Baked

As part of a two-person household, you may be hesitant to do any baking. Those 5-pound bags of flour are daunting, and if you use sugar by the teaspoon, not the cup, buying it in bulk can be overwhelming. You can bake for two, but you may want to scale down your purchases. The standard advice is to buy larger sizes because you're paying less per cup. However, smaller packages take up less room in your cupboard and have a faster turnover. Buy flour in 2-pound bags. If you bake infrequently, store the bag in the refrigerator (this is especially important for whole-wheat flour, which can turn rancid)

The O'Malley Senior Center, 1275 Odenton Road, will hold a vendor and bake sale from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday. Handmade and commercial craft items such as jewelry, needle crafts, purses, quilts, artwork and other items will be available. Call 410-222-0140 for more information.

Helen Lauer, the matriarch of a family who founded two Anne Arundel County supermarkets and believed that traditionally made baked goods could win customers, died of lymphoma Wednesday at her Severna Park home. She was 80. Born Helen Beaudette in Baltimore, she grew up on Mallow Hill Road. She attended St. Mark's Parochial School in Catonsville and was a 1946 graduate of Seton High School. After marrying grocery store manager Edward Lauer 59 years ago, and raising five daughters, she and her husband moved to Anne Arundel County, where they fulfilled a dream of opening their own supermarket.

Ruth Bosley from Parkton was looking for a recipe for peanut butter bread. I received a recipe from Anna Childs of Northampton, Mass., for a peanut butter and pumpkin bread that I thought sounded interesting and different. Bosley said the recipe came from a co-worker some years ago. She said the unusual combination of peanut butter and pumpkin is delicious and she enjoys baking and sharing these lovely loaves with friends and family. This is a quick bread that comes together in minutes.

Janna Snyder from Portland, Ind., was hoping to find a recipe for one of her favorite dishes from childhood. It was a skillet type of pizza, without the traditional crust, that she thought was made by soaking bread in beaten eggs and then topping it with pizza sauce, cheese and pepperoni in the fashion of a traditional pizza. I decided this sounded interesting, and while I did not receive any recipes from readers, I did locate a recipe for a skillet pizza on Cooks.com that sounded close to what Snyder had described.

Juanita McNeill of Marston, N.C., was looking for a recipe for an old-fashioned egg custard. Bonnie Giraldi of Perryville sent in an easy recipe for a baked egg custard. Her recipe is the classic one. It is simple to prepare; just be sure to put enough water in the hot-water bath. The water should come up to the level of the custard inside the dish. The water bath assures that your custard is protected from the heat. To me, baked custard is definitely a "comfort food." It is good almost any time of day, including breakfast.

Eating their cakes, and baking them too Who says that those historical designations and resolutions approved by state legislatures and widely mocked as inconsequential are as meaningless as critics claim? Last year, the Maryland General Assembly designated little-known Smith Island cake as Maryland's official state confection, and the guffaws could be heard from Annapolis to Tangier Sound. But guess what's happened since then? All the publicity has touched off a cottage industry that stretches all the way from the Smith Island village of Ewell to Salisbury and West Ocean City, where a business called Original Smith Island Cake Company opened last week.

If pizza and pizzerias had trends, the latest would be the coal-fired oven. (I say if they had trends, because somehow pizza is one food above such things.) These ovens, which burn anthracite coal, produce such a hot fire that a pie can be fully baked in less than five minutes. Coal-fired pizzas should have thin crusts and thin toppings so that they cook all the way through before they burn. (Expect a bit of char here and there, which coal-fire aficionados feel is part of the pizza's charm.

Ann Paszkiewicz of Fallston was looking for a recipe for a rice-cheese bake that she said was probably at least 35 years old. Mary Rollins of Martinsburg, W.Va., sent in this recipe from an old cookbook called Recipes Out of This World by the Women of St. Agnes Catholic Church in Charleston, W.Va. Recipe request Patti Kress of Osprey, Fla., said that while visiting Baltimore some years ago she had a wonderful Asiago cheese spread that she purchased at the cheese store in the Cross Street Market in South Baltimore.

Michelle Obama's 45th birthday cake was mixed, baked and iced in the heart of Baltimore - in a cinder-block east-side building, next to a sheet-metal factory, a few blocks north of Pulaski Highway. Longtime Donna's baker Sabine Breitenstein did the honors - though she had no idea at the time that it was an honor. She was just baking, as she's done for more than 15 years. "I didn't know anything, really," says Breitenstein, who found out later that the two cakes she made were for Obama.