Baking Highlights

Oh, there's been a ton of baking that I've done in the last two-plus months! Here are some that were impressive or new enough for me to actually take pictures of.

Mother's Day Chocolate Boxes

After the phenomenal success of my Valentine's chocolate box special, I decided to offer chocolate boxes for Mother's Day as well. So these beautiful flower boxes were filled with chocolate truffle hearts. They turned out quite well, but the weather was much hotter than I'd been expecting and I had to crank the air conditioner so I could actually temper the chocolate. As a result, I'm not certain whether I'll do them again next year.

Jar Cookies

As I was searching for a fantastic end-of-the-year gift for my MOPS table, I stumbled across these and these on Pinterest. And was persuaded to try them. I just happened to have started saving my old peanut butter jars, and they worked fantastically! They're nice, large, wide-mouth jars, and they were just the right size. I ended up making basically two varieties: toffee cookies, and chocolate chocolate chip cookies (see links above for recipes). And the people who've baked them since have told me they were fabulous.

 I had help.

 

Toffee Caramel Crunch Cheesecake

Our very good friends recently moved to Alaska, and I needed a special dessert to say goodbye. Since I know toffee is a favorite of theirs (and cheesecake is a favorite of mine), this recipe that I found on Pinterest (again) looked perfect. And it was. Because brand name toffee bars are so expensive, I made my own toffee (which I also used in the toffee jar cookies above) using this recipe.

Tie Cookies

I needed a Father's Day special to follow my Mother's Day one. And when I saw this tutorial for creating one's own cookie cutters, I decided tie-shaped cookies would be a good choice. The tutorial was easy to follow, and the cookie cutter worked well, although it was pretty flimsy. My initial idea of using it on cocoa nib-pecan cookies would never have worked...that dough can be difficult to cut through. Instead I chose to decorate vanilla and chocolate sugar cookies...time consuming, but lots of creative fun!

pristine cookie cutters

a sample of my decorating...I forgot to take pictures until more than half were boxed up.

Birthday Cakes

My husband's and my niece's birthdays fall very close to one another. So I made two “fancy” cakes in a week. Since my husband is 42 and he's a fan of “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy” (in which “42” is given as “the answer”), I made this cake and conspired with one of his coworkers to surprise him with it at work.

You probably have to be a Douglas Adams fan to really get it.

My niece requested a castle:

Chocolate Cheesecake Cookie Bars

Another Pinterest recipe that I found for a dinner party in June. Another phenomenal result! This bar is chocolate graham cracker crust topped with chocolate cheesecake and chocolate chip cookie dough. I'm not a huge fan of plain chocolate chip cookies, but in the instance the dough isn't super-sweet, and is a great, crunchy complement to the creamy cheesecake.

Brownie Layer Cheesecake

I don't really know what to call this one. The original recipe called it “Bittersweet Cheesecake Torte”, but that doesn't seem quite descriptive enough. Instead of a crust, this cheesecake starts with a layer of fudge brownie, then chocolate cheesecake, then more brownie, then white chocolate cheesecake, then ganache. Absolute decadence.

So...there you have it. An overview of the last few months baking-wise.

The Joy

It feels redundant to even write this section for this particular post. There's joy in just looking at the pictures of these delicious things! There's joy in remembering the joy other people got from eating these things. And, as I've said so many times before, I'm so totally wired to bake! Few things give me quite as much joy as experimenting in the kitchen, even when I've been working at the stove for hours.

Easter (a little late!)

Easter Fun

Friday

Our MOPS group hosted an Easter egg hunt in a park.  We got to play at the park,

Judith with her friend Lily

 make crafts,

coloring a coffee-filter butterfly

and hunt plastic (candy-filled) eggs.  

finding eggs

As I watched Judith hunt eggs, I noticed she was bypassing most of them.  When I came closer to ask her about it, I noticed that she only had pink eggs in her basket.  Apparently the other colors just aren’t good enough!

Saturday

We celebrated with Lance’s family.  We dyed eggs, 

making a pre-dye design

pink (of course!)

hunted eggs, 

hey, I found one!

Cora and Olivia had a great time pointing out all the not-so-hidden eggs to Judith!

Easter girl

and hung out with family.

Easter Meaning

We celebrated our Risen Savior on Easter morning.  Most significantly to us, Judith was baptized. While the church we attend and my own upbringing support infant baptism, the time never seemed right when Judith was an infant.  But we’ve been discussing it more and more lately, and when we heard that they planned to have some baptisms on Easter morning, we decided to do it.  Judith is God’s covenant child, and we need all the help we can get raising her as such.  Baptism is our way to recognize and emphasize that.  We are so so so blessed to be in our church family.  We have participated in the lives of many children there over the years, and we are overjoyed to be commemorating Judith as a part of that community. 

Easter Baking

I didn’t take pictures of most of my Easter baking.  I made a strawberry cheesecake for the Saturday family meal, and I made a whole bunch of mini cupcakes for church; our worship leader and his wife are moving away, and we were commemorating their time with us.  

I had one Easter order: a woman from Curves ordered three hand-painted rabbit cookies for her grandchildren (I made some extras for family).   

Judith painted some cookies for Daddy while I was painting mine.

 And I made some Easter butterflies for the women at my MOPS table.

love how this one turned out!

Easter Joy

If any day in the Christian calendar promotes joy, it’s Easter.  Our Lord is Risen!  Death is conquered!  We will live forever with Him!  And then there’s joy in seeing family.  And there’s joy in baking.  And there’s beyond-joy at officially welcoming my precious daughter into the covenant family.

posing in her new after-Easter dress from Great Great Aunt Nancy

Joy to you!

Barbara

Brownies and Blankets

Olive Oil Brownies
Last week I got to make a meal for a family that can't have milk.  I thought, "what can I possibly bake that doesn't use butter?"  And voila, I found this recipe on Pinterest.  Except, as I was beginning the process, I realized that the semi-sweet chocolate I'd bought listed "milk solids" as an ingredient!  Ack!  So I quickly searched for a cocoa substitution for semi-sweet chocolate and found an answer here.  (What did we ever do without Google?).  I added pecans to the recipe as well, because the called-for milk chocolate chips obviously wouldn't work. 

I made enough modifications to the recipe, that I'm going to post it here.  It can easily be made Vegan by using egg substitute.

Olive Oil Brownies:

Ingredients:

1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa

1/2 cup Olive Oil

1/2 cup dark brown sugar

1/2 cup granulated sugar

2 eggs (or egg-substitute equivalent)

1/2 cup flour

2 tsp vanilla

1 tsp salt

1 cup pecans, coarsely chopped

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 and line an 8×8 pan with foil.

In a large bowl, combine cocoa and olive oil.

Whisk in sugars, eggs and vanilla until combined.

Add in flour and salt and stir until incorporated. Fold in pecans.

Spread in prepared pan and bake 25 minutes.  DON'T OVERBAKE!!

Let cool completely.  Remove brownies from the pan by lifting out the foil.  Flip over onto a cutting board and peel foil off.  Cut into squares and enjoy.

Coconut Cream Brownie Bites
I also found this recipe on Pinterest.  Naturally, since it's a Duncan Hines recipe, it calls for a Duncan Hines brownie mix.  But I used my favorite fudge brownie recipe (from Bittersweet by Alice Medrich) instead.  No pan size is specified in the recipe, so the first time I made it, I followed the comment suggestions and used a smaller (8x11") pan and one batch of fudge brownies.  The result was very yummy, but was an extremely thick coconut cream layer with two very thin layers of brownie on either side.  Yesterday I tried it again, doubling the brownie recipe but leaving the coconut cream layer the same, and using a 9x13" pan.  Now I've got something that's basically a fudge brownie with a ribbon of coconut cream.  Also very good, and probably a better bet for a party, since some people are not coconut fans. I'd probably prefer something between the two.  (Oh well...that just means I can experiment more :-)

Twin Boy Blankets
A family at church just welcomed twin boys.  I wanted to make blankets that would be similar, but different, and I wanted to try out a rectangle granny blanket.  And this is what I did:

That's dark brown with the light blue, by the way, even though it looks black!

I also finished the afghan for our bed!!!!!  I haven't taken pictures yet, though, so it'll get its own blog post :-).


Joy to you!
Barbara

Recent Adventures

Finally, a blog with pictures!  And since it’s been so long, this is an all-round update, with Judith stories and crochet and baking and more.  Our everyday adventures :-). 

Peanut Butter Cookies

squiggly peanut butter cookie

A friend of mine asked me to do peanut butter cookies for her sister’s wedding.  And she wanted them to be heart shaped.  With initials.  So I checked online for recipes for peanut butter cutout cookies.  But the reviews for each recipe I found said either that the recipe was tasteless, or that it was way too soft to roll out.  So I used the recipe that my sister makes, because I know people like it.  (This was only like my second time ever making peanut butter cookies.  They’re really not my favorite!)  The dough was soft, but not too soft to roll out between sheets of wax paper (my pastry teacher would say “pastry chefs are laughing!”).  Honestly, I wasn’t fully satisfied by my handwriting on the initials, although both Lance and my friend said they were beautiful.  But I was thrilled with how these squiggly ones turned out! 

Teaching Preschool

February 27 was my first day teaching the preschool co-op.  I got to teach about Summer, and yellow, and squares.  I searched the internet for fun ideas, and found some great resources.  We traced the squares in an “Itsy Bitsy” book, had homemade yogurt popsicles on an indoor “picnic” for our snack, and made paper bowl suns for our craft.  All-in-all, a good experience, and I’m already looking forward to teaching “Taste” April 2.

"can I have it now?"

The Moose-Bear Boat

As I was working in the kitchen one day, Judith came scooting around the corner on these friends, using her legs like oars to propel herself along.  She said it was her boat.

Must be rough water

Tamales

Lance asked me to make tamales!  (Actually, what he said was “With all of your recent discoveries/experiments with different recipes and things, I was wondering if you would find a good recipe and make me some tamales?”)  So I went searching.  And found a recipe.  And bit the bullet and bought some pork and cooked it in the crock pot until it fell apart (gross!) and added salsa.  Then I made the masa according to the package directions, and assembled them.  I made only as many as one batch of masa made, because I wasn’t sure if Lance would like them.  But he did...especially with some mole sauce and fresh cilantro.  He at about one third of what I’d made and I froze the rest.  He’s requested that I try to make sauce-from-scratch ones next.  We’ll see.

Assembly line ready

the finished "present"

as served, with green mole and fresh cilantro

Crochet Projects:

Crowns:  at the request of a friend I made a crown using this pattern, modifying it in some places as suggested in the pattern’s comments.  And then I experimented with another smaller, simpler crown that I could possible put beads or jewels on.  I’m pretty happy with the result, especially because I was mostly feeling my way through what I was doing.  Which paved the way for:

Cupcake Nametags:  at MOPS this week we had “cupcake wars”, a competition between tables to see who could decorate the best.  And in the interest of table spirit, I decided to try making some crochet cupcake nametags.  I think they turned out rather well – and I didn’t have a pattern at all, just a picture that gave me somewhere to start.  (I suppose, if someone requested, I could try writing the pattern down :-)

crowns...bottom is from a pattern, top is improvised

crochet cupcake nametag

And progress continues on the big blanket for our bed.  I'm ready to crochet the border!  Look for a big reveal soon!

Bubblebath Fail

In an effort to save money but still be green, I tried two different recipes for bubblebath using castille soap.  Neither worked at all.  The bubbles lasted for approximately thirty seconds, and then the water was just cloudy.  I’ve seen some other recipes for DIY bubblebath that just add a little water to body wash, but since I’m trying to avoid sodium lauryl sulfate, that’s not what I’m looking for.  Guess I’ll have to write that one off.

The Joy

Lots of learning, lots of chocolate, lots of gifting...of course there’s joy!

Joy to you!

Barbara

More from the hook and cook

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, this has been a busy week for me.  Here’s what I’ve created this week:

Crochet Flowers

I’ve been working on these for about a week (I’d been thinking about them ever since I saw them on Pinterest.)  You can check the pattern out here – basically you crochet flower, stem, and leaves, then sew them all together and run floral wire through the stem to make them stiff.  The floral wire was by far the hardest part for me – and I’m still not entirely happy with it, because it keeps sliding out the ends of the stem.  Individually, I think they look pretty cute, but they make me very happy all bunched together in a vase like this.  These are all for gifts, but I think I might make myself a bunch just to have around.  I’ve never been a fan of fake flora, but these are so far from looking real that they don’t disappoint me the way ordinary faux flowers do.

Happy flowers!

My favorite one - and all because I didn't have enough of any purple to finish a whole flower.

Valentine’s Heart Boxes

I made 19 of these!  They’re a dark (or milk) chocolate box filled with dark (or milk) chocolate truffle hearts.  I didn’t track how many hours I worked on these, although it probably would have been good to know, just so I could figure out my hourly wage from them.  I started on Wednesday, experimenting with different methods of filling the boxes so that they were hollow but stable.  And that took some doing.  I finally settled on pouring several tablespoons of chocolate in the box, then slowly tipping the mold around in a circle several times so that it coated the sides thickly enough that they’d hold up.  Even so I broke a good third of them, and had to melt them down and start again. 

They're very cute - but looking at the picture closely you can see how very fragile they are!

Spicy Chocolate Wafer Hearts

These are for Lance.  He likes these wafer cookies (from Alice Medrich’s Bittersweet) with cinnamon and a little cayenne pepper thrown in.  Since these are a slice-and-bake cookie, I experimented a little with the heart shape.  At first I tried cutting them with a dowel underneath the “log” of cookie dough, thinking that might give me the indentation at the top of the heart – instead it just meant I had a hard time cutting all the way through the log!  So I pretty much just cut circles and then shaped them by hand.

Window Sandwich Cookies

These are becoming a Valentine’s Day tradition for me – and I love the way they turn out, both aesthetically and visually.  Basically, it’s two sugar cookies (I use the basic sugar cookie recipe from Southern Livings’s Incredible Cookies) filled with chocolate buttercream.  I just cut a “window” out of the top cookie as I’m cutting them out – like you do with linzer cookies.  This year there were no mishaps with little fingers stealing buttercream out of the window!

Butternut Squash Ravoli

On Saturday night we had guests for dinner (fulfilling that goal of hospitality!), and I invited them to come early so that we could cook together.  First, we made half-whole-wheat pasta, rolling it out with the pasta attachment to my KitchenAid.  Then we placed small dots of butternut squash filling (I pureed baked butternut squash with ricotta cheese, walnuts, and some Italian seasoning) on one sheet of pasta, wet the dough all around the filling, and topped it with another pasta sheet.  Then we used a heart cookie cutter to cut out the ravioli.  I have to say that using that cookie cutter is a fun idea, but wastes an awful lot of dough!  It’s definitely a special-occasion method.  Because these use fresh pasta, they only take like 2 minutes (max!) to cook.  I also experimented with a tomato-ricotta-mushroom sauce.  The combination was great, even though both “recipes” were untried.  And the best part?  Judith ate three whole ravioli! It's the first time she's asked for more of something we were "forcing" her to try.

Aren't they cute?

Bittersweet Chocolate Cheesecake with White Truffle Sauce

Of course when there’s company I get to make a fancy dessert!  This one is extra rich, which was a good complement to our not-too-heavy dinner.  The recipe (from Betty Crocker’s Everything Chocolate) doesn’t call for a crust, but I made one anyway.  I should have left it out – I’m not entirely sure what I did, but the crust baked so hard that we couldn’t cut it with a fork, and had to pick it up like a cookie.  It still tasted good though!

Sunday Morning Apple Coffee Cake

I found this recipe here, while I was searching last night for a coffee cake recipe for our community breakfast at church this morning.  Instead of using 5 apples, I used two apples, with a cup of chopped pecans and a cup of dried cranberries.  Since the recipe uses baking powder, and I know that baking powder batters can sit for a long time, I put everything together last night, and just baked it this morning in time for church.  It took much less time than the recipe calls for (20 minutes less!), and I’m not sure whether that’s because it had been sitting for so long or if there’s another reason.  It was good, though – not too sweet, but still satisfying.  I’ll likely make it again.  (Sorry.  No picture.:-)

The Joy

My heart is fed when I bake - and even more so when I do so with a friend.  And most of these are gifts - I love to give gifts!  There was joy aplenty for me, in spite of the stress of busy-ness.

Joy to you!

Barbara 

By hook and by cook

Here's my weekly (well, it's the first one, but I intend for it to be weekly) update on what I've baked/cooked in the past week, and what I've crocheted.  Where applicable, I'll include links to patterns and recipes, but I'm not going to type out anything that's not already online somewhere (unless specifically requested!).

In the Kitchen this week:
(see Monday's post)
Brownie Cookies
Also known as "deep dark decadence".  They're dark chocolate "brownie" batter, with dark chocolate chips and macadamia nuts.  Needless to say, they're a family favorite.  The recipe's from the Williams Sonoma Cookies book, so I'm not going to list it here. 

Brownie cookies - fresh out of the oven

 "Valentine's Day" meal

We celebrate V-day early, and ate at home to save money.  As shown below, my husband got pan-seared ahi while I had an oven-roasted portabello.  On the side we had apple, walnut, gorgonzola salad with maple-balsamic dressing that I found a recipe for at this blog.  For dessert we had chocolate mousse cups, which I didn't take a picture of because they weren't beautiful.  They were an experiment based on a triple-layer cheesecake that I make - I made a normal chocolate mousse mix, scooped 1/3 of it into the bottom of two dishes, and added increasing amounts of (extra) whipped cream to layers 2 and 3.  They were tasty, but a little grainy...and I didn't add enough cream to layer 2, so there was very little difference from layer 1.  Next time I think I'll just try this recipe that I found on Pinterest.

Valentine's Day dinner

Not much else was cooking last week, but I'm gearing up for Valentine's Day!  This coming week should be busier.

Crochet Projects
Chemo Caps
Two of my friends from church are going through chemo right now, and when I saw this pattern on Pinterest, I was immediately inspired to make them.  The first one (pictured below, stunningly modeled by my daughter) took me much longer than it should have because it took me about five tries to get the band around the hat to be the right size.  When I followed the directions as printed, it kept fanning out exponentially and just wouldn't fit.  I finally followed some directions I found (Pinterest again!) for making a foundation row without using a chain, and then crochet the rest of the band in a smaller hook size.  I made the second hat in red, and it went much more quickly.

chemo cap

Lance's Scarf

Isn't it beautiful?

At Christmas time, when I was making a number of scarves for presents, it occurred to me that my husband might like one!  So I asked - and he said he'd wear one if it wasn't "too phoofy".  So I searched through my pattern books, and through the yarn at the craft store to find some combination that would be both impressive and non-phoofy.  Here's the result.  And I must say (bragging!) that I love it...the pattern (basketweave stitch) and the yarn.  And Lance's does too.  He's actually worn it every day since I gave it to him. 

There was drama though, because I was (proud) enough to want to take a picture to post on Pinterest - and then I somehow forgot to put it away before he came home...and he saw it, and came out the next morning wearing it.  When I burst into tears (it was supposed to be a surprise! and I'd been so careful - I thought - about keeping it hidden), Judith said (in a conciliatory tone) "Daddy, you can't have this now." and took it and "hid" it in her room.  (She and I wrapped it and gave it to him before our Valentine's celebration.)

I'm also continuing to work on my afghan, as well as some secret gift projects that might show up here next week.

The Joy - do I even need to write this?  I love to be in the kitchen, especially when chocolate is involved.  And crochet gives me almost as much joy, especially once the project is done and I can give it to someone and see their joy.  And I took joy, too, in my little girl's efforts at playing peacemaker, even when her mama was irrational.

Joy to you!
Barbara

Busy Kitchen

Yesterday Judith's friend came to play again, so I took the opportunity to spend some time in the kitchen.  (It's wonderful to have Judith entertained by someone else, even if they do require mediation with regularity.)  As I was cooking, it occurred to me that I haven't yet blogged about any food!  That's pretty bizarre, considering that I used to have a separate blog just for baking.  It seems that after the insanity of December (I was baking nonstop for four weeks!), I haven't really been focusing on baking, although I could have written about the Chocolate Cream Tart with Pecan Shortbread Crust I made for Lance's uncle's birthday, and my adventures with Spaghetti Carbonara for the same dinner. 

At any rate, here's what I was working on yesterday (at one point four of these were going simultaneously!):

• homemade greek style yogurt - I started making this more than a year ago when I started finding ways to get extra protein.  The store bought stuff is yummy, but so expensive, so I googled alternatives.  This website got me started, and I've improvised my own methods to compensate for the equipment I don't have.  It's especially wonderful because Judith loves it (she thinks it's ice cream) and I make a batch for Lance and her that I sweeten with local OV honey.
• no bake "cookie" balls - Pinterest got me turned on to these!  They're pretty close to "raw" (if only I could bring myself to leave out the chocolate chips, they would be!), and with the flaxseed in them, they're pretty healthy for my little girl, especially because I sub unsweetened coconut for the coconut flakes.  And with local honey (raw) in them, they help with seasonal allergies too!
• butternut squash, red lentil, and garbanzo stew in the crock pot - Pinterest again.  It won't surprise anyone who knows me that I made this without all the called for spice.  (Well, not all - I did add the garlic, and some bouquet garni.)  It was a little overly sweet that way, but considering that I'm juststarting to tolerate butternut squash (it's always too sweet for me), it was pretty good.  (And it felt fantastic to be able to throw all the detritus in my composter instead of in the trash!)
• cooking the garbanzos for above stew, and baking the leftover squash to freeze for later - I'm kind of a slow food junky.
• whole wheat biscuits - I googled "whole wheat biscuits" because I wanted to try some with the stew.  And I was totally appalled by how many "whole wheat" recipes were actually half whole wheat.  In fact, this one was the only one I found that was totally whole wheat.  They were yummy!

In the future, I intend to do a weekly "This Week in the Kitchen" kind of entry, unless I bake something totally fantastic that I simply have to blog about right away.  :-)

The Joy:  It's really not hard for me to find joy in the kitchen.  I'm so wired to image my Creator by creating in this way.  Every time I bake it's worship - and my body and soul rejoice!  I'm also finding joy in following my goal to eat healthier.

Joy to you!
Barbara