How Have I Not Made These Before?

I really have no excuse. I have lived in New England almost all my life and, somehow, avoided making whoopie pies. Was I intimidated by them? I can't say. 

But since it is pumpkin spice season, the stores are full of pumpkin whoopie pies, and I decided that maybe I could make a batch. Now that I am no longer contagious. I started simple, with chocolate ones. 

A few of them didn't come out as pretty but, given that my husband has promised to always eat my baking mistakes, you don't get to see those. You just get to see the good looking ones. 

A Whole Lotta No, and a Surprising Yes

Several people asked me recently if I was entering canned goods in the fair - sadly, No. I just didn't can enough things to make it worthwhile. It hasn't been a great year for wild produce. Even the elderberries I have been eyeing all summer seem to have been eaten before I could get to them. 

Then, yesterday, I was supposed to have an in-home macaron making class that I won at a silent auction. I was ready - even though my mixer died earlier in the week, my husband was able to replace the worn out gear in my first dead mixer and get that one working, I had all the eggs, the elderchild was heading home from college to participate. Everything was ready! So I took a COVID test. Just in case, you know?

Shockingly, it was positive! 

I have been working directly with COVID positive patients since the pandemic started. This is the first time I have ever tested positive, and I don't even really know how I was exposed. Strangely, I have zero symptoms. I'm now just stuck at home for a few days and trying not to infect anyone. (Elderchild turned around and left, without getting exposed, thankfully.)

So, macaron class? No. For now.

Missed It

We missed apple picking season again. 

That's two years in a row. I guess I keep hoping both the kids will be free on the same weekend and, while technically they were, one had Covid so we couldn't exactly go anywhere. I still have some applesauce from last year and when I run out I can just buy a bunch of apples and make more, but the outing was always part of the fun. Maybe next year we can plan that better.

What I have done recently is make a chocolate cream pie, something I have not made before. I followed the King Arthur recipe and it was fabulous. The pie did not last long! Much more successful than that red velvet cake, I might add. 

Today I am making chocolate chip cookies, using a recipe from the NY Times. Lately my toll house cookies have been very...thin. I'm not sure what has been happening but they come out very flat and yet still chewy. Weird. This recipe is fantastic. At least, they look good. We haven't tasted them yet. My new coworkers have been after me to make cookies, since they know I bake. So I'm bringing some in for them. The cool thing about this recipe is that you make the dough and refrigerate it for at least a day. The longer you let it sit, the better it is, apparently. Seems to work. 

Farewell, 2021

Like I said before, I've been doing a lot of baking, just not writing about it. 

For the holidays, I made a lot of cookies to share with family, friends and coworkers. I even made enough to share with the youngerchild's D&D group. Gingerbread snowflakes and stars, chocolate crinkle cookies, Nanaimo bars, Linzers, and M&M cookies. It took a few days to bake them all and not very long for them to get eaten!

Over the holiday week I fulfilled a promise to my family that I would make croissants from scratch. This usually takes 2 days, but can be done in one. Basically, I got all the folds done, rolled the croissants and partially proofed them in one day, put them in the fridge overnight and then completed the proofing the next morning and baked them. A lot of butter leaked out, so I'm going to have to try again when I have the proper amount of time to do them slowly, as that might change things. Still, for a first attempt, they were very good, particularly fresh out of the oven with strawberry jam. 

I hope next year is the year we finally come out from under all this. Fingers crossed.

Pizza and Doughnuts

Due to the frequent rain the tomato crop at the farm share has been limited. We're expecting more rain over the next few days so yesterday they said we could pick 15 large tomatoes each in addition to the sungold cherry tomatoes. I picked plum tomatoes and set to work this morning making pizza sauce, which is something that we use a lot of throughout the year. 15 tomatoes made a half-batch of sauce, about 4.5 cups. 

But that isn't nearly as exciting as doughnuts! Last Saturday I took a recreational cooking class at the culinary school and it was all about doughnuts. Mmm. In pairs we made a batch of yeasted doughnuts that were then deep fried; my partner and I opted for Boston Cream. It is, after all, a classic. And a favorite of this family for sure. Each student could also make their own batch of cake doughnuts; the choices were apple cider, gingerbread and Devil's Food; I made the Devil's Food and my partner made gingerbread and we shared the results. I also made a humongous batch of chocolate glaze which we shared with other groups and also the chef instructor planned to keep the rest and use it the next day. 

All in all, the doughnuts were tasty and easy, and now I have another pan to buy....

Wild Blueberries

Another thing that's been missed for the past few years has been wild blueberry season. We did find some when we were camping last year, but we hadn't trekked out to our favorite spot since 2017. Apparently, in the interim the bushes were sprayed again and have started to come back but aren't up to their usual bounty. 

Yesterday we went fairly early in the morning to go pick - partly because it was the coolest day of the week and partly because it was a weekday and hopefully not as crowded. As we're still fairly busy and everyone has been tired lately, we set a limit of two hours of picking. At the end of that we had just under 6 cups of berries. Last year I had made blueberry jam from the regular berries we picked in NH, and still have a bunch, and this was enough to freeze some and make a batch of scones. 

This morning I made a full batch of scones which made twenty. In addition to the blueberries I tossed in a bit of crystallized ginger. I froze a dozen and the rest we had throughout the day. Although they were at their best still warm from the oven, with soft butter. Mmm. 

Savory Scones

The other day I was sent a recipe through Instagram from my elderchild with a request that I maybe make them, sometime, please? They were for Spinach, Feta and Fenugreek scones. Well, I couldn't find fenugreek leaves, but I was able to get everything else. Spinach, cilantro, feta cheese, self rising flour and then all the regular scone ingredients. Today I put them all together.

At first the dough is dry and rough but the minute you add the cheese and fresh greens it becomes almost too soft. Maybe the greens needed to be completely dry? Not sure. The instructions weren't really clear on that part. Also, I probably rolled them too thin as they didn't puff up like the photo. That's OK. They tasted very good. Even the youngerchild ate most of one and, considering how much green was in there, that's impressive.

Served with chicken marsala and buttered noodles, they were a fine addition to dinner. A big thanks to the elderchild for finding the recipe!

All The Pieces Coming Together

After our disastrous macaron attempt last week, the elderchild and I tried again yesterday. It was almost disastrous again but we persevered and got pretty decent looking raspberry macarons!

Here's what worked, and what didn't:
1. The oven, new, is convection, and it seems that it should be set to 275˚F. 300˚F was too hot and they didn't develop their little feet.

2. The parchment, King Arthur brand, was perfect.

3. The egg whites were the near-catastrophe. I had egg whites in a carton which I'd used for a cake. After we tried to make meringue out of them for the macarons I recalled that they don't work well for that purpose (maybe there is a preservative or pasteurization issue? I don't remember). Anyway, we separated some eggs and made a better meringue which we used for the macarons. Not wanting to waste the other egg whites, later I beat the meringue for probably 20 minutes and made forgotten cookies. Which are not bad, after all that!

Forgotten cookies.

4. For the ganache, since I didn't have raspberry purée, I used raspberry syrup I had in my canning inventory. I added together the volumes of the purée and invert sugar and just used that total amount of raspberry syrup, and it worked perfectly.

I am now out of almond flour and don't anticipate buying any more in the near future as my freezers are both overflowing with food.

Where've You Been?

Yeah, I recognize I haven't posted since Thanksgiving. I don't know where the time goes anymore. But I have been baking, a lot, and getting my holiday gifts together.

As November drew to a close I discovered I hadn't really been canning all year and had approximately three jars in my gift stash. Normally I need about 50! Clearly something needed to be done. I decided to try to make a variety of cookies this year and hand them out to my neighbors instead. I started with gingerbread (Day 1). Actually, I started with a gingerbread house, and then moved on to gingerbread cookies. We had a marathon decorating session (Day 2) and I set the cookies aside. Nine dozen.

Then I made shortbread cookies (Day 3). They were supposed to be spritz cookies, using my cookie press, but the dough was too thick (I vaguely remember that this was why I put the press back in its box for over a decade) so I rolled it out and made shortbread hearts which were filled with ganache and dipped in chocolate. Two dozen.

Next I made Biarritz cookies (Day 4), with almond and hazelnut flours and orange zest. These also were sandwiched with ganache and striped with dipping chocolate. Four dozen, I think. Maybe five. I lost count.

The next task was meringues with hazelnuts (Day 5), Rochers. The technical difficulty here was that the hazelnuts clogged the star tip while piping, so I had to change to a plain tip and they weren't as pretty. They baked overnight in a low oven. Six dozen or so.

Then I made chocolate crackle cookies (Day 6) which was really fun and easy. But the recipe was a little off for me so instead of five dozen cookies I got four and a half dozen.

Lastly, a double batch of Nanaimo bars (Day 7). This recipe I posted is similar but I use pecans and my Mom's recipe has slightly different proportions. These are traditional for our family at Christmastime. Roughly four dozen bars.

Today I assembled little gift boxes of all the cookies along with some kisses and other chocolates and have started delivering them to our friends and neighbors. I have more to do, but this takes care of the bulk of people on my list!

I Bake Because I Love You

The youngerchild takes Latin. Last year the fun project was gladiatorial combat using cardboard armor (and weapons) that was graded on its period accuracy. This year, they will be escaping Pompeii, or trying to, during the volcanic eruption.

Snacks for the class were optional.

Originally the youngerchild asked for Lava cakes but we realized they needed to be baked and served immediately. That wouldn't do. Then we discussed cupcakes with lava colored filling. That led to the inevitable...cream puffs with lava colored filling.

Here's what I know - 1. I am terribly out of practice. 2. One full batch of pate a choux makes a whole lot of cream puffs. And swan bodies (I'm freezing those, thinking about Thanksgiving which is not that far away). 3. My hands aren't as strong as they were while I was in culinary school (see #1, above). 4. Swan heads don't need to be baked for 20 minutes, 15 minutes will do (the first batch burned, whoops!). 5. I have clearly forgotten how to make fondant topping. I did manage to save it after it broke, just barely, and half a batch is just enough for 3 dozen cream puffs. 6. I'm dreading starting my new kitchen and desperate for it at the same time.

Anyway, here are the lava puffs. And I'm exhausted. They literally took all day.

I love you, kiddo.

Problem Solving

Let's talk cookies for a minute.

I love to bake cookies. I used to always bake cookies for my friends. In college, as I had access to a kitchen, I had a deal: if you bought the chocolate chips and the sour cream, I would bake you a batch of cookies. I did this all through medical school as well. When things got hectic as I became a parent I ended up baking less and, when we moved to this house, I was never able to get the cookies right, so I gravitated away from baking those basic, lovely chocolate chip cookies everyone wanted.

Over the years since we've been here, I've chipped away at some of the problems that were making my cookies come out wrong. They were too flat, too crispy or too cakey. I was aiming for "just right," which seemed impossible. I changed the recipe from the one I liked with the sour cream to the traditional one on the packages of chocolate chips. I bought a thermometer for the oven so I could be sure the oven temperature was correct. I even learned more about baking and still, they weren't perfect.

Yesterday I was inspired to bake cookies again. I took a look at the recipe and, using my pastry school training, thought critically about the recipe. It calls for baking soda. Baking soda needs acid to work and there really isn't a lot of acid in the recipe. There was acid, certainly, in the recipe that calls for sour cream, but I wasn't using that one anymore, and I couldn't figure out where the acid was coming from. So I decided to add 1/4 teaspoon of baking powder.

And that, my friends, is what finally made the difference.

Also yesterday I made a batch of the cheese bread I like so much, using Legion and this time getting the liquid content under control. I did the same thing, using 8 ounces of Legion and reducing the flour and milk accordingly. They were perfect! 

Cinnamony Goodness

Is this not the most amazing looking thing ever? It's a muffin tin doughnut. Essentially it's a muffin, but meant to look a bit and taste a lot like a doughnut hole. It's quite awesome.

I didn't have the buttermilk the recipe calls for, so I used plain yogurt, which worked just fine. For the record, it's ~400 calories per muffin. Yikes!