the difference between the stove and the oven

At the beginning of this summer, I didn't know the difference between the stove and the oven. I'm the youngest in my family by a lot; my brother is twelve years older than me, and my sister is older than me by nine and a half years. Combine my youth with my traditional Southern cook of a mother, and I was never really needed nor desired in the kitchen growing up. And truth be told, I never had any interest in the kitchen. The mixing, the timing, the tasting, the boiling - none of it appealed to me at all until a few months ago.
At the beginning of this summer, I realized I wasn't going to have much to do this summer. The first three weeks of my summer break were spent in Peru, which was amazing yet left me returning to the States with few available jobs on the market. Right after I came back from Peru, my boyfriend left to go be awesome and study in Europe for two months, and my best friends got jobs. Bored and alone, I decided to finally begin some of the projects I'd been talking about for so long yet hadn't actually accomplished anything - I was going to start running, and I was going to learn how to bake.
Surprisingly, I fell in love with all that mixing and measuring and (especially) tasting. The pride I feel when I make something delicious completely from scratch is practically addictive; I can't get enough.
Over the past couple of months, I've found some fabulous recipes on my StumbleUpon account, and I thought I'd share them on the interwebs. So here you go! Happy baking!