Cake With Raspberry Filling and Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting

At first, I told my mother-in-law that I'd bring cookies for Easter dessert. I've got springtime cookie cutters and a pile of pastel-frosted flowers and bunnies and eggs would look nice and Eastery on the table. But while cookies were easy to make, cookies were not what I wanted to eat. I just couldn't shake my craving for a lemon and raspberry dessert. I went rogue.

I'm not really a food blogger, so don't critique my lousy photos.

The Cake

I made a white cake from a box to save myself a little time and trouble. I made 2 8-inch rounds so I'd get a nice 2-layer cake. I was not adventurous enough to go for 4 this time.

The Raspberry Filling

4-6oz fresh raspberries or frozen (thawed) raspberries

1/4c to 1/2c raspberry jam

Mash up the raspberries and jam until you get a nice lumpy raspberry goo. Spread it on top of one of the cake halves, leaving empty space at the edges for the inevitable oozing when you put the cakes together.

The Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting 

1  8-ounce package cream cheese
1  cup  confectioners' sugar
zest of 1 lemon, grated
Splash of lemon juice

I used this frosting recipe from Real Simple but ended up using less sugar than it calls for. I tasted it after one cup was added and decided I liked the balance of sweetness and tartness. If you like a sweeter frosting, then go ahead and add more powdered sugar. Also, be careful with the lemon juice. If you add too much, the frosting gets runny. Mine did, but it went on thick enough to coat the cake and firmed up just fine in the fridge.

The cake was a big success at Easter and it's already been decided that I have to make it again, preferably soon. I'm okay with that.

Apple Pie

I'm sure there are more complicated ways to make an apple pie. I've seen recipes involving nuts and cranberries, vanilla and allspice, and delicate lattice crusts. I'm sure those are very nice, but I like to keep it much more simple.

The apples: there have been physical altercations over the types of apples that are "supposed" to be used in an apple pie. There are very aggressive Granny Smith and Golden Delicious contingents. Northern Spy is often praised as a pie apple, but I've never seen one in the flesh, so I've never tasted one. One of these days I will have to spend a day making a dozen apple pies with different apple varieties so I can see what all the fuss is about. As for my pies, I've always used McIntosh apples when I can find them, and Spartan or Empire as a backup plan. The internet will tell you that McIntosh apples get too mushy when cooked, but it's not like you get an applesauce pie at the end. I don't like my apple pie to have a crunch - the filling should be pretty soft.

The crust: I have tried making my own pie crust, and I find that the effort put into the process isn't worth it when the quality of pre-made refrigerated crusts has gotten so much better. Homemade is better, but not better enough for my pie needs. I used the store-brand stuff, because it's really close to the right texture.

The spices: Cinnamon and sugar. The end. I use about 1/2 cup sugar and 1/4 tsp  ground cinnamon for a pie, but the measurements are flexible. I scoop out some sugar into a bowl, sprinkle cinnamon over it, and mix it up. It's ready for the pie.

The pie: I lay out my bottom crust in the pie plate, then I peel my apples and put them, whole, in a pot of water with a dash of lemon juice to keep them from browning as I go. Once they're all peeled, I dry them off one at a time and cut them into big wedges, tossing them into the waiting pie plate. Once I get a full layer, I sprinkle a mix of sugar and cinnamon over it using a big spoon. I aim for near-full coverage, and it's okay if some of the sugar falls through the gaps and gets to the bottom. I keep adding apples and sugar until I have a nice big mountain of apples.

Notice how big I keep the apple pieces? If I cut them much smaller than that, then they may get too soft once they're cooked. That is probably because I insist upon using the wrong apples for pie.

The top crust goes on to cover the apple sugar mountain, and holes are poked to let steam out. I covered the edges of the crust with foil to keep them from getting too dark, and only realized at the end that I should have tried that with the top part, too. I got a brown pie. 

I also may have left it in a tiny bit too long, so the filling got a little closer to applesauce than I like, but it was tasty anyway. 

Yes, that is a dirty plate. That's because it was my second helping and I was so eager to eat my first piece that I didn't bother finding my camera.

HOORAY FOR PIE!!

Red Blood Cell Cake

This week at work, we produced our 50th lot of antiglobulin control cells. It's a week-long process, from testing red cells to treating them, diluting them, putting them into little vials, and labeling and inspecting them before getting them ready to ship out. Everyone here has a hand in the process, and so we all feel connected to the product. I decided that 50 was a big and important number, and that it called for celebration.

I made a cake.

When in doubt as to choosing a way to celebrate, the answer is usually cake.

I took a plunge into real baking and made this cake completely from scratch. It's something I've been wanting to try for a long time, but I've been intimidated by the process. It just seems so complex and touchy, especially when compared to the three easy steps involved in a Betty Crocker cake mix. But, a cake was needed, and what better time to finally just go ahead and try something new? The year's nearly over already, and since "bake a cake from scratch" is on this year's list of goals, it had to happen sometime.

I asked my sister-in-law (link goes to her blog) for some help choosing an idiot-proof recipe for both cake and frosting. She's been making tasty from-scratch cakes forever, so I figured she had enough experience to know which recipes may be unrealistic for a beginner like me.

On her recommendation, I made Hershey's "Perfectly Chocolate" chocolate cake, and topped it with an "easy vanilla buttercream" icing. The cake was a matter of measuring everything into my stand mixer and then pouring it into pans, not very much different from what I would have done with a box cake, except that I had to measure more things out. The final batter was extremely thin - the website warned me about that, but as I was making the cake, I hesitated. It was already looking very runny, and then I was supposed to mix in a whole cup of boiling water. I did as instructed, but the result was the consistency of tomato soup, and I was sure I'd done something horribly wrong somewhere. Despite my misgivings and my many peeks into the oven to see if it was still goo, it baked up just fine into actual solid cake. Hooray!

Cake!

While the cakes cooled, I made the icing. I took the sticks of butter, which had been on the counter all day to soften, and dumped them into the stand mixer's bowl. When I tried to fluff the butter with the whisk attachment, the machine shuddered and wobbled, so I stopped it in a hurry. When the thing stopped, I saw my problem: a solid ball of butter lodged inside the whisk. I guess "room temperature" did not equal "soft" on this particular day. I poked the handle of a wooden spoon between the wires of the whip and dislodged the butterball one chunk at a time, scooping the chunks into a measuring cup. Once I'd gotten most of it, I microwaved the measuring cup so the butter would be of a more whiskable consistency.

The finished icing looked and tasted great, but it needed some color. I wasn't making a white blood cell! Again on my sister-in-law's advice, I'd picked up some Wilton gel food coloring for this project. Because red takes so much dye to get right, a gel works much better than the liquid color and doesn't dilute the icing. I picked "no taste red", thinking that maybe the others had a weird taste to them, but it turns out that this shade doesn't really go to true red. It was more of a pinky coral color. Still very nice, but not the bright oxygenated hemoglobin I was going for. I ended up using almost the whole jar.

I used a small paring knife to cut away an indentation on the top of the cake, because red cells are biconcave (dimpled on both sides), and I was going for realism. Or as much realism as an amateur baker and decorator could get out of buttercream and cake, anyway. This also gave me an opportunity to sample the cake before inflicting it on my coworkers. I was quite relieved to find it delicious.

Looks pretty good, even naked!

Here's the finished cake just before I covered it up to bring it to work. You can see that the red didn't really come out right, and I'm a little grumpy about that.

Finished Red Blood Cell Cake

Also, I tried and tried to make the icing smooth and flat, but all I had to work with was a small offset spatula. I think I'd need some fancy cake tools to get it right, but I'm not sure I'll do this often enough to invest in those.

If my coworkers were disappointed in the color or outer texture of the "red" blood cell, they didn't say anything. The cake disappeared in record time. Yay! Total cake success and I can cross something off this year's list of accomplishments!

Mmmm. Cake.

Cuppy Cakes a la Momo

This isn't a recipe. It's a fond memory and a sweet tribute to my grandmother, Momo, who left us this past weekend after 91 rich years in this world. I've been working on a written tribute, because I feel it's something I need to do, but this week has been very difficult. The words aren't lining up right, so I turned to food, as so many people do in painful times.

These "cuppy cakes" were Momo's specialty, as far as my siblings and I were concerned. "Cupcakes" could mean almost anything, but when someone said "Cuppy Cakes", you knew exactly what was waiting for you. They never stood a chance of surviving overnight once they were made.

They're just simple chocolate cupcakes, made from a box mix, with holes cut into the tops to make room for homemade, lightly sweetened whipped cream. They always lived on a shelf in her fridge because of the whipped cream filling, and we kids would try to be subtle about sneaking back over to open the fridge door for just one more... Sometimes the simplest things are really the best.

They just seemed like the right thing to make this week.

Apple Cinnamon Muffins

I'm guilty of piling up dozens of "to try" recipes on Pinterest, and never getting around to actually trying them. Recently, re-pinning a chicken recipe led me to a great Canadian cooking blog called Rock Recipes, which I have since bookmarked, because I want to try so many of their ideas. 

I was in the mood for muffins, so I searched their recipe archive to see what I could work with, and their Caramel Apple Muffins seemed like a good bet, even without the caramel part. I added more apples than called for, since I was skipping the caramels, and I think these turned out so great.

Get your dry ingredients mixed together:

2 1/2 cups flour

1/4 cup white sugar

4 tsp baking powder

2tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp salt

Then do the same with your wet ingredients:

1/3 cup sour cream

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1 cup milk

2 eggs

1tsp vanilla

Then add the wet to the dry and mix it all up until you've got a nice lumpy batter.

Peel and chop three apples - this recipe is a good way to use up older, softer-than-usual apples. Then, and this is where I tweaked the recipe, toss the apple bits with a couple of spoonfuls of sugar and a dash of cinnamon so they're well coated. There's not much sugar in this recipe, so adding more here doesn't hurt. Fold the sweet apples into the batter.

Bake them in greased muffin tins at 350F for about 20-25 minutes. Depending how big you make your muffins, you'll end up with 12-15 muffins.

They were fluffy and not too sweet, just cinnamony enough, and very good with a cup of coffee for a quick breakfast.

Antibody Cake!

To round off a week's worth of laboratory stories, how about some dessert? I know you must be hungry, because I didn't even tell you anything about microbiology and the fun specimens that come into the lab.

My contribution this week was a cake for my coworkers. I went with Funfetti cake, because in my experience nobody hates Funfetti, and it was easier for me to use a box mix than to try my hand at a from-scratch cake. I colored some vanilla frosting so it would have a yellow tint like the plasma we work with, and then I decorated it with antibodies.

I initially thought pretzel sticks would work, but they're too inflexible. My antibodies are made out of Twizzlers Pull-and-Peel (cherry flavor), carefully peeled, cut to size, and pressed into the frosting. Several which were not cut to the right length were eaten in the process. For science.

The little guys around the edges are IgG molecules. They're made of two long "heavy chains" and two small "light chains" and look like little letter "Y"s. The upper tips of the Y, where the light chains and heavy chains are held together with sulfide bonds, is where the antibody magic happens in your immune system. Those tips will recognize and bind antigens, signalling your immune cells to attack. Variations in the amino acids at the antigen-binding region of the antibodies make your immune system capable of mounting a response to pretty much anything nature can throw at it.

The big mess at the middle is an IgM pentamer, which just means five IgM antibodies bound together into an immunological ninja star. IgM is usually the first antibody to respond to an infection. The reason you can be tested for Lyme disease and they can tell the difference between an active infection and a past infection is that the IgM will be present if your body is still fighting in its initial encounter with the bug, while the IgG antibodies will persist for life, hanging around ready to multiply if you're ever re-infected.

I'm pretty certain that cake doesn't have much effect on the immune system, but it sure made us happy.

Gingersnaps

I can't decide whether or not I like gingersnaps. I usually pass them over for almost any other kind of cookie, but this time around I made a huge batch of them to give away as gifts and found myself really enjoying them with my coffee.

Gingersnaps

1 cup sugar (plus more for rolling cookies)
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground cloves
3/4 cup shortening
1/4 cup molasses
1 egg

Combine the dry ingredients, then cut in the shortening to make coarse crumbs. Use your hands to break up clumps if necessary. Stir in the molasses and egg.

Shape the dough into small balls (1 inch diameter) and roll in sugar. Place on an ungreased cookie sheet and bake at 350F for 10 minutes. Remove them from the baking sheets immediately and cool on racks. Makes about 4 dozen.

These are very snappy gingersnaps. They're very spiced and very crunchy, so I think they are wonderfully paired with tea or coffee. I have a feeling that the smaller you make the balls, the snappier your cookies will be, so don't go too small or they may be inedible.

Prize Shortbread Cookies

I'm not sure which prize they won, who won it, or when, but this is my family's Best Christmas Cookie. Mom made these every year, even when she was exhausted and threatened not to, because we all love them so much.

Prize Shortbread
(From Five Roses Flour "A Guide to Good Cooking")

2 cups flour
1 cup soft butter
1/2 cup icing sugar
1 egg yolk
1/2 tsp salt
1/8 tsp nutmeg*
*Freshly grated nutmeg is so much better, but regular ground nutmeg from the spice aisle will be ok.

The recipe in this book is very clear about using a wooden spoon, and I don't know why. I've never dared to try a plastic spoon or (gasp) my Kitchenaid mixer, because I feel I should obey the book. So, start by finding a wooden spoon.

Stir sugar and egg yolk into the soft butter, then stir in salt and nutmeg. Add the flour, a quarter cup at a time, until the batter is too hard to stir with the spoon. I usually hit this point at about 3.5 cups. Dump the batter out onto a floured counter and knead gently while adding more flour to the dough by hand. Keep drawing flour in by kneading until the dough just begins to crack*. Roll the dough out with a floured rolling pin to about a quarter-inch thickness and cut into shapes with cookie cutters. Decorate with sprinkles or colored sugar if you want to. Bake at 350F for 10 minutes on an ungreased cookie sheet. Look for the edges to start browning the tiniest bit - that's when they're done.

Move them to a cooling rack immediately, but be careful, they are very fragile. Pushing them off with a spatula is usually better than trying to get anything under them on the cookie sheet.

This recipe will get you about 3 dozen cookies, but it depends on how big a cutter you're using.

These will fall apart in your mouth and taste like buttery heaven.

*It has just occurred to me that I should have taken a picture of this step, because what the heck does "beginning to crack" mean to someone who hasn't done this before? It shouldn't be so wet that it sticks to everything, but it shouldn't be so dry that it flakes as you roll it. I'll take pictures next time and add them!

Baking - No-Knead Dutch Oven Bread

Bread! Glorious bread!

It has always seemed to me that baking bread is a special category of baking reserved for the talented elite among us. This, pastry dough, and cakes from scratch, all belong to graduate-level baking: difficult, requiring effort and concentration, and taking much longer than you think it should.

Well, with baking bread from scratch on my 30 in 30 list, and the year coming to a close, I had no choice but to try. And I cheated a little bit. Just a little. I found the world’s easiest bread recipe. It’s a yeast bread, but with no kneading required, and it’s baked in a dutch oven instead of a loaf pan.

Here’s the recipe, which I got from the Steamy Kitchen blog, who got it from elsewhere:

3 cups bread flour
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast*
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups warm water

Just mix all the ingredients together in a big bowl, cover, let it sit overnight in a warm place, and it’ll puff up full of bubbles and smell nice and yeasty. Flip it out onto a floured countertop, and then shape it into a ball with either your hands or a big spoon or spatula (make sure your shaping implement is wet or things will get real sticky real fast), folding the edges up over the middle. Dust a tea towel with more flour and put the ball, seam-side down, into the towel, cover it up with the rest of the towel, and let it hang out on the counter for another two hours.

Your oven and pot need to be really hot from the start, so sometime during the two hours, put your pot in the oven and crank it to 450F to preheat. You will need a good enameled dutch oven type pot for this - check that what you're using can go to 450F, because not everything can. Take the hot pot out when it’s ready, plop the dough ball into the pot and wiggle it so it sits well, and put it in the oven, covered, for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, take the lid off and give it another 15-20 minutes – you’re looking for the crust to get crusty and brown-gold. The website I linked to says the internal temperature should be 210F when it’s done.

Wait for it to cool – and good luck waiting, because the smell will drive you insane and you’ll keep coming back to poke it and see if it’s cool enough to eat yet. It makes a delicious squishy loaf with a thin crunchy crust, and it absorbs butter beautifully.

I’ll be baking bread often, now that I know how easy it is to do. I might even try a more complicated bread, with kneading! I need something for my 31 in 31 list, right?

* I bought regular yeast, because I don’t know the first thing about yeast and didn’t actually realize there were different kinds. Well, I know there are different kinds – I studied microbiology, after all – but I didn’t realize the grocery store had two different products, an instant and a not-instant. I used the regular yeast in this recipe, which meant that I had to “proof” it before using it. I followed the instructions on the packet and mixed my yeast with warm water and a little sugar, then let it sit for a few minutes to see if it would bubble. It did, which meant the yeast was alive and farting out CO2 like it’s supposed to, so I added that bubble sludge to the flour and just subtracted that amount of water from my total.

Dear lard, I found the perfect pie crust!

I'm bad at pie.

Crusts are not easy to get right, and I've been trying to match my Mom's perfect pie crust for years with no success. It's delicious and flaky and so good that I actually want to eat the sweet curve of crust left on the plate when the pie is gone.

Her secret, besides the traditional dash of love, is Tenderflake lard. It's a Canadian thing, and I've never found it here in the States, which makes me sad. Can someone ship me some lard, please? I did try using a different brand of lard here, but it was all wrong and I couldn't even roll out the dough because it was so sticky. Oh, how I sobbed that day, rolling pin hanging from my dejected hands as I stood, flour-dusted, by the sad lump of goo on my kitchen counter.

Crisco does a decent job in a pie crust. I've used it a few times now and it passes for edible, and I can make it work, but it's not a crust you'd want to eat on its own. At least not when I make it. I get a good shell to keep the pie filling in place, and that's about it. So sad.

I've also used refrigerated Pillsbury pie crusts in a pinch, and they're almost identical to the Crisco ones, but with a lot less work, so I'm a big fan. Yeah, it's cheating, but it results in faster pie.

This week, when I went grocery shopping, I picked up some refrigerated pie crusts. Feeling a little cheap, I decided to save 23 cents by buying the Giant store brand instead of the fancy Pillsbury stuff. Some things are just as good in generic form, and some are horrible, but I'm learning where I can cut corners to save a little... as it turns out, this is a situation where being cheap paid off.

I cut out the circles necessary for the pot pies I was making, and saw that I had leftover crust. Why waste crust? I spread some butter, sugar, and cinnamon on the remnants and popped them into the oven on a cookie sheet just for the hell of it. 15 minutes later they were golden and tasty-looking, and I found myself taking a bite far before they were cool enough to comfortably do so. Golden pastry has that effect on me. It was flaky. It was delicious.

It was Mom's pie crust.

I don't think I could have told them apart in a blind taste test.

I ran to the fridge, huffing and puffing not from exertion but from the pain of having a second much-too-hot wedge of sugary crust stuffed in my mouth, and checked the ingredient list on the box. Lard. Sweet, sweet lard. I almost died. I called my Mom to tell her. Really.

I think I will buy a dozen of these and keep them in my freezer, because if they are discontinued I will die.

Baking - Cranberry Orange Bread

This is my Mom's recipe and it's so good I recommend you double it right away because you're not going to have enough! This makes one loaf, 8 mini-loaves, or 12 small muffins.

Cranberry-Orange Bread


1 cup fresh cranberries, cut in half
1/4 cup sugar

1 3/4 cups flour
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsp shortening
1 tsp fresh orange zest (one large orange should do it)
3/4 cup orange juice
1 egg

Grease a bread pan or muffin/mini-loaf pan, and preheat the oven to 350F.

Mix the cranberries with 1/4 cup sugar until they're well coated. This mitigates their tartness and helps them not to sink to the bottom of the bread.

Mix the dry ingredients (including the non-cranberried sugar) in a large bowl, then cut in the shortening until it's all in tiny crumbles. Make a well in the middle and pour in the juice, egg, and zest, then mix until everything is wet - don't overdo it. Add the sugared cranberries and blend them in well, then pour into your baking receptacle of choice.

A loaf will need 40 to 45 minutes, my mini-loaves only took 20. Not sure how long muffins would take, but I'd start with 15 minutes and check from there.

Notes: I didn't get much more than 1/4 cup of juice out of my orange, since I don't have a juicer thingy - I was stabbing at the orange halves with a fork and squeezing them to death to get some juice out and it didn't go very well. Sadly, the OJ in the fridge was very expired, so I just made up the difference in liquid with plain water and hoped for the best. It turned out really well - still tasted plenty orangey.

Banana Bread

I got the baking itch this weekend. Enjoy some banana bread!

Mom's Banana Bread

1 1/2 cups flour
2tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1/3 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 cup mashed ripe bananas (3 or 4 medium-sized bananas)*
1/8 cup milk

*The riper the bananas, the more banana-y the bread will taste. So wait for them to look absolutely gross and splotchy before you mash them up for baking. Really, wait it out until they're barely edible and the fruit flies are calling their fruit fly realtors for an open house visit of your bananas.

Mix the dry ingredients and wet ingredients in separate bowls, then pour wet into dry and stir until it's all well blended. If the batter seems dry, add more milk by the tablespoon until it's the right consistency. It should be a little thicker than the average brownie batter. Pour it into a greased and floured loaf pan and bake at 375F for 40-50 minutes (check at 40 with a toothpick, it will come out clean when it's done).

This tastes best with butter smeared all over it. But I say that about a lot of things.

Marmalade Muffins, part 2

How to make furry marmalade muffins:

1. Make marmalade muffins.
2. Don't eat the marmalade muffins.


So simple! And I may have developed a new antibiotic!

As you can see, we weren't impressed by the recipe I tried. I seem to be having bad luck with "made from scratch" muffins. There are so many boxed muffin mixes, I suppose maybe I should just stick with those, but I would love to be able to throw a few basic ingredients in a bowl and bake up some delicious muffins without needing to ask Betty Crocker for help.

Recipe Fail - Marmalade Muffins

Another cookbook find at the book sale provided me with this intriguing recipe. Marmalade muffins sounded tasty, so I assembled everything and gave them a shot. Only after my ingredients were lined up on the counter did I realize that the recipe did not call for sugar. At all. No white sugar, brown sugar, honey, nothing. I hesitated, but it did ask for 2/3 cup of marmalade, and my jar listed high fructose corn syrup at the first ingredient, so I figured that would count as my sugar and I'd be fine.


I was wrong.

They were a little dry, and didn't taste marmaladey enough for me. Or sweet enough. I guess it's possible they were meant to be savoury muffins, but I didn't expect a fruit muffin to be without sweetness. They're probably good with butter and would go with a meal, like corn muffins would. But alas, they're not breakfast muffins. So I made pumpkin bread from a mix instead and have been eating that for breakfast.

I can come back and post the recipe if anyone's interested... but I recommend against interest on this particular occasion.

Mexican Wedding Cookies

My Christmas gift to both of my grandmothers this year will be tins of homemade cookies. They keep telling me they don't want or need anything, but everyone likes cookies. Mom told me that Grandmaman's favorite cookies are pecan cookies, so I did a little hunting for a good recipe online, and came up with these "wedding cookies". They're traditionally an almond-based cookie, but I substituted toasted pecans and they turned out wonderfully. I'm transcribing this recipe into my book immediately so I don't lose it!

Mexican Wedding Cookies (with Pecans)

1 cup butter
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 tsp vanilla
2 tsp cold water
2 cups flour
1 cup crushed toasted pecans
powdered sugar for dusting

Toast the pecans by putting them in a single layer on a cookie sheet or pie pan, and baking at 350 for 8 minutes, stirring them at the halfway point. Put them in a large ziplock bag and crush them with a rolling pin, or do what I did and put them in a cup and smash them with the end of my smallest metal measuring cup. I guess you could dump them in a food processor, if you have one of those. You want them ground pretty fine but with bits big enough to give a crunch.

Cream butter and granulated sugar, add vanilla and water and mix well. Add the nuts and flour, mix until blended. Chill 30 min in the fridge.
Preheat oven to 350F.

Roll dough into balls and then squeeze into crescents (you can leave them as balls if you want) and place on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 15-20 minutes at 350, then move to a rack to cool. When cool, dip the tops in a bowl of powdered sugar. This makes about 4 dozen cookies.

And they're so cute!



I absolutely loved these. I want to make a second batch for myself but I'm getting tired of all the baking, and I also know I'll be eating a ton in the next week, with the special Christmas Eve dinner I'm making, Christmas dinner with the in-laws and then with my Mom... so I'll skip the cookies for now. But I'll be baking these again in the near future, I think.

Lemon Sugar Cookies

I signed on for the cookie exchange at work this year, and while I first had crazy dreams of complicated fancy cookies, I ended up being realistic about my time, energy, and skills, and went with lemon sugar cookies. I used the Food Network recipe for Lemon Volcano Cookies, but tweaked it a little by adding a half teaspoon of lemon essence to the cookies, and upping the lemon zest content by a pinch or two because a teaspoon seemed like nowhere near enough. Oops, upon reviewing that recipe it appears I also missed the vanilla completely. Well, no matter, they turned out great anyway. The only real hiccup in the process was the lemon sugar - after refrigerating the cookie dough and trying to cut it into slices, the lemon sugar was falling off, so they didn't keep that nice lemon-sugar "crust" like in the Food Network photo. I didn't pulse the zest and sugar in a food processor as instructed, I just smooshed it all together with a fork, so maybe that's my problem.


I did remember to use my KitchenAid mixer this time! Cookies are so much easier when I've got that thing doing all the hard work!

In return for giving my coworkers batches of these lemon cookies, I got snickerdoodles, flourless peanut butter cookies, cherry almond cookies, and adorable little sandwich cookies with a chocolate filling. Like tiny, tiny, Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies. Mmmm.

Christmas Cookie Extravaganza!

Today was Cookie Day 2010. An event of near-epic proportions. A day which leaves us covered in flour and buzzing from the sugar high.

We get together at my mother-in-law's place in December every year so we ladies can bake cookies while the menfolk wrestle with the assembly of the Christmas tree. This year there may have been some actual wrestling with the strings of lights, because I heard some muffled cursing and then some muffled electrical engineering brainstorming to try and get them to work. They figured it out, though, because in the end there was a fabulous decorated (and lit) tree to admire over eggnog and cookies. And we ended up with a LOT of cookies!


We started by making the oatmeal chocolate chip craisin cookies I've already talked about. There is debate among us whether they should rightfully be allowed as Christmas cookies, but since everyone loves them we definitely had to make them. After that, we got down to the difficult one - the shortbread cookies. The recipe is a very old one from a Five Roses cookbook my Mom's probably had since before I was born. We always made them for Christmas, with Mom doing the dirty work of mixing and rolling and cutting, and us kids going wild with sprinkles and colored sugar. I always end up in the "Mom" role when we make them on cookie day - they say it's because I'm better at rolling them out, but I suspect they just want to play with sprinkles. :)

The first batch, though, didn't turn out quite right. The recipe instructs the baker to knead in flour until the dough "just begins to crack". Well, I learned tonight that it is a damn fine line between "beginning to crack" and "falling apart into cookie dust". Some of the first batch was salvaged and we were able to cut out shapes with the cutters, but after one cookie sheet's worth I just rolled the remaining dough into lumps and added sprinkles and hoped they'd taste better than they looked. This was the result:


Cookie fail! They taste ok, so it's not a complete loss, but considering how pretty these cookies are when we do them right, I was frustrated with myself for misjudging the flour. I started over with a second batch and they were perfect. I think I need to make these more than once a year so I can remember what "just beginning to crack" looks like.

The third cookie of the night was the peanut blossoms. I'm not a huge peanut butter fan but everyone else loves them, and there would be a riot if we skipped these. My favorite part about these cookies is eating the Hershey's Kisses that are left over.

What's for Dessert: Pumpkin Bread Pudding (and Maple Whiskey Cream Sauce)

For Thanksgiving (American-style) this year, I was assigned the task of bringing dessert. Not yet feeling a mastery of pie crusts, I was at a loss for interesting and tasty ideas. Until the Food Network rescued me. I was watching a special Thanksgiving episode of Throwdown with Bobby Flay, in which the Pioneer Woman challenges him to a five-course Thanksgiving dinner cook-off. I've been following her blog for a few months now, which is why I was interested in watching in the first place. On the show, Bobby Flay made a pumpkin bread pudding for dessert, and it looked incredible. So I thought I'd give it a shot. I put the recipe together over a couple of days to save myself some stress.

A couple of days ago, I made pumpkin bread using my friend Tasha's recipe. It really is the best pumpkin bread I've ever had, so even if you're not going to make the whole bread pudding thing, at least give this bread a try. And read her blog sometime - she's got some great recipes on there. Lucky for me this recipe makes two loaves, because we couldn't help ourselves from slicing into one of them that night when it was still warm from the oven. I think I'll be making mini-loaves to give away to co-workers for Christmas this year. Plus extra for me.


Last night, I made the Pioneer Woman's Maple Whiskey Cream Sauce. I had to ask Dave to pick up some bourbon for me, because it's not generally something I'd have in the house because we're not big drinkers (especially not bourbon or whiskey). Actually, I asked him to bring me a bottle of Colonel Kwik-e-Mart's Kentucky Bourbon, but he couldn't find it and brought me Maker's Mark instead. I considered leaving the booze out, but she raves so much about it on her blog that I decided to stick to the recipe, at least the first time. It turned out so incredibly good. It took ages to thicken up and I gave up and decided to let it cool in the fridge while it was still fairly liquid, but when I pulled it out today to use, it was exactly the right consistency. I stirred it to check, and then I used the spoon to see that it had exactly the right flavor, too. I want this sauce on everything now!

This morning I got up early and cut up the bread into little cubes and toasted them in the oven while I was watching the Macy's parade. Then I followed the directions from Bobby Flay's Food Network site, skipping the sauces and substituting my own fabulous fresh pumpkin bread. I tweaked the recipe a little, using 1.5 cups of light cream and 1.5 cups of 1% milk, instead of the 2 cups heavy cream and 1 cup whole milk he calls for. It just seemed too heavy for me. And since I don't have fancy-schmancy real vanilla beans lying around, I dumped in a tablespoon or so of vanilla extract.


I served it tonight at Thanksgiving dinner, with a drizzle of the sauce and a blob of whipped cream. Fantastic. Really. My mother-in-law has decreed that this shall be a new Thanksgiving tradition, so you know it's got to be good. We split up the remaining bread pudding (and sauce) so everyone could bring some home! I give full and grateful credit to Tasha, Bobby Flay, and The Pioneer Woman... I just assembled it all!

What's for Dessert: Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Craisin Cookies

Note: edited to correct amount of butter!

These are currently my favorite cookies. Make them. You will not be disappointed. If you are disappointed, mail them to me and I will eat them.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Craisin Cookies

1/2 cup room temp butter
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup regular sugar
1tsp vanilla
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups flour
1tsp baking soda
1tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
3 cups oats, either quick-cook or old-fashioned (uncooked, of course)
About a cup of chocolate chips
About a cup of Craisins (dried sweetened cranberries)
Also: A gallon of milk - because you'll want a glass with your cookies later. You shouldn't make these if you're out of milk, because you'll regret it. I speak from experience.

Crank the oven to 350F. Cream the butter and sugars, then mix in eggs and vanilla. Sift all dry ingredients together (or be lazy and stir them in a bowl with a fork, like I did) and then add them to the sugar mixture, half at a time. It will be pretty thick at this point. Add the oats and stir them in. This is the point at which I wished I'd remembered I have a KitchenAid mixer in a cupboard, because my arm was hurting. This is a very hard batter to mix well by hand! Stir in Craisins and chocolate chips. Use as many as you think you need to have a few in each cookie. I ended up using about 3/4 cup of each for this batch because it seemed like enough, but I've used the full cup in the past with no problems.

Drop the dough onto an ungreased cookie sheet in tablespoon-sized blobs. Leave a little room for them to expand, but you don't need much.

Bake them for 10-12 minutes, until golden brown. Because I'm paranoid that my oven is crazy, I started peeking at 8 minutes. 10 minutes was definitely the "done" point for my batch.


Let them sit on the cookie sheet for at least one minute before taking them off to cool or they will crumble apart. Unless you want them to crumble apart on purpose because the broken ones have no calories, in which case you should remove them immediately.

This recipe makes 4 dozen. But you should double it. Because they disappear fast.

Recipe Fail - Honey Cinnamon Muffins

I'm not going to post the recipe because I'm still not sure how I botched these, and I don't want someone out there to make bad muffins and blame me.

I've made these before and they were delicious, but this time they got crispy and burned very quickly. Did I copy down the recipe wrong, or is my oven too hot? Or is it because I used our CSA honey and it's cursed?

My husband enjoyed eating the burnt offerings for breakfast today, which is sweet of him. But I'm going to try them again next weekend and use an oven thermometer to see what's going on. The oven is a near-antique wall oven and I think its temperature sensor is broken. There's a... thing... on the inside of the oven wall, which I suspect might be a sensor of some sort. If I knock it while putting something in, it shrieks. Just before sticking my muffin pans in, this happened, so maybe I messed something up, but I've also noticed that my oven tends to cook things faster than it is supposed to, and I need to keep a closer eye on things near the end of the cooking time.

My stove has issues too - the rings stay so hot for so long that even after I've turned the heat off, water will continue to boil for several minutes. It makes me nervous to try anything fancy that would require good heat control.

One of my long-term hopes for this place is to get a new stove and oven so I have something better to work with.