a brand new, fresh-out-of-the-oven baking blog

I've been baking. A lot.

And loving it.

I've been cooking more, too, with a focus on unprocessed ingredients and from-scratch recipes.

Over the past year,I've become a better cook and a better baker. I'm no longer a blind follower of recipes. I can tweak, adapt, and improvise--and still get dinner on the table at 6:30. I've even begun dreaming up and testing my own recipes.This new-found confidence makes me love cooking and baking even more than I already did.

Baking has increasingly become a distraction from other things I'm supposed to be working on. Things like finishing graduate school.

Lately I find myself thinking about Ana Pascal in the film Stranger than Fiction  (2006). There's a scene where she talks about being in law school and how she would always bake some treat to take to meetings of her study group. She says she became more and more interested in the lemon bars, oatmeal cookies, and chocolate tortes and less and less interested in law.

I relate to that story. I'd rather be baking than finishing this degree. I'm happiest when I'm in the kitchen mixing, pouring, kneading, and keeping an eye on whatever is in the oven. In that happily-baking state of mind, I'm beginning this new venture.

For a couple weeks now I've been brainstorming and searching the web looking for the perfect moniker for my online presence. I found a lot of baking and cooking blogs out there in cyperspace, and I also found that almost every clever name I could think of was already being used (or, more often, was holding a spot at a lonely, abandoned blog somewhere).

I was trying so hard to be hip and clever. I began to fret that I would never find an appropriate name. Then I happened to read a blog post that discussed how essential it is to just be yourself in the blogosphere. Finally, the pieces clicked together.

I'm a writing teacher as well as a baking enthusiast. I like words, and I have many opportunities to see words used, misused, hopelessly confused, and generally made amusing.

The college freshmen I teach often mislabel a common punctuation error "a coma splice." I find this quite funny despite the spelling error.

When we were planning our dessert wedding reception, my husband, a heckuva sharp guy but not the world's best speller, sent me a text message in which he wondered if we should be concerned about putting any of our guests into "a sugar comma." I thought that was pretty cute.

I like words, and I figure I can work with this amusing mashup of similar words. Perhaps, when I combine my interests in baking and in the English language, I'll even find some additional opportunities for wordplay.

What do I expect to do with this blog? Right now I'm baking two or three times each week, and I cook every day. That's a lot of potential material. My goal is to post a few times a week including at least one baking project (with a recipe) and at least one post about cooking from scratch with unprocessed foods (again, with a recipe). I also have some ideas about how to format recipes to maximize their usefulness, and I'll be practicing those as I go along.

So welcome to my shiny new food blog. I hope you find both entertaining commentary and worthwhile recipes as we go along.

Here's hoping I'll keep it updated and not let Sugar Comma become yet another of those lonely, abandoned food blog spaces.