Baking

Baking #18: Happy Anniversary Cake SMASH

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He was excited to finally cake smash…

So, I wasn’t originally going to write about this as my baking project, but after how much fun we had, I thought I should share. With how busy we’ve become since having a baby, we were fiercely protective of celebrating our anniversary. We even turned down jobs to keep the day open so we could celebrate together. However, while May 12th is our anniversary and my poor husband has SO many celebrations he has to make happen in May between birthdays and mother’s day etc. that we decided to stay home and celebrate with a home cooked meal. He did dinner and I did dessert. At our wedding we had some AMAZING cupcakes made by a dear friend and some truffles which were perfect for our celebration. We didn’t have a traditional wedding cake, and we did not Continue reading →

Baking #17: Stress baking & chocolate chip muffins

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“You should have a muffin. They’re really good and they’ll help you.”

I originally got into baking in college because it made me feel good when I was stressed. Instead of stress eating, I could bake and enjoy the smells of the treats in the oven and then know that I could easily give it away by just walking down to the callboard hallway and offering it to a ton of other stressed out exhausted theatre majors who had probably forgotten to eat most of the day after going from class to rehearsal to another rehearsal and back again. (In a lot of ways being a theatre major really prepared me for parenthood….) I actually started baking so much due to stress my senior year of undergrad that people started making jokes about the Grey’s Anatomy character Izzy Stevens- Continue reading →

Baking #16: Already dreaming of Thanksgiving… Parmesan Cheesy rolls

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My husband and I were sick last week, hence the lack of posts. It’s the first time we’ve been sick at the same time since the baby was born and boy was that a miserable experience. So we are still playing catch up but I wanted to get a blog in. I’m going to have to try to be short but I think this recipe needs a little background… Continue reading →

Baking #15: Fish Biscuits or How to Throw a LOST Party

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Start ’em young…

**Today’s post is split into two parts, the first will focus on the actual baking project. The second will give you some of the awesome ideas we used for the rest of our party.** Continue reading →

Baking #14: Hot Cross Buns

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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 #12: Happy St. Patrick’s Day! (42 projects in 52 weeks)

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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.

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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!IMG_5432

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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:

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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.

IMG_5438We 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)

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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

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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!

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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!

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I mean… would YOU get anything done?!

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Baking #9: Pretzel… Buns… and Bites…

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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?

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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:

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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!!

IMG_5172 IMG_5173And 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!