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What Are You Baking?


monavano

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Made ginger "chewies" last night, for our office tradition of one treat per day during the couple of weeks before Christmas.

Still getting used to my new oven - I think it runs a little cooler than my previous one, so that will take some getting used to. I was watching the cookies like a hawk, though, so they still came out nicely.

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Thursday was Toll House Cookies. Yesterday was Portuguese Orange Biscuits. Today is Sticky Pecan Bites (from the new Alice Medrich cookie book) and Apricot, Almond, and Lemon Cake from David Leibovitz's blog. (The biscuits = cookies and the cake = quickbread.) The apricot cake would be in the oven by now if I'd remembered hours ago to get the eggs out so they could come to room temperature :) .

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The apricot cake would be in the oven by now if I'd remembered hours ago to get the eggs out so they could come to room temperature :) .

You can bring eggs up to room temp quickly by submerging them in a bowl of hot tap water for a few minutes. Much easier than getting butter softened.

Today I made brown butter pecan shortbread cookies edged with turbinado sugar and fleur de sel. A little crumbly but delicious.

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Today we made 4 pumpkin pies and chocolate dipped treats; dried apricots dipped in dark chocolate; pretzel rods dipped in white chocolate, milk chocolate and butterscotch then decorated with colored sugars and various holiday toppings. "Dried" everything outside on platters on the deck and then will put into holiday bags with ribbons tomorrow. The kitchen was a mess but my 7 year old and I have memories and goodies to cherish (as does my DH of course)!

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Yesterday I made rugelach-apricot preserves with walnuts and raisins, and raspberry preserves with chocolate added to the filling.

Does a milk wash alone do the same job (with adhering sugar and cinnamon) as an egg wash with a bit of milk added? I think next time I'll just try brushing milk on, as the egg didn't add any finish to the tops.

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Yesterday I made rugelach-apricot preserves with walnuts and raisins, and raspberry preserves with chocolate added to the filling.

Does a milk wash alone do the same job (with adhering sugar and cinnamon) as an egg wash with a bit of milk added? I think next time I'll just try brushing milk on, as the egg didn't add any finish to the tops.

I brushed mine with heavy cream, then sprinkled on cinnamon sugar. The filling was damson plum jam, chocolate chips, almonds and dried sour cherries.

Today I made a Guiness Stout ginger cake, which we had with some creme chantilly. And I just made some brown butter to make another batch of pecan shortbread cookies with turbinado sugar and fleur de sel tomorrow. My daughter said they were the best dessert she's ever tasted and "a revelation." One of her girlfriends described them as "life changing." They were J's favorite, as well. An easy way to make everyone happy--I gotta hang onto this recipe (it's an amalgam of several I found online).

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I brushed mine with heavy cream, then sprinkled on cinnamon sugar. The filling was damson plum jam, chocolate chips, almonds and dried sour cherries.

Today I made a Guiness Stout ginger cake, which we had with some creme chantilly. And I just made some brown butter to make another batch of pecan shortbread cookies with turbinado sugar and fleur de sel tomorrow. My daughter said they were the best dessert she's ever tasted and "a revelation." One of her girlfriends described them as "life changing." They were J's favorite, as well. An easy way to make everyone happy--I gotta hang onto this recipe (it's an amalgam of several I found online).

Well, then, you need to share don't you think?

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I love being able to cook lunch :) Focaccia from Baking with Julia, topped with rosemary, grey salt, cherry tomatoes, and EVOO. The tomatoes were picked green before the first hard freeze, and spent several weeks in a bowl with a plantain. Not so great fresh, but nicely flavored when roasted.

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Toffee with Valrhona Manjari chocolate and toasted almonds. For a hostess gift.

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Just put a cassata into the refrigerator. In this one, rum-soaked spongecake layers alternate with a filling of sweetened ricotta cheese, orange rind, pistachio, and shaved chocolate. Icing, candied orange zest and toasted almonds go on it tomorrow.

Next up is angel food cake. While I'm letting the whites come up to room temperature, some of the yolks are going into a batch of an eggy butter cooky dough, which will go into the freezer to be sliced and baked later.

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I can't even begin to tell you what an amazing recipe is the Washington Post's Spicy Cheddar Thumbprints. I generally hesitate to cook something I haven't tested for a time as important as a holiday, but this looked so good I had to try it. The recipe is pretty futzy--it requires you to do this and that and this again--but the work pays back in spades. This was an utter, uncontested success. Really, I've made good stuff before, but I've gotten this level of homina from anything I've made. And from me too. They are spectacular. (And I swear they are the delicious evil twin of Aunt Kay's Butter Cookies.)

Recipe notes: I forgot to put the cayenne in the dough, and it's still wonderful--maybe better because it makes cookies just a jubilee of cheese. But also, I'm not a spicy gal--'medium' is about my limit--so I balked a bit at the call for habanero jelly. No matter! I had no time to shop, so all I could find was Dickinson's Hot Pepper Jelly. Make no mistake, these cookies were still awesome, but even my non-spicy palate thought it could have used something with a bit more heat. I very much like what the sugar in the jelly did for the taste, but there wasn't enough ... spice, oomph, whatever. I think next time I may try onion marmalade and not be so conservative with it. Or I may make sure to remember the cayenne and stick with Dickinson's.

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made faccacia. One of my worst efforts. It was flat and very yeasty. Really dense, had no rise in it at all.

I think I let the first rise go too long (24hrs on the dining room table. I completely for got about it). When rolled it out on a sheet pan, it would not rise again. Thank goodness, my kids have never met bread they did not like. It was gone within the afternoon.

Soup

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made faccacia. One of my worst efforts. It was flat and very yeasty. Really dense, had no rise in it at all.

I think I let the first rise go too long (24hrs on the dining room table. I completely for got about it). When rolled it out on a sheet pan, it would not rise again. Thank goodness, my kids have never met bread they did not like. It was gone within the afternoon.

Soup

This recipe that Legant posted upthread for No Knead Easy Focaccia is really good. I have made it twice within the last week with great success. I would recommend upping the salt to 2 teaspoons as the first time I made it (as written) we all agreed that it definitely needed more salt.

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I guess it was over a page ago that I mentioned making the graham crackers from The Art of the Dessert and being somewhat underwhelmed by results.

Well, better than first variation on Alice Medrich's, a surprise! Cf. Chewy Gooey....Cookies. Admittedly, I did the chocolate ones w salt sprinkled along w the sugar.* Not great idea perhaps and w only 1/4 c cocoa w 2 c flour (graham and oat only), not very chocolate-tasting. And w little sweetener, all butter and 20 minutes in oven (excessive!!!), blah, too crisp and over-cooked. Have to say I understand why Americk includes Crisco for texture.

Hope other recipes in the book don't disappoint.

*During a particularly cold farmers market, some guys were toasting marshmallows over their portable heater. Thought it would be nice to give them graham crackers to make semi-s'mores, but this may be the first batch of cookies I ever throw out.

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Finally getting around to Christmas cookies on the eve of Epiphany:

Small, crisp, thin squares, half flavored w cardamom and pistachio, half w Meyer lemon and cranberry. Corners dipped in melted, bittersweet chocolate and sprinkled w either pistachio dust or bits of dried cranberries [have used chopped pecans or crystalized ginger for latter flavor in past] while chocolate still gooey.

Also, a batch of Screaming Ginger Cookies

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I broke out the new ebelskiver pan (Williams-Sonoma)! My SIL gave me a pan and recipe book (Kevin Crafts) for Christmas. I already had the pan, so I traded that in as a down payment on a mortar and pestle. The book is full of great ideas.

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Monte Cristo-style, filled with chopped ham steak and shredded gruyere and dipped in raspberry jam (which harkens back to Bennigan's circa 1987....).

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That looks gorgeous, monavano!!

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Just finished washing up after baking 9 of these chocolate chip cookies, but as Alice Medrich suggests, with whole wheat pastry flour (same amount as AP) and toasted nuts, amped up to 1 1/2 c. to play off of nuttiness of flour. Unlike the chocolate graham crackers (see above), freakin' fantastic. A bit too sweet, but sugar's integral to amazing texture. Best at 8 minutes, 2 minute rest out of oven. Reserved rest of dough to bake tomorrow and later.

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Homemade granola bars from Ina Garten's Back to Basics. I didn't have any honey, so I subbed in agave nectar and some cane syrup that my uncle made, and also used the dried fruit I happened to have in the pantry. They smell fantastic. Here's hoping they do their job and fuel our new bicycling habit.

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Almond génoise, which will be soaked with orange juice and Grand Marnier and layered with orange marmalade and apricot buttercream and finished with an apricot glaze on top. From Ann Amernick's The Art of the Dessert.

The buttercream requires a dozen egg yolks, so I'll likely be making an angel food cake, too, 'cause that's a good way to use a dozen leftover egg whites.

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I made 2 1/2 dozen mini crack pies yesterday* and took them in to physical therapy with me this morning. The young therapy techs went berserk over them. I also brought strawberries and a homemade chocolate dipping sauce for everyone. Gotta give these folks some oven lovin' every once in a while. They've been taking care of me for a long time.

*I had half a recipe's worth of oatmeal cookie crust base left over from last week's crack pie bake, so it wasn't nearly as much work, although it was a pain in the butt to extract them from the cheap mini tart pans that my mother gave me.

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I finally made macarons. They'd been on my to-do list for over a year, but I knew that making them would be involved, so I kept putting them off. I was right -- they were involved, and used many bowls -- but they were also very yummy. I made pink-raspberry ones and cream/plain ones filled with dark chocolate ganache.

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I'm making another batch of Parker House rolls out of dough leftover from making them last Monday. It looked and smelled good coming out of the refrigerator. I'm giving it another rise, which I hope doesn't mess up anything, since it had gone through all of its rises before I decided not to make rolls out of all the dough and stashed this part.

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