Hi friends! As you are reading this I am on a much needed vacation! One of the things I love about my job is that I get to attend one conference every year. Derek and I are big travel fanatics, so we like to make this annual trip into a vacation every year. I honestly pick the conference based on the cities we want to visit, and this year is Washington DC!

I have toyed with several ideas of what to do while I am gone, including just not posting or having a guest post from a fellow food blogger, but I decided that I wanted to give you all a little peak behind the scenes of BakingJunkie. I know that a lot of you are fellow food bloggers and understand the process quite well, but I also know that I have many non-blogger readers. I realize that we are naturally a voyeuristic society, so I’m hoping that you will all enjoy a look at my life behind the monitor!

First let me start with an updated family picture, with both of our “puppies” (Maisy will always be a puppy in our minds)

That’s Maisy on the left and Maiya on the right. She has been growing so much! Baking with her around can sometimes be a challenge, and she causde me to forget to add vanilla to a cheesecake recipe last weekend, but we still love her!

This is my kitchen, where I spent a great majority of my time at home. Besides the color of the cabinets, I am in love with it! It is one of the main reasons that I fell in love with our house when we bought it three years ago.

I try to do most of baking on the weekends, usually Saturday and Sunday mornings. During the first few months of the year we tend to be home most weekends, so I try to bake 2-4 different items between the two days. From March through December we spend a lot of time out of town on weekends, so it’s nice to have a back log of desserts to post about when I am too busy to bake a lot. Right now I have another 5 items baked, photographed and ready to post over the next few weeks.

If any of you have noticed, I do two posts a week. I’m afraid you all will get bored and forget about me with anything less than that, and anything more than that becomes way too stressful for me! I did 3-4 posts a week to get all of my holiday recipes in for December, and I vowed never to do it again!

This is hands down my favorite item in my kitchen. I use this mixer all the time, not only for baking, but for pizza dough and ice cream too. I am constantly washing and reusing the bowl several times in a day. I actually still use my old hand mixer as well, mainly when I make buttercream.

This is my baking drawer, directly below my mixer. It just keeps getting filled with more stuff! I have a feeling it will someday be completely full.

I love having two sets of measuring cups, and I’m thinking about getting another set of measuring spoons as well.

I am fortunate enough to have two large cabinets in my kitchen, one of which I use as a pantry. The extra baking supplies have taken over two shelves, and I’m sure that in time I will take over a third as well.

As most of you probably know (or can figure out from these pictures already), I am a pretty organized person. I hate clutter or having to dig for whatever it is I’m trying to find. These are some of my miscellaneous decorating items.

This is another pantry shelf where I keep my cookbooks and recipes. That stack of papers on the right hand side are all recipes that I have printed out or taken from magazines. Honestly, most of my recipes are either bookmarked or saved in my Google Reader, so this is just a small sampling! What I’m about to say may be considered food blogger blasphemy, but I don’t really like cookbooks that much! There are a select few that I really enjoy, but I usually only find a handful of recipes in each one so I don’t spend a lot of time or money amassing a huge collection.

This is the extent of my cookbook collection!

Here is my collection of plates and some of the fabrics and napkins I use in my photos. I keep collecting more and more.

These are just some of the items of have used for or in a background. I also have quite the collection of large pieces of construction paper.

The photography is definitely the area I struggle in the most, and is the most frustrating part of the process for me. Instead of baking whenever I would like, I now end up planning my baking around good daylight hours. Using a flash for food photography is absolutely out of the question. You will read this all over the internet for a reason, it makes the food look yellow and washed out.  Natural light is truly the best. I think I may have learned more about photography and lighting than I have about baking since I started this blog.

This is the setup I use most often when taking pictures. This is the area in the house where I get the most natural light coming in. Sometimes, if I’m feeling really motivated, I’ll move the table right next to the window. I always, always use a white foam board placed on the opposite side of the food to reflect back the light. You’ll be amazed at the difference this can make. For me, I get the best pictures with this light anywhere from 10am-3pm. Outside of those hours I tend to open up my front door (on the opposite side of the house), and place the food on an end table with the white board reflecting the light.

Well I hope you’ve enjoyed your tour around my kitchen and glimpse into my life as a food blogger. I won’t lie, there are days where I would love to just give it all up. Then you guys leave me comments and let me know how much you enjoy my recipes, and those thoughts fly right out of my mind. As long as you keep reading, I’ll be around for a while