Thanks to a great recipe from Martha Stewart, I made a batch of old-fashioned sugar cookies on some new baking boards I purchased. Her recipe calls for lemon juice and lemon zest, but I removed those two ingredients since I’m not always the biggest lemon fan. Added some St. Patrick’s Day candies on top for fun. Not too bad!
There isn’t much in this world that is better than catching up with one of your best friends while making dinner at home. And if that dinner happens to involve these delicious, yeasty, honey wheat rolls made from scratch, well then so much the better:
Another work from the domestic side. I made oatmeal cookies using the trusty Quaker Oats vanishing recipe, and threw in some chocolate chips and chopped pecans in place of the raisins.
I guess the recipe works, because the cookies are gone now.
February 17th
Yummy Baked Goods
Nom nom nom. I had decided awhile ago that I wanted to learn how to make these simple yummy treats my mom sent me last semester at college. And furthermore, i wanted to work on sending them to two of my friends who seem to be having a rough time lately - so really, no time like the present to whip up a nice, yummy surprise.
They have no name, but I was fiddling with names like: Chocolate Saucers. But my brain got fried, so it ended there. And technically, you could call them chocolate covered pretzels but that’s not really what they are and that’s boring. So pfft. Chocolate saucers it is.
Watch as I give you a homemade recipe.
Step Number One:
Buy a bag of Hershey’s hugs or kisses. I have done both, and hugs taste better (kisses are a bit overwhelming - although both taste good!!!) and melt quicker/are easier to deal with. But anyway, do as you please, both work. C’est la vie. Anyway, proceed to unwrap all those hugs/kisses. This is probably the most time-consuming step of the process. Other than waiting for the chocolate pretzels to solidify in your fridge.
Step Number Two:
Find a place that sells circular pretzels. Or something similar. If you live around the Illinois area - um, I don’t know how popular this chain is anywhere else, but Jewel Osco (grocery store) has them. I don’t know of anywhere else that would really.
Step Number Three:
Place hugs/kisses on circular pretzels. Really, rocket scientists invented this formula.
Step Number Four: Preheat oven to 200 degrees. When it’s all fired up and ready to go, place those pretzels in. I should clarify that if you’re using a stone slab such as that… you really ought to use parchment paper on top of it, otherwise it’s hell to get those things off. If you’re using a cookie sheet, apparently no sort of paper is necessary (according to my mom who made them on cookie sheets before and popped them off quite easily). Anyway, if you are using hugs, you should leave them in for 2-4 minutes. The original recipe says 2-3, but our oven must be weak or something, because we needed to keep them in for four minutes. As for kisses, you are better off leaving them in between 3-5 minutes, or, in our oven, it was best between 4-5 minutes. Assuming you don’t like my haphazard time frame, you should pull them out when they begin to look glossy and a bit gloopy/melty.
If you leave them in too long: The kisses will begin to form this weird shell, which doesn’t matter too much in the long run, but it doesn’t make the pretzels look as appetizing. The hugs usually just melt down into the pretzel (fo srs, they are mad convenient).
Step Number Five:
YUM. I mean. When you take them out, if they aren’t already melted down (most won’t be, it’s sheer good luck really if they do), you take your finger to each kiss/hug and press down until they smush into the pretzel. Yup, it gets messy. But so so yummy. The chocolate will try and follow your finger back up, but you’re going to have to try and swirl it around a bit and get it to lie flat - if you want them to look like a discus, rather.
The real challenge of this step is, after so many of the candies you have pushed down, you will be EXTREMELY tempted to lick your gooey chocolatey finger. DON’T DO IT. Or rather, you can do it, but remember you licked that finger and proceed to use a different finger for the rest of them. Get what I’m saying?
Also, kisses will be harder to push down - for the same strange reason that they take longer to melt. Also also, it might be easier/less messy if you wet your finger first before flattening the chocolate - or rather, it will make the chocolate flatter, which is preferable.
Step Number Six: After that funderful (yes, I just said funderful) process, proceed to take your pretzels and place them in the fridge for about 45 minutes - 1 hour and a half until they look chilled and solidified in place. You don’t want gooey pretzels at this stage, haha, so make sure they are definitely not that.
Step Number Seven: Pop pretzels off tray/stone slab/parchment paper. And eat. Nom nom nom. So good.
As I said, it’s really not a long process. It’s just the unwrapping candy. And waiting.
Funny story: I’ve still been making these consistently the past two days. See, once I almost finished the bags for my friends, my mom requested some for the household. -_- So, here I go again. I made two more batches tonight, and I’ll probably make two more tomorrow. Jeezus
This week has been unsually hectic at work, but I have still been plugging away with some creative time.
13th: edited episode 39 for Potter Fic Weekly. Soon to be released!
14th: baked some wonderful flax bread from my own recipe
15th: finished the 7″ for the leg of a pair of stripy socks
16th: cast on and knit the ribbing and 4 pattern repeats of the leg pattern on the Bellatrix socks
i baked another kahlua chocolate cake for my husband’s birthday. i was going to bake it last week but postponed it because i was sick all week. i photographed some eggs before i baked them:
Posting my Thing a Day for 2/14 a day late. My apologies; was out late last night and didn’t have time to post during the day because I was in a zombie-like state. I’d gotten up balls early to bake some madeleine cookies as a Valentine’s gift for my boyfriend:
They were kind of tricky and I had to spend ages whipping the batter into a perfect ribbon consistency, but they actually turned out well! I was mega, mega stoked. The little, buttery shell-shaped cakes got wrapped up in a homemade gift box and delivered as fresh as possible to his work.
Today I attempted Red Velvet cupcakes. I hadn’t heard of them until recently. They have a pretty interesting history it seems. I underestimated how much red food colouring I would need…so they ended up a pinky brown colour.
My bf is a fan, I however was not. They weren’t sweet enough for me. Mind you the icing was tasty.
For day 15, I will try my hand at Calligraphy!
Just knitting. And I find progress shots of knitting to be pretty boring—especially when what you’re knitting is a seemingly endless sequence of garter stitch squares—so I haven’t bothered to post any. I’m on the third square of the third strip of that baby blanket, though I didn’t finish the second strip because I spilled some very strong tea onto the lightest blue square (of course). I tried to soak it out, but the spots are still there, so I’ll have to rip back to the beginning of that square and reknit. Blah, blah, blah. See? Knitting’s horribly boring.
Meanwhile, Wednesday is the night I make dinner for my mom, so I did make some food, in addition to knitting. (Making food may not seem like much of a project to normal people out there, but although I’m a pretty good cook and like doing it, I rarely bother cooking for myself. It’s not nearly as much fun as cooking for someone else, and the leftovers too often end up festering in my fridge.) Mom had pretty much nothing in the house to make dinner out of, besides stuff we’d both eaten too recently to repeat, and we weren’t ravenously hungry, so I said, “Well, I could make David Eyre’s Pancake . . .” (more…)
One batch cherry almond, one batch chocolate-cranberry-almond. Mmmmmm!
For Valentine’s Day, I was courageous enough to make half a batch of Brooklyn vs. Boston Cream Pie Cupcakes (VCTOTW, page 65). My vegan pastry crème is not as clearly visible in the photo as in the cookbook but the taste is purely heavenly. My rich chocolate ganache frosting came out a little thinner than usual this time (probably because I had a heavy hand in measuring the soy milk) but what the heck. I’m still loving this batch of not-overly-sweet-and-super-rich cupcakes.
There is something simply happy about a plate of perfect chocolate chip cookies - crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside.
I forgot to post yesterday. I made blueberry muffins because the house was really cold. The ones on the left are wheat/gluten, egg and dairy free (and flat). The ones on the right only accommodate for nut, peanut, legume and corn allergeries.
On Day 9, I baked cookies. Some heart shaped and others flower-shaped. Oh, no! There’s a cookie missing! Where could it have gone?? munch… munch…
On Day 10, I decorated them with rolled buttercream.
Today, I made this bangle bracelet. I think it looks fun.
And for my next trick, I will be making cupcakes from scratch!
Today I only made some brownies. But I made them in my fancy bundt cake mold 
And I even managed to still accomplish my thing a day, while staying in my pjs all day long !!! Yay !
Today I made a siamese poppy seed strudel. When the dough is ok, something else must go wrong. But I made it for the first time. It tastes good, but looks horrible!
Today was a slow day. My roommate had a small party last night, and so today was the recovery and cleaning after that. Plus she took her puppy away for most of the day, so I had one of those lovely days to myself. I cleaned and sang badly along with my iPod. I putzed around online. I returned something to Amazon so I never have to deal with them again. I tried some lovely dessert wine at Whole Foods, and ended up buying a bottle for my boyfriend’s visit in a week. I didn’t get breakfast at Panera as planned, because it was a zoo in there. That’s okay, it’s probably better that I keep my pennies as much as possible. I also bought some eggs at Whole Foods, but I haven’t used any yet.
Trying to figure out dinner tonight, I decided to on an old fall back. Not in terms of the food, but in terms of the plan. Cooking for one can be a real challenge, and so I’ve often resorted to making a side dish as my main food, and then scrounging around for anything else if I’m still hungry. So, since I’d already planned to make Red Chile Carrots Cointreau for thing-a-day, I figured I’m make dinner and do my thing at the same time.
Again, I photographed most of the process, but I’ve only posted a photo of the final product in pan. Food photography is incredibly hard.
And, just for the record (to make up for my missed day), I not only photographed the puppy yesterday, I also did the unthinkable (for me) and experimented with my best ever recipe. I think a lot of people have that one recipe they make for all the pot-lucks or get-togethers, and it always garners rave reviews. Usually, we’re not interested in modifying it after that point (or at all, depending on how we got it), because what if it sucks? Well, I took the plunge, and instead of making my usual pumpkin bread I made pumpkin muffins with a sweetened cream cheese filling and a dark chocolate icing/frosting.
Out of this world. One of my roommate’s co-workers took three of them home with him after I went to bed, and the ones I left out had been decimated to a lonely five muffins. Which, between the roommate and I, are gone now. Sometimes it’s good to experiment with the tried and true, I think.
