Did you know that STC Craft has a new "sister" blog called STC Cooks? It's a great site where you can read about all of the cookbooks that STC publishes and lots of other foodie culture, plus get free recipes.

One of my favorite STC cookbooks, published this fall, is Baked Explorations: Classic American Dessserts Reinvented by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliatito. This weekend I tried out their recipe for Soft Candy Caramels. These pretty nuggets taste like a high-quality version of the little square supermarket caramels I remember loving as a child. Mine turned out a little harder than they were supposed to because I let the caramel mixture get a tad too hot, so I couldn't cut them into neat squares (as you can see in my photo above), but they're still delicious. I hope you'll check out STC Cooks. And if you're in New York this week, be sure to attend the Baked Brownie Bake-Off at the Brooklyn Kitchen. It's a fundraiser for the Greenpoint Reformed Church Soup Kitchen and the judges are none other than Baked Explorations authors' Lewis and Poliafito.