Gingerbreading

It's been a long time since I made gingerbread. I think I was in highschool and my friends and I trashed the kitchen because we thought it would be funny to take pictures covered in flour. I never realized until now that my mom was pretty cool about all that... I don't remember the gingerbread being that tasty though, it was hard and the dough was evil and hard to work with. But this try went much better!


Last week I mixed a bunch of gingerbread, chilled it over night, then rolled it out and baked it up. Then let it cool and decorated it for like 3 hours the next day. I used this recipe, and also used her royal icing recipe. It was my first batch of royal icing ever. Exciting. And while my icing was pretty simple and I think it looked pretty good covered in my Christmas sprinkles! :oD


For the cookies, I baked up some normal sized shapes of gingerbread men, reindeer, trees, etc. And I also had a bunch of mini Christmas cookie cutters that made bite size gingerbread cookies. Mini anythings go over so much better with crowds! Recipe is awesome, I've had them covered in tin foil for a week and they're still nice and soft and chewy. Amazing.


For the royal icing though, I required much more water than the recipe called for to make it anywhere close to a good consistency for piping. In fact I could of used more I think, and I had a ton left over. I read it can be stored at room temp in an air tight container for up to two weeks, which I'm doing and had good intentions for a gingerbread house or something else cool, but we'll see.

Here's one more pic of a mini gingerbread tree with Christmas nonpareils.


And one more of a super cool full size gingerbread man.


More are in my baking adventures set, plus more to be uploaded this week!

Embroidered Christmas Cards

Normally I don't send Christmas cards, I'm really bad at hanging on to addresses, but that's what facebook is for. So i crafted christmas cards this year, using these instructions to get me started.

I traced cookie cutters for the stencils. I like the snowflakes best but they're also the most work! Each card took about 2 hours or so! These were sent to friends but I still hope to make some for family!

Definitely should of taken these pics during the daylight, but I had to send em! Here's how some of them turned out!





Right now I'm on a mission to finish a crochet gingerbread house in hopes it will be a center piece for a dinner part Sunday. :oX It's ambitious...so here I go!

Funfetti!

Tis the season for holiday treats, but it was also my friend Kristine's birthday last weekend!


Perfect occasion for homemade funfetti cupcakes! I used my standard go to for some vanilla buttercream too.

They came out great, only issue was the color on my sprinkles started to run and pretty soon they were mostly tye dye cupcakes. Then, well, when all colors start to mix, you get gray. But they still tasted good!

That is all! Lots more and super cute on the flickr page. Back to Christmas crafting! good night!

Thanksgiving Baking

I know it's December, and almost Christmas. House is decorated, cards have been sent, gifts are piling up to be wrapped and I've been gingerbreading.

But all that stuff has taken time and I baked some cool stuff for Thanksgiving that deserves a blog post! I short changed a lot of my fall baking treats that were pretty cool so I'm trying not to do that again!

So here's the last of the fall baking, keeping it short and sweet. :o)

1) Pumpkin brownie bites


I baked and pureed my own pumpkins this year (and I still have a freezer full of pumpkin puree). So I meant to bake these to bring to Dave's family that was our second stop on Thanksgiving but my bottom pan burned and I had to pry them out of the pan. :o( The top pan, however, was delicious.

It's a fabulous chocolate brownie "swirled" with a pumpkin cheesecake. My recommendation if you're going to make them is to make the pumpkin portion first then the chocolate portion. My chocolate portion thickened as it cooled and made swirling difficult.

2) Pumpkin cookies withe maple icing


Seeing as I couldn't bring only 8 or so good pumpkin brownie bites for Thanksgiving, I got up early that morning and in addition to baking an apple pie, I baked these pumpkin maple cookies!

I did have maple extract on hand as the recipe calls for and I have to say this icing was orgasmic. If I ever make it again I'll try it with real maple syrup (we bring back a high grade from Maine every year), but the extract gives it some serious flavor. I had a ton left over though and couldn't bring myself to just get rid of it, so I put it in some tupperware and brought it to my mom's to set out at dessert for Thanksgiving. It has the potential to be to all foods what bacon has become to desserts. My uncle tried it on pie and I think my cousin put it over her ice cream.

Anyway, these cookies have a nice pumpkin flavor and also stayed nice and cakey. Love em.

3) Apple Cake


Once back from Maine I had some apples left over from my epic apple pie baking. So I baked up an apple cake from my Totally Tea Time cook book! I really love tea, and going to tea rooms, the whole tea experience. In fact I'd love to own a tea room, I think I'd be great at it, anyway... I got this book as a gift awhile back and thought I'd make some apple scones but this used up far more apples. ;o)

Came out pretty good, I thought I'd frost it with some swiss meringue apple butter frosting I had in the freezer but I don't think that's the point of apple cake and it was good without it anyway. :o)

That's it! That's all my fall baking blogged. On to the next adventure!

The Apple Pie Post

The holidays are busy, cut me some slack... See the flickr page for Christmas photos until the blog catches up with the holiday baking and crafting! There are new photos of my epic gingerbread adventure and crafty holiday cards!

But this post is about apple pie! I made two apple pies this Thanksgiving. One for my fam and one we traveled to Maine with for Thanksgiving with Dave's fam. Here's the one that came to Thanksgiving at my mom's house with us.


I made my first unsupervised apple pie this year (featured in this post of fall baking) and it turned out so well, my mom asked me to handle the apple pie for Thanksgiving. I really was very pleased with it. I got the recipe from a book my mom photo copied for me, Aunt Jenny's Pies Husbands Like.

It's all about how to hook a man with pie, I think it was published in the 50s? So it has to be good. ;o) And the pie did go over well with everyone who tried it! It makes a big deal about the "water whip" method for pie crust that involves pouring boiling water over something called Spry...the same thing as shortening...and then adding the flour etc. I used butter flavored crisco and it did turn out lovely.

I also used my William Sonoma fall pie crust cutters!


Cute! I colored the dough with different color food coloring and cut the leaves out of that. I'm such a nerd. Here's pie 2 that went all the way to Maine. I came home after Thanksgiving and made this that night (hence the bad lighting) since we were leaving the next morning, so glad I had something to bring though, and again everyone seemed to enjoy it. :o)


My crust got a little burnt although I covered it with foil towards the end. I hear there are pie crust protectors that take care of this, but I have yet to see one.

I had some extra pie crust (I had to double Aunt Jenny's recipe for my giant pie dish) so I made some cinnamon and sugar pie crust swirl cookies. My mom and grandma always made these when I was younger with left over pie dough. We snacked on them in the car on the way up to Maine. :o)

Homemade Applebutter

I need to get back to blogging, and I need to get to posting some recipes. Usually, I follow recipes as I find them and add notes to my delicious page. I don't know the rules around posting adapted recipes, but I feel I did enough research to this homemade applebutter recipe to post here!


I wanted to make these apple butter macarons. So first step was I needed apple butter. I had gone apple picking and had some apples to use up. ;o) So Whisk Kid's recipe over here, calls for whole spices like cinnamon sticks, allspice berries...I didn't even know allspice came in a berry... So I did some googling and found substitutes.

Homemade Apple Butter

adapted from Whisk Kid

Yields about 2/3 cup

3 cups diced apples (I think mine were red delicious and rome or courtland?)
2 cups water
½ cups sugar
1 tbsp lemon juice
¼ tsp salt
1 tbsp honey

¾ tsp ground nutmeg

¾ tsp ground cloves

1 ½ tsp ground cinnamon

Peel and dice the apples.

Place the prepared apples and remaining ingredients in a large pot. Bring to a boil (uncovered) over high heat, then reduce the heat and let simmer (also uncovered) until very soft, about 1 ½-2 hours. Be sure to mix every once in awhile, increasing the frequency with which you do so the longer the apples cook. Once very soft and caramelized, remove from heat and allow to cool briefly. Pour into a blender or food processor to puree. Store in the fridge.

It's fabulous, and smells delicious while cooking! My only change after the fact reflected in the recipe above was to omit the black pepper from the allspice substitute. Here is what I found on it:

One teaspoon ground allspice is equivalent to approximate 5 whole berries.
If you need a substitute for allspice combine equal parts of ground cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and black pepper.

Right...skip the black pepper, you'll taste it in the applebutter and rather prominently.

And in case you're wondering here's how the macarons turned out!


My macarons have been hit or miss, it seems the baking temps are way to high on all the recipes I've considered and I've consulted quite a few of them... I thought the cinnamon on top would add some significant cinnamon-y flavor, but it did not...and I added 4 tsps of apple butter to the buttercream, but could you taste it in the the end? No. Plus I burned one tray...how does that happen?

Anyway, happy apple buttering!

Fall baking round up

work has me stressed out, so haven't been keeping up with my little blogger or much baking/crafting for that matter. Flickr has been updated thought!

Here's some cool photos from the season!


Pumpkin muffins!


Apple cider mini donuts! Yes! I got a mini donut pan! <3
My first apple pie all by my big self. With apples we picked from the orchard.


Sexy apple pie slice with homemade ginger ice cream, without and ice cream maker. Still a success! Doesn't go as well with the apple pie as I thought but it's tasty. :oD


Homemade apple butter, would of been great except don't use black pepper in your all spice substitute, worst idea ever.


Vanilla and apple butter swiss meringue buttercream macaron. That's cinnamon on top, did it taste like apple cinnamon? No...just sugar. Still looking for a decent macaron recipe, baking instructions are all wrong for the ones I tried so far!


Ghost shaped Count Chocula cereal treats for a halloween party. They were awesome.