I learned this Lent, from someone in my church group, that hot cross buns are a Catholic tradition for Good Friday. I had no idea! In fact, I had never even tried hot cross buns until a dear friend baked some for my bridal shower several years ago. Before that, I thought they were just nonsense words in a nursery rhyme song you learn to play on the recorder in elementary school music. (one a penny two a penny….) Regardless, I remember them being delicious (which made me a little confused because usually Lent means giving up all the delicious) so I decided to go do a little research. Continue reading
Baking
BAKING #13 PB&J and a nephew at play
Today’s baking project includes a special guest helper- my nephew! Continue reading
Baking #12: Happy St. Patrick’s Day! (42 projects in 52 weeks)
St. Patrick’s Day Onesie! We figured we’d stick to our Catholic roots instead of trying to pimp the baby by asking strangers to kiss him…
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!! I won’t lie, this is usually a holiday that doesn’t get much attention from me aside from maybe throwing on something green if I have it around. However, when you have a kid you suddenly feel like you better do SOMETHING to mark the big events of the year since the months are flying by so quickly. So I decided I made my little guy a custom onesie and decided I would bake something for the occasion. Why not celebrate a little?
I was originally planning to make green sugar cookies for this week, until I got a brilliant text from a friend telling me I should make Irish Soda Bread for this week’s project. After looking up a few recipes, my first instinct was to say nope, I don’t have the ingredients I need for this and even with the magic of ring slings or other baby carriers, a trip to the grocery store is still a 45 minute venture that I am just not into today. And then I mentally kicked myself. The whole point of the 42 things in 52 weeks part of this blog is to make myself try new things, things I would not normally do! I bake sugar cookies all the time. Bring on the Irish soda bread.
In case you didn’t know- the soda in soda bread refers to baking soda. Not soda pop. Baking soda takes the place of yeast as far as what makes the bread rise!
But I still wasn’t going to the grocery store so… I improvised. After all, what’s more Irish than resourcefulness? (Don’t answer that, I have a feeling
it could get culturally insensitive really fast… someone once told one of my best friends that she looked “as Irish as sadness” true story. Of course, we were living in New York, people just say stuff there…)
For example, I had heard that that instead of buttermilk you can mix regular milk with vinegar. Great… check!
BONUS: My Trek Mix is now effectively Nuts About Chocolate Trek Mix. DOUBLE WIN.
Then recipes called for dried currants or raisins etc. and I had none of those. At first I thought well, it’s optional. Then I remembered- I don’t have what it called for but I DO have trail mix… not the kind with raisins, but there were dried raspberries in there! Those should work, right? same idea…
I used my trusty kitchen aid to whip up this recipe in no time. It’s pretty basic ingredients aside from those two tricky ones I didn’t have in the house. Since the trail mix only yielded me about 1/3 the amount of dried fruit you are supposed to have and the recipe made enough for two loaves, I figured I would make one with the raspberries and one without. Here’s the before and after shots:
Let me just say that of all my baking projects I’ve done so far this year, THIS is the winner for leaving my kitchen smelling AH-MAZING. It probably helped that i took my son outside to play before the AZ weather makes that difficult in the coming weeks, but when I opened the door to check on the bread, I couldn’t help but smile at how good it smelled.
We wanted to try some warm so I sliced off a piece of the larger loaf without dried fruit since i was worried the pieces could be just big enough to pose a choking hazard to my son. He LOVED it, I can’t wait to share some tonight.
Happy St. Patrick’s day, all. I’d love to hear how you celebrated 🙂
Baking #11 Easy as Pie? That saying LIES. (42 Projects in 52 Weeks)
OK, let me start by saying that this week I had my first epic fail. Failure on so many levels. And I’m not sure I learned enough to counterbalance the failures to make myself feel good about the project as a whole. Let me follow up by explaining my title- making a pie is a freaking difficult task! Continue reading
Baking # 10- 42 projects in 52 weeks
So… have you ever had a time where you thought.. oh good, things are a little less busy and now I can catch up? If you are anything like me, those times suddenly become the busiest of all. Our family has found we are extra busy these days, mostly with a few great opportunities which I will be talking more about in the near future (I know, such a tease…) BUT… I did manage to squeeze in my baking project yesterday, even if I didn’t have time to write about it until today!
Applesauce monster… aka my handsome boy!
My son is obsessed with applesauce. It was one of the first foods he tried and still remains a favorite. We affectionately call him an applesauce monster because he tears through servings like a wild animal. This week’s baking project was chosen in honor of his applesauce obsession. It’s an applesauce loaf that I found HERE and tweaked just a bit based on what we had in the house.
I was a little skeptical because the mixture looked lumpier than most things I bake, but the recipe called for it to look like that so I put it in the oven and tried to put my little guy down for a nap so I could get some sewing projects done while it baked. My nap plan worked a little TOO well and instead of having to struggle to start nap time, he fell asleep right in my arms!
I mean… would YOU get anything done?!
Baking #9: Pretzel… Buns… and Bites…
So I decided to start wading further out of my comfort zone today and try my hand at pretzels. This was almost certainly a mistake as it’s a Monday after a crazy busy weekend, it was a cloudy almost but not quite rainy day which means my son was having a terrible reaction to the high pressure system, and I could go on. But you know what? I’m trying not to be such a perfectionist.So a little failure is good, right?
Making this was my first time using the dough hook on my Kitchen Aid- that alone made this project worth it.
I used Alton Brown‘s recipe because I’m trying to pull from a wide variety of sources for these projects (also because I found quite a few blogs that word for word copied his recipe and directions without giving him credit- come on blogging world). I mixed the dough and added a little extra flour because it was still pretty sticky after the 4.5 recommended cups and then left it to rise for an hour. After the hour was up it had risen quite a bit but some of the puff went away once I started working with the dough again. I separated the dough into 8 pieces, so far all was going according to plan…
And then my son was no longer amused with his lunch so I was back and forth between trying to keep him happy (He actually loved playing with a bit of dough, until he’d drop it off the high chair every 30 seconds… fine motor skills are hard to come by!!)and trying to make the pretzels. I did not have the patience to keep the dough into long enough ropes to truly form a good pretzel shape without breaking. So my first few pretzels looked a lot like this:
OK, that’s a lie, they looked a little better than this, this is how they looked once they came out of the boiling water- like zombie pretzels
I saw that this was not going well and I didn’t have time to even make halfway decent pretzels with how grumpykins my son was getting so… in the spirit of being ok with a change of plans and making lemons into lemonade I decided I’d make the rest into pretzel buns. and since buns took less dough than the pretzels themselves I also had some dough left over to make pretzel bites too. And then I baked all the pretzel variations together.
The zombie pretzels still came out pretty zombie-ish. but the pretzel buns were AMAZING!!
And even though I hated how the pretzels looked? They tasted SO WONDERFUL I don’t even care. My husband agreed they were some of the best pretzels he’s ever eaten. And he was born in Germany so he would know.
Now I just need to hunt down a good cheddar/fondue dipping sauce to enjoy with our pretzel bites tomorrow!
Baking #8: King’s Cake Pancakes
***Originally posted 2/17/15. Only one more repeat post after this one if you are signed up for updates and were signed up before as well, just bare with me for one last post after this 🙂 ***
HAPPY FAT TUESDAY!
You may or may not know that one of the items on my bucket list is to celebrate Mardis Gras in New Orleans. It’s funny because most events with crowds that big don’t appeal to me, but the music, the atmosphere, the colors, I think I would love it!
Although I also think the smells of gumbo and other spicy, delicious NOLA meals would make me wish I wasn’t pescetarian. However, one of the non-meat filled traditional meals would be a King Cake- which would be way too big for my family to try and eat on our own so I had to scale that idea down.
Luckily, I also grew up with the tradition of Shrove Tuesday- it’s basically another way to celebrate Fat Tuesday centering around pancakes. Pancakes are the perfect pre-lent meal because they are made with sugar, butter, syrup- all sorts of sweet and fattening things you are supposed to abstain from during Lent. Pancakes were a great way to get those ingredients out of the house to avoid temptation. Shrove Tuesday also holds a special place in my heart because as an early modern scholar I get extra joy out of ringing the pancake bell.
Baking #7: 42 projects in 52 weeks
***Originally posted 2/16/15***
So this post has been delayed.. a few times. First because i thought I was going to write it on making homemade pizza with my family on Friday, but my mom was super prepared and pre-made the dough so I felt like that was cheating. We make this often enough so i will post about it when I can really do it from scratch. Consider these pictures a sneak peek:
Then it was delayed again due to Valentines day and while I finally wrote it yesterday, I didn’t get around to importing pictures and publishing until today because we had such a busy Sunday, so just pretend like you are reading this then, because I don’t want to go back and change all the tenses. Here you go:
Definitely an AZ girl!
Yesterday was Valentine’s day, but it was also something even closer to my heart than candy and cards- it was Arizona’s birthday. My state… is crazy town sometimes, but I love it. I love the mountains and the sunsets and I especially love that you can’t shovel sunshine and that we can use the BBQ on Christmas Day. Continue reading
Baking #6: 42 projects in 52 weeks
***Originally Posted 2/8/15***
OK, remember when I said that technically some of my projects wouldn’t be baked persay? This week’s is one of those. I made Oreo Truffles today so I could bring something sweet to the How I Learned To Drive cast party and I thought I’d share this very easy treat with you.
There are several variations of this recipe all over the internet, but I have always just guestimated after making them for the first time at a holiday treat party in 2010.
Here are you basic ingredients: Continue reading
Baking #5: 42 projects in 52 weeks- Cookies for the Cast
***Originally Posted 1/27/15***
Yesterday’s baking project was an oldie but a goodie- chocolate chip cookies!
I wanted this week’s recipe to be something I could easily share because today is the designer’s run for How I Learned to Drive. Our rehearsal process has been short, intense, and has just flown by! After the designers run we have only a few more rehearsals before we open a week from Thursday! WHOAH!
(Seriously… Get. Your. Tickets!)
I am so proud of this cast and so thankful to have a full production team (still seems strange after 3 years of grad school where the cast WAS the production crew!) So I thought cookies would be a good way to offer a gesture of appreciation. Plus, things are really busy around here so it seemed a good time for a tried and true recipe. That’s also why today’s post is fairly short. Hopefully back to your regularly scheduled blogging after getting through tech and opening!
There are hundreds of cookie recipes online. I won’t tell you my exact recipe, but I will tell you a little cookie baking hint: If your oven heats unevenly (and I think most household ovens do at least a bit), make sure you switch the trays between the top and bottom rack halfway through cooking. This will keep them soft instead of half soft and half crunchy from the extra heat!
Another tip? Don’t skip on the chocolate chips! MMMMMMMM….
Also, always have a glass of milk handy for taste testing…
Alphabet Resolutions 