking for Engineers Michael Chu
Tagline: "Have an analytical mind? Like to cook? This is the site to read!"
Geared toward methodical, step-by-step cooks, Cooking for Engineers began as a place for computer programmer Michael Chu to store the laboriously tested (and mostly perfected) recipes and food-related facts that were taking up space in his brain. "Sometimes people ask me (or quiz me) about cooking and there's a tendency for me to smile and respond with, 'I wrote it down so I wouldn't have to remember!'," Chu said. CfE also contains reviews for books, gadgets, gear, and restaurants.
Sample Recipe: Simple Tiramisu
Coconut & Lime
Tagline: "100% fresh, original recipes"
Rachel Rappaport, a 7th generation Baltimorean, started this blog in 2004 and has since become a professional recipe developer, food columnist, cookbook author, and food photographer. Her recipes run the gamut from Spicy Vegetable Ham Pea Soup to Mussels with Zucchini and Basil and homemade crab stock (go, Baltimore!). Each recipe is accompanied by a photo and Rappaport's thoughts on serving suggestions, ingredient backgrounds, and more.
Sample Recipe: Eggplant and Rapini Meatball Subs
Joy the Baker
About: "I really like chocolate... and cookies... and anything with the word 'cake' in the title... I can think of no better way to get to eat all of these goodies, [than] to teach myself how to bake them."
Launched in 2008, Joy the Baker has gotten some serious attention from the press. Saveur magazine named Joy the Baker the Best Baking and Dessert Blog of 2011. The site was nominated for the 2010 Bloggies ‘Best Food Blog,' and was named one of the Top Fifty Food Blogs in the World by the London Times. Joy takes her photos using a Canon 5D with exclusively natural light, which results in vibrant pictures of velvety pie dough, sugar-sprinkled scones, and peanut butter brownies that look like they're jumping off the screen.
Sample Recipe: Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread
Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef
About: "Hi. My name is Shauna James Ahern. I am alive."
As the opening statement of an About section, this may sound a bit melodramatic. But after years of struggling with debilitating Celiac disease, which sapped her energy and made her prone to illness and depression, Ahern discovered that cooking her own gluten-free meals became not only a lifesaver, but a life passion. Garnering accolades from Newsweek, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Wolfgang Puck's former sous chef, the Gluten-Free Girl shares her recipes with vibrant appreciation for the ingredients within. And good news for carb-lovers on a gluten-free diet: Ahern has experimented widely with replacing wheat flour with sorghum flour.
Sample Recipe: Whole-Grain Gluten-Free Pancakes
Spoon 'n' Spades
Tagline: "Scrumptious Sweet Treats"
Suggested as a site to get to know by our Facebook fans, Spoon 'n' Spades explores baking on the other side of the pond. Blogger Paula Sealey lives in the U.K. and is a mother of two, who is usually found in one of two places: in the kitchen covered in flour or in the garden knee-deep in dirt. Sealey bakes prodigiously, posting recipes every other day or so. If you like the sound of Black Forest Gâteau, Fruity Vanilla Crumble Cake, After-Dinner Mint Cakes, or Jammy Marshmallow Squares, you might enjoy a scroll through this sweet, chatty site.
Sample Recipe: Orange and Honeycomb Biscuits
Odd Couple Eats
About: "People often ask, "No meat, no dairy, no fish... what do you eat?" And the answer is 'a lot!'"
For anyone who's tried out vegetarianism and ended up subsisting on cheese pizza, grilled cheese, and French fries, this blog's for you. Follow Hally — one half of the Odd Couple with her husband Johnny — as she learns how to eat sensibly and healthfully while following a vegan diet. Why the Odd Couple? Husband Johnny is an omnivore, meaning he eats meat, vegetables, and everything in between, and Hally strives to make veganism as easy as possible to incorporate into anyone's life.
Sample Recipe: Spicy Chickpea Soup with Lemon and Orzo
Zoe Bakes
Tagline: "Eat Dessert First"
From selling homemade gourmet cookies from a vending cart in college to attending the Culinary Institute of America and working as a pastry chef in several restaurants in the Twin Cities, Zoë Francois has earned her stripes in the baking world. Her blog contains beautifully lit, expertly styled, large-format photos of her confectionery creations, which include milk chocolate peanut butter pie, Dacquoise cake with peaches and cream, and back-to-school blueberry bars (for her two sons), among others. Just try to keep the drooling to a minimum.
Sample Recipe: Chocolate-Covered Coffee Toffee
Cooking with Sugar
Tagline: "Inspiring women to cook again"
Her given name may be Arlene, but this blogger prefers "Sugar." Sugar's goal is to incorporate the Old World traditions of her Italian heritage into a modern (read: busy) American lifestyle. Describing her family's obsession with food, Sugar explains, "When we were eating, we talked about what we were going to eat tomorrow and when we were cooking we were talking about what we were going to cook tomorrow. I think some people cook to live, but Italians live to cook." Most of this blog's posts consists of simple recipes for everything from pasta Puttanesca to peach cobbler and steakhouse Cheddar burgers with warm bacon and onion BBQ sauce.
Sample Recipe: Mini Cannoli Cream Pastry Cups
Post Punk Kitchen
About: "The most important things to know about me: I was born and raised in Brooklyn, I love cats, and I love to feed people, myself included. I’m a strong believer in baketivism. Bake sales, benefit dinners, or outreach via cupcakes. I believe that tastebuds are the perfect vehicle for change."
Fresh and fun with a quirky punk aesthetic, Post Punk Kitchen (or PPK) is a vegan cooking blog created by Isa Moskowitz in 2003. Though her recipes range from Phyllo Tempeh Reubens and Romesco Pizza to Okra Gumbo and Savory Mushroom Gravy, Moskowitz puts a heavy emphasis on vegan baking, posting recipes for cookies, quick breads, pies, and more, all of which are made without eggs.
Sample Recipe: Chana Masala
Deep South Dish
About: "Deep South Dish is about basic, country style southern cookin' with an emphasis on Coastal South dishes and most often, cooking from scratch."
Mary Foreman, the woman behind Deep South Dish, learned to cook through trial and error and focuses on unpretentious recipes that come from her heart and soul. Foreman cites Gulf Coast cuisine, as well as traditional Southern cuisine, among her influences and, while most of her recipes are made from scratch, she does not eschew shortcuts or convenient products like Velveeta and condensed soups. "This is true southern cooking, and I make no apologies for it," she says. Recipes on the site include savory dishes like Crock-Pot Coca-Cola Peach Barbecue Pork Chops and sweets like Chewy Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies.
Sample Recipe: Fried Green Tomatoes
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