reika

Even though I think I'm fairly adept at baking, I'm still generally wary of working with yeast. I have this perpetual fear that I'm going to screw it up (make the slurry too cold or too hot, inevitably end up killing the yeast) so in a fit of bravado, I decided to make these cinnamon sticky buns for Christmas breakfast. My mom was staying over, and if there's anybody who's a challenge to impress, it's mom.

I followed my baking guru's recipe, down to making twice the amount of needed dough, which essentially was just a buttery brioche dough. The recipe itself wasn't difficult to follow; it just takes a lot of time, between the rising and the chilling and the second rising. It is so fulfilling to actually see the dough rising and expanding though~ maybe that's the thrill that bread bakers experience all the time.

The final baked product came not too shabby, in my opinion. The mom and I scarfed a couple each as soon as they were removed from the oven.

I never really worked with pumpkin before, but I figured that, hey, it's that time of the year so why not try something new?

So far, I've made:
- pumpkin roll
- pumpkin muffins

And I now plan to make:
- pumpkin pie ice cream
- pumpkin pasties, maybe in anticipation for next week's HP7 movie?

Inspired by The Food Librarian, I set out to make this Dorie Greenspan double apple bundt.

I actually found the cookbook, Baking: From My Home to Yours, at a random Marshall's store when I was out shopping with my mom. It's literally a tome, but they had priced it at $7.99 so I figured why not. Little would I know that it would become one of my favorite baking references here on out.



I know I sound like a remnant of a bygone era when I say this, but I really like making bundt cakes. I've borrowed my mom's pan indefinitely and have made numerous cakes (mostly pound cakes or banana cakes) using it. Maybe it's a false sentimentality, because I don't think I remember my mom making too many bundt cakes in my childhood, even though she did have a couple of cake pans back home in the Philippines too.

Anyway, this recipe makes a lot of bundt. I still had apples from when we went apple-picking a while back so I used a combination of empire, golden delicious, and macintosh for the recipe. I even made my own apple butter since I wasn't going to buy a jar of it only to use 1 cup; it's easy to enough to make anyway. I added the nuts and raisins, but you can skip them if you don't like such elements mixed in your cake, or if you're serving it to others who may be allergic, etc.

(If you don't have the book, the recipe's here.)

Haven't been doing too much baking or new recipe cooking lately. Most of my meals these past weeks have come out of a can, or are of the stir-fry kind. As it's also Lent, I'm generally trying to limit my intake of meat. It's a good idea anyway and I may continue to do it even after Easter just to continue the habit.

Anyway, the one time that I did bake -- mayhaps this was three weeks ago -- it was to make a small batch of brownies using (Inside a Black Apple)'s recipe. Tania swore up and down that this recipe is super simple, but has yielded the best results. She's right. It's also a testament of how much of a fatty that I am that I had all the ingredients to make brownies on hand.

Had my holiday brunch on Saturday, and decided to also do a cookie exchange this year. I really should stop giving myself so many things to do. I become really ambitious when it comes to cooking -- if only that applied to other aspects of my life, I would be a much richer woman.

Anyway, I made three types of cookies (and a loaf of banana bread on the side):

Earl Grey Tea Cookies [recipe] - Yeah, it's a Martha recipe, but I tried making a small batch of this last year and really liked it. The cookies are a shortbread texture, and with the tea actually embedded in the cookies, it makes for a unique flavor. The boyfriend totally loved this, which doesn't surprise me since he adores tea in any shape or form, and probably also because the resulting cookies weren't too sweet.

Snickerdoodle Blondies [recipe] - I really like the classic simplicity of snickerdoodles. It's just cinnamon and sugar, but really, life doesn't need anything else more complicated than that. The cinnamon-sugar topping makes the resulting bar cookie appear like a cross between a coffee cake and a blondie, but that's just all right by me. I would've preferred it if the blondie part were chewier, but again, that's my personal preference; the recipe's quite good as it is.

Chocolate-Hazelnut Sandwiches [recipe] - This was a little bit of a cheat since they're essentially just sugar cookies (which I cut out in star shapes -- c'mon, it's the holidays!) with Nutella in between. Everything's always better with Nutella, I figure. The RS sugar cookie recipe, to their credit, is super foolproof. I haven't really worked with sugar cookies before (except for the slice & bake types) but I didn't have any issues with their recipe.