A Delicious New Book by Sheila Connolly

By Sherry — I’ve been baking in Northern Virginia but not because it’s hot out!

Happy Book Birthday, Sheila! Today we are celebrating the TENTH book in Sheila’s fabulous Orchard Mystery series, Seeds of Deception! To celebrate I decided to try making a couple of recipes from Sheila’s earlier books. Since I’m not the greatest cook in the world, I decided I’d share the good, bad, and ugly of the whole process.

The first recipe I made was the Toffee Crunch Blondies from A Gala Event, the ninth book in the series. After reading the recipe and seeing ingredients like chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, and toffee bits, I decided I had to try this one!

What better way to keep the book open than to use a couple of Granny Smith apples? This recipe was easy to follow. Of course I forgot to set the butter out so I put it in the microwave for 15 seconds. It might have needed a bit more.

I mixed it all up and stuck it in the oven for the recommended twenty-five minutes. The house smelled like heaven!

Sheila says in the instructions for the book: Try not to eat them all at once. My husband couldn’t even wait for them to cool completely. But there were some left at the end of the evening — perhaps because I made a pie too.

Next I decided to make Apple Cream Pie from Picked To Die, the eighth book in the Orchard Mysteries. My husband is chief pie maker at our house, but I wanted to do it myself. That meant a store bought crust instead of homemade. And yes, I forgot to take the pie crust out to get to room temperature so it was back to the microwave. This recipe is also really easy — the most time intensive part is peeling the apples. (I’m guessing Sheila has one of those cool apple peeler/corer devices.) I used my vegetable peeler.

The recipe says to: Prepare your apples and pile them into the shell. I may have been a little over enthused with the piling part of the instructions. My pile turned out to be a small hill.

I think because my pile was so high that the top apples got a little browner on top than they might normally. But the pie tastes delicious, a fabulous combination of tart and sweet! I know what I’m having for breakfast tomorrow!

Read A Gala Event and Picked to Die to find the recipes. I can’t wait to read Seeds of Deception and see what happens to newlyweds Meg and Seth (they are on their honeymoon in Western Massachusetts) and to get more recipes!

Readers: Have you ever made a recipe from the books you read? How did it turn out?