Holiday Recap

December is always a busy month and this year was no exception. I've been baking up a storm. Since it wasn't a good canning year, I made a LOT of cookies to give out as gifts. Gingerbread, Linzers, chocolate chip, Nanaimo bars, meringue rochers, damiers, and toffee. I was baking for DAYS. But I was able to bring 4 dozen cookies to my new workplace, drop off cookies for neighbors and friends, and still have plenty left over for the family.

Then it came time for the actual holiday meals. On Christmas Eve we went to visit my parents and cooked lunch for them. I made fettuccine Alfredo and sautéed chicken and shrimp, so that everyone could add their own protein. For dessert we had...cookies!

For Christmas day, the family was greeted with warm cinnamon rolls, fresh out of the oven. I had made the dough the night before and, after its first rise, put it in the fridge. Rolling it out when it was cold was so much easier. I might even make them more often, considering how much easier it was. 

Dinner was chicken or salmon en croute, depending on if one eats fish or not. With curried mashed sweet potatoes on the side, yum! I made puff pastry from scratch, and wrapped each piece of fish or chicken individually. I did pre-cook the chicken because I was worried the puff pastry needed less time to cook than the chicken. They ended up being much larger than I envisioned, and we have plenty of leftovers. For dessert, I made creme brulée!

Chicken

Now I'm very tired and, other that making bread, I think I'll be taking a break. We have plenty of leftovers to eat.

Salmon

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.

Serious Disappointment

Ever since the new oven arrived and I discovered it had a convection function (I'd forgotten) I had been planning to make macarons and try it out. My theory was that my barely functional gas oven couldn't maintain a stable temperature and that convection was required so the heat would be drier. Today the elderchild and I made a small batch of macarons. Everything was going fine. Until it wasn't.

Note: every single cookie cracked. All are stuck to the parchment.

My best guess is that the parchment I bought was just... crap. There is no other way to describe it. I had cheap parchment before, and then I bought a batch from Amazon that was great and worked perfectly. So when it was time to buy more, I went through my order history and ordered the exact same product. That was somehow completely different when it arrived. I'd had heard this complaint about Amazon recently, that other vendors were reselling products on Amazon that were not the correct product and not of the same quality. This is why, in the past I had not purchased toilet paper and other sundries through Amazon; mainly because the reviews for various products indicated that they were also subject to the same bait-and-switch.

Anyway, you can imagine our disappointment. We can't even pry all these broken macarons off the paper without the paper coming with the cookie. It's ridiculous. Every single cookie was ruined. Every. Single. One.

Setting aside all the work involved, almond flour is not cheap.

I have ordered King Arthur Brand parchment. And if it arrives being anything other than King Arthur Brand parchment, I will send it back. 

The Princess and the Nonpareils

As I mentioned in my last post, my mother-in-law requested gingerbread cookies. I decided on hearts this time, thinking I could get ready for Valentine's Day by making some cookies ahead of time and freezing them until February. I made them on Sunday and today I got to decorating them.

One thing I know - I should use the good metal tips rather than the cheaper plastic ones; the icing came out in globs. Despite that, the cookies turned out much cuter than they had any right to, considering my suspect decorating skills. And, speaking of that...

For Christmas, in my stocking there were various little sprinkle decorations, including a bottle of tiny white nonpareils. (Yes, I know nonpareils are the chocolate candy with the little white balls, but I think the term also applies to the white balls themselves.) Let's just say they are affected rather profoundly by static electricity and, the second I opened the bottle and poured some into a bowl, they scattered.

Despite sweeping, and roomba-ing, I am constantly stepping on these itty bitty, 1 mm-across candy balls. And I can feel every one. I have taken to picking them up off the kitchen floor by hand. And I haven't even checked out the dining room yet...

Quite The Production

Holidays came and went, along with a quick ski trip in Vermont that was less "skiing" and more "staying inside and avoiding the rain." We did play a pretty awesome game, Betrayal Legacy, which kept us entertained for hours but needing to take a break once in a while because it was so complicated! We also discovered that ground venison is a fine substitute in tacos and spaghetti sauce. My brother-in-law sent me a bunch of game meat for Christmas; I sent him a signed copy of Hank Shaw's new cookbook: Pheasant, Quail, Cottontail.

One of the things on my agenda this weekend was to defrost the freezer, so exciting, but that meant I needed to get the four gallons of tomatoes out of there. Yesterday they thawed and this morning I boiled them and tried to run them through the food mill. I'm not really sure what happened except that somehow the food mill got jammed. I ended up scooping out tomato pulp from the hopper and pushing it through a sieve by hand, making a mess that the youngerchild suggested looked like a crime scene. Someone has been watching too much Supernatural, maybe? Anyway, after the liquid boiled off I was left with 3 and a half pints of tomato sauce; I added Persian spices to one pint, Italian spices to the other two and left the half-pint plain.

The other thing that I wanted to get done today was to make a batch of gingerbread cookies for my mother-in-law, who was envious that she didn't get any over the holidays. I got the cookies all made today - two different sizes of hearts - and will frost them tomorrow, hopefully. It's a LOT of cookies. 

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!

Autumn Baking Problems

These hazelnut shortbread cookies do not look like acorns.

They are supposed to. I followed the recipe exactly. I'm not even going to link to it because it didn't work properly. I was able to salvage them by sandwiching the smaller ones with ganache, dipping them all in dark chocolate, and sprinkling them with fleur de sel. Like so:

They are crispy and light, but they aren't what I was going for. And they aren't acorns.

Today I tried again, using a linzer cookie recipe and adding in some hazelnut flour instead of almond flour. They're not dipped in chocolate yet but...do they look like acorns?

Yes. And they taste fabulous.

Fiddly

The other day we were going to a party and I wanted to make pretty cookies. I'd seen a picture somewhere of cookies where the dough was woven and then the cookies were cut out and they were adorable. I tried to recreate that.

I will never do it again.

The dough was too flexible and broke a lot, and I had a hard time making even strips. Some of the cookies came out looking like those woven buttons that were popular in the '60's and '70's. I finally gave up and made rounds scored with the tines of a fork. Some of those got sugar crystals and some didn't. It was a long afternoon.

Easter Treats

In the few days leading up to today, I was busy with work but also with baking. First, as a lunch box treat, I made Easter-themed Linzer cookies. In order to do this, I needed to get tiny little cookie cutters. Even with them being so small, the cookies needed to be a fairly large size to accommodate the challenges of asymmetric cut outs. Many of the rabbits broke, but here are some of the ones that made it:

The fillings were blueberry jam and strawberry lavender jam.

Today, in between Easter baskets, video games, an egg hunt and a walk to the grocery store, I made Puits D'amour (wells of love) out of quick puff pastry (butter, flour, salt and water, folded and rolled many times), lemon curd and meringue. Since they ended up being more oval than round, I took that as serendipity. They are egg shaped, after all.

Happy Easter!

Comfort Foods, Again

There has been an unbroken circle of illness going around the house over the past two weeks. So much so that a lot of our plans have completely gone out the window. Such is winter, I guess.

Anyway, yesterday to ease unsettled tummies, I made chicken noodle soup. Actually, I made chicken and goose noodle soup, as I found both chicken and goose bones in the freezer. This won't be canned as it's needed now.

Today I made "kitchen sink cookies," meaning chocolate chip cookies but with anything and everything in them. Some of the things I'd been hoping to add had gone bad, including pretzels (really? yes, pretzels can apparently go bad) and peanuts, so here's what was in them: mini chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, coarsely chopped almonds, coconut flakes, craisins, raisins, and mini marshmallows. I should try to remember not to bake with marshmallows. They melt and caramelize before anything else bakes.

However, having a weekend in which I am stuck in the house helped me finish another project. Mocha, our rabbit, has a problem with textiles. By that I mean he finds some of them irresistible. So about a month ago my husband recovered the window seat. I took the leftover fabric, bought a contrasting but complementary fabric, some trim, and a few pillow forms and, very slowly, made replacement pillows. I finally got them all done today.

Just don't look too closely at the seams!

Valentine Linzer Cookies

With Valentine's Day coming up, I needed to make some cookies for the kids. Thankfully, shortbread-type cookies work just fine in my oven and that's exactly what Linzer cookies are. I made them without almond flour so they were just regular flour, butter, sugar and egg yolks. I cut my recipe into a third and that made 22 cookies. I suppose could have made them smaller, but these felt just right.

The filling is strawberry lavender jam from my stash. Half are being frozen for now and the other half can be eaten in the next few days. Yum!

Snickerdoodles

Yesterday, I made a batch of snickerdoodles. They were so easy! But I used my #24 scoop, which was too much dough per cookie. It's my smallest scoop, and I thought I'd be OK. Not really. Some of the cookies ended up hexagonal because they ran into each other. I decided to try again.

Today's batch was a touch different. Rather than rolling them in cinnamon and sugar, I decided to use cardamom and sugar instead. Which meant, of course, that I needed to add some rosewater to the dough! I added a teaspoon of rosewater. Maybe not enough. It smelled great before baking but lost the rose flavor/scent after. The cardamom tasted great, though!

Rainy Slushy Day

An overcast, cold, slushy day is the perfect day to work on some canning projects!

I pulled out 4 ziploc bags of chicken bones from the freezer and made stock this morning. Four quarts are set aside for canning later and I might set aside more. It depends, as I'm also making chicken soup and we'll see how much I need. So the rest of the morning was spent cleaning out the freezer a bit, reorganizing, and pulling chicken meat off bones.

Also this morning, I made a 2.5x batch of Cranberry Rhubarb Compote, which made 13 cups of compote. Of those, 12 got canned and are just coming out of the canner now. My gift stash is quite complete, I think, but I always add more and more people to my list so I have to double check!

Another thing that I've been working on is baking. I've baked about 12 dozen cookies so far in the last week: Oatmeal Scotchies, Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Orange-Hazelnut sandwiches. I have a plan to give some to the staff at work, and I want to make more cookies for home as well. I might have to make some gingerbread cookies soon!

Cookies for School

The elderchild's school is having a cookie reception to launch their annual Toys for Tots drive. Even though I just did all that cooking, I volunteered to make two dozen cookies for the event. I pulled out the syllabus from pastry school and made these beauties, which are essentially shortbread with apricot jam filling and dipped in chocolate. 'Nuff said.

The Finished Product

Here's our table from last night's feast!

The turkey, brined for two days, was perfect. There was stuffing. Mashed red potatoes. Creamed (well, sort of) broccoli, mashed squash. Pumpkin bread made by my sister-in-law and sent with my in-laws. The sweet potato casserole was made by my Mom, although we did the marshmallows on top here at the last minute. I got a little distracted and so they had a smokey je ne sais quois which, heh, augmented their flavor. Really, they were only burnt a little!

Plus, cranberry sauce, gravy, pickled beets and eggs, pumpkin pie, apple pie, and two different kinds of macarons brought from Zurich and London by a friend who joined us for dinner.

I am thankful for all the love and joy in my life and that I have time to sit back and savor it once in a while. Happy Thanksgiving!

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! 

Restocking

This weekend has thus far been spent making the things we've run out of. Yesterday morning I made a batch of yogurt, half a gallon this time rather than a full gallon, and it was ready when I got home from work. Last night I started a batch of bread. This morning I proofed it and baked it. This afternoon I made eggplant caponata and canned it (three pints plus one 4-oz jar). Later today I'll make granola.

For the bread, I thought I'd try to make a Pullman type loaf using my regular loaf pans and a baking sheet to serve as a cover. They worked okay, but could have been proofed longer so they would have been more square. I think if I'm going to do this on a regular basis I would need a Pullman pan with a lid and use a less dense bread dough.

Also, two days ago the youngerchild and I made a batch of cookies. For the first half, it was just regular chocolate chip cookies with both milk and white chocolate chips. For the second half of the batch, the youngerchild requested to add mini-marshmallows. They don't exactly work as desired; the marshmallow melts and leaves holes in the cookies. I suspected that might happen which is why I didn't add them to the whole batch. I did, however, solve the too-flat problem; my oven hasn't been hot enough so they would spread too much and get very flat.

Up To My Ears in Cookies

Which, by the way, is never a bad thing.

Although almost all the cookies I've made are on their way to Canada, so I'm not really up to my ears in cookies anymore. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

This morning I first made a batch of granola and then realized I didn't have enough powdered sugar to make the macarons I wanted to make for the memorial service. Off the the store, to get much more than just a bag of powdered sugar, of course! Oh! You know how I was collecting those Monopoly game pieces? Well, I haven't won anything from the game board yet but I did win a $25 gift card to the grocery store as an instant prize. I cashed that in today and used that for my groceries. Kinda cool!

Once I got home I tried to make chocolate macarons. I went online to figure out how much cocoa powder to add and even added an extra egg white to the meringue since the cocoa powder dries things out. Despite that, and after piping all 8 half-sheets of cookies, the batter was too thick and the cookies cracked. I decided they weren't pretty enough to use, so I made another batch (the first batch was a half-recipe and the second batch a quarter-recipe; a quarter-recipe makes 4 half-sheets) but didn't use cocoa powder. Instead, I added a little espresso powder to tint the meringue and add a mild coffee flavor. Since they all had the same chocolate ganache, essentially I made mocha macarons. These came out better, but still many of them cracked. I was able to get enough pretty ones to set aside 3 dozen mocha and 1 dozen chocolate macarons to send off to Canada. That, plus the 3 dozen lavender cookies and the 2.5 dozen lemon sablées is, I think, plenty.

I did assemble a lot of the remaining cookies and have a box to give my neighbors and some for us to enjoy at home.

UPS is very kindly shipping my box of cookies up to my cousins with a plan to arrive on Monday. Hopefully they will get there unscathed. I would hate for them to be ruined somehow! 

Day 24: Petits Fours Frais

Yesterday's class involved making something we've made before, pâte à choux. However, we were making it in the context of petits fours frais, or fresh. Some of us had already done this when we volunteered to do the prep for that party back in the beginning of March. So when it came time to make the little tartlets, we were familiar with the process. Pate sucrée, almond cream, fresh fruits with apricot glaze and lemon curd with Italian meringue. I got to work the torch again, which always makes me happy.

The best part of yesterday was getting a sense of how far we'd come. We made pâte à choux in week 3. It's now week 12 and it was a whole lot easier. Not perfect, mind you, but easier.

Today I made a batch of lemon sablée cookies, which are being set aside to be sent to Vancouver. My great aunt, a woman very special to me, passed away a few weeks ago and, while I can't go to the memorial service, I can be there in spirit in the form of cookies. After all, food is love. I have one more batch of cookies to make (tomorrow) and then I'll send them up to my cousin.

Also, I finally got to that bag of Meyer lemons in the fridge, and currently have 5.5 cups of lemon curd in the canner.

Day 23: Cake Decorating

I think this is one of the classes I was most looking forward to; my home cake decorating up until now has been haphazard at best. Probably because I never really piped anything at home and today was all about piping frosting and royal icing. However, before you get any notions that making frosting roses is easy let me assure you, it is NOT.

We started the day by making yellow cake and cookies, basic recipes, so we could practice our decorations. Then we made royal icing and we each got to choose a color and then make roses. Granted, the icing wasn't stiff enough, even with adding more sugar, and it was a rainy day which likely made it more finicky. But my roses were UG-LEE! I did a little better with the apple blossoms and, because I had purple frosting, I made violets.

After everyone was good and frustrated, we moved on to icing the cookies. This went a lot better; again we each made a color and then we passed them around to make our cookies and play with techniques. We made piping icing for the outlines and flooding icing to fill in between the lines. One of my classmates taught me how to make really pretty roses in the icing. (Unfortunately, that cookie smudged on the way home and so I just had to eat it.)

Then it was time to work on the buttercream frosting for the cakes. We made a Swiss buttercream, as we started the egg whites and sugar in a double boiler and then transferred that to a mixer; from there the technique is the same in that you beat it until it's cool and then add the butter. As we made a lot of buttercream we were in serious danger of overflowing the larger mixer. Ultimately we had to split the batch for it to beat properly. The buttercream was left white so we could work on the cakes.

First we assembled the cake - trimmed layers with about half an inch of buttercream between the layers. Next was a crumb coat and then back in the freezer to chill briefly. After that, the cakes were frosted and the sides were smoothed. Chef showed us how to do a basketweave on the sides and we got to pick how we wanted to finish the top edge. I chose a braid. The basketweave comes out so beautiful and I really enjoyed working on it; I took my time and I'm pleased with the result. Finally we added our flowers and had the option of writing on the cake if we wished.

The flip side to all this work is that it was a significant mess and clean up took longer than anyone really wanted it to. But we still managed to get out of there before the next class started!