Scrumptious Cookbooks: Scone Queen Bakes and Baking Across America

24 Mar

Scone Queen Bakes: 100 Recipes for Scones, Muffins, Cookies, and More from the founder of The Hungry Gnome
by Danielle Sepsy
After watching Danielle Sepsy compete on the streaming series The Big Brunch, I was excited to try some of the sea salt chocolate chip and white chocolate toffee cookies that her Hungry Gnome supplied to a local delivery service. They were delicious so I was even more delighted to find out she had a cookbook, The Scone Queen Bakes, of 100 of her recipes for a variety of delightful baked treats. On the show Sepsy was dubbed the “Scone Queen” and If you enjoy tea and scones, like I do, then you will be excited; she has one for each month of the year. I am particularly interested in trying her red bean scones with sesame crust and butter pecan scones. She even lets us in on her secret recipe for her famous chocolate chip scones. I’m also a huge muffin fan and she has a variety of tasty muffins including raspberry ricotta muffins, chocolate chip pancake muffins, double chocolate muffins (that include a variation with a bit of cream cheese), and several more. I think people living here in the Hoboken area, with our large Italian American population, will be particularly excited by the family recipes she has from her Sicilian heritage like pignoli (pine nut) cookies. I found the autobiographical details about her childhood learning to bake through starting her own business charming.

Baking Across America: A Vintage Recipe Road Trip
by B. Dylan Hollis
My family is a fan of B.Dylan Hollis fun short streaming cooking videos online where one never knows if the quirky historic recipes he bakes will be hits or misses. His previous cookbook, Baking Yesteryear, featured recipes broken up by decades (1900’s-1980’s). We tried several of the cookies for Christmas and found some that will be regular on rotation in the future including the Anzac biscuits and the Potato chip cookies so we were excited to check out his newest work, Baking Across America. In this work the recipes are organized by regions that each one comes form. New Jersey is represented by a chocolate cake recipe that incorporates tomato soup! Another unusual ingredient recipe is the Hatch Chile and Cheddar Apple Pie from New Mexico. It includes some of my favorites like whoopie pies and beignets. Both those who are looking for nostalgic bakes as well as those who are adventurous eaters will find recipes to try.

Written by:
Aimee Harris
Information and Digital Services Manager

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Stranger in the Woods (2017) by Michael Finkel

19 Mar

The Stranger in the Woods is the true account of Christopher Knight’s 27 year hermit journey in the Maine woods. No human contact, no conversation, no care for the outside world, just survival, and his own heartbeat against nature. He stole to survive, but took only what he needed. What’s remarkable about this book, besides its subject, is it achieves something consistent in its truth and a consistent question: Why?

Book cover showing a dense and shadowy forest in tinted greens. Handwritten white chalk text reads “The Stranger in the Woods” and “The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit.” In the background, a truck is hidden in the trees. The author's name, “Michael Finkel" is at the bottom.

Why do we need people and contact? Why do we succumb to society’s expectations? Why don’t we push harder to connect with universal truths? Why do we not pull away more from assumptions of who we should be. 

Knight’s story is not a sensationalized spew of intrigue, mystery, and crime, but an honest and connective account of someone who escaped authority and accountability for almost three decades. In a way, I came to respect Knight and his commitment to something he truly believed in, even if he knew it was wrong (if you think of it in terms of fiction, he’s a flawed antagonist, doing what he believes is right). 

What worked so well for me, is that Finkel lets the silence between Knight’s actions breath, giving us time to process both the magnificence of Finkel’s journey along with its mistakes. 

Finkel interviewed Knight extensively (though Knight was always reluctant and evasive), and he contextualizes Knight’s words with a blend of philosophy, psychology, and history. The book asks: Is solitude an illness, a spiritual awakening, a radical rejection, or just a preference?

A makeshift campsite in a wooded forest. Tarps are strung between trees to form a shelter, with clothing hanging from lines. Buckets, plastic bins, a propane tank, pots, and other survival gear are scattered on the ground and tied to trees, showing Christopher Knight's living setup deep in the woods.

Above is a photo of Knight’s camp. I felt the weight of being alone with Knight throughout the book, and I sympathized with him. At a certain point, I perhaps even wanted to follow in his footsteps (just an interesting thing to think about). 

And why did my mind go there? Because Knight’s mind simply switched, as all of ours has at some point (even if to this extreme.) There was no traumatic event or dramatic falling out. He just walked into the forest.

There is a powerful detail Finkel shares in Knight’s memory that haunts and fascinates me: Knight never felt lonely in the woods and simply forgot what it felt like to need people.

Have you read The Stranger in the Woods? What did you think? Comment below.

If you haven’t read it, you can reserve it in the BCCLS system here. 

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Written by:
Sean Willey
Information and Digital Services Assistant

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