Dog cookies... updated

A while back, I gave out the recipe for Siena's gluten free peanut butter cookies. The old recipe is still fine, but I played around with it a little today and really liked how the cookies came out. I wanted to make rolled out cookies in the shape of dog bones. The two things I changed were adding less water to the dough, from 3/4 cup to 1/3 cup, and replacing the baking powder with baking soda. I rolled out the dough between two greased pieces of parchment paper and but out the shapes. They baked at 375 degrees for almost 15 minutes, making them more crisp than the previous version. The girls enjoyed them too and are planning to share them with their boyfriends tonight when we begin the New Year's festivities! See you in the new year!

I'm making my own yeast. I know...

I can't recall how I came up with the idea. It just kind of came to me. I was sitting on the couch and googled "make your own yeast." I found this video which used a variety of fruits to make natural homemade yeast for baking. The raisins that were used worked the best, but it was an 8+ day process. Do I really want to make it that bad? Sure, why not. I have raisins, and water! And yeast isn't cheap. And it was easy enough to start.

Day 1

Throw some raisins into a glass jar, and fill halfway with water. Screw on the lid, give a little shake, and wait till tomorrow...

Christmas goodies

I haven't been blogging lately. I also haven't been baking as much this month. We went to Florida this month, but we also hosted Christmas for the first time ourselves. So I did a lot of cooking and baking this last week, anyway. For Christmas dinner, I made Betty Crocker crescent rolls and cloverleafs, sugar cookies, KAF's chocolate-pecan pie, KAF's cinnamon twists (and boysenberry twists), and America's Test Kitchen's peanut butter blossoms and mint chocolate cookies. I would have documented the pie and some of the other treats, but pre-Christmas drama overwhelmed me. And since KAF does a good job of detailing the pie, and the twists and crescents I've made before, I will show you how I made the cookies from America's Test Kitchen's holiday cookie issue.

Finished vanilla! and Christmas cookies

It's all ready to go! After more than two months of steeping in my cupboard, I've bottled and started giving away my homemade vanilla extract. I used some in my whole wheat m&m cookies tonight, and they tasted fine. I was a little worried because the extract isn't nearly as dark as I thought it would be. About a week ago, I was searching this problem online and came across Jamie Deen's (one of Paula's sons, who I usually find annoying) recipe for making vanilla extract. He heats and simmers the vodka on the stove before adding it to the beans. Does the heat draw out the vanilla faster than room temperature vodka? I should know this but I don't.

Today, on the French Chef! Episode 79: Brioche

The title pretty much sums it up. Today I made Julia Child's brioche. And it was good. I bought a reprint of her French Chef cookbook, originally published in 1963. I don't usually buy new books, but it was only $7 and it's Julia, you can't say no to Julia.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Just thought I'd show you what I made for my Thanksgiving. I told my mother to leave me in charge of bread. I made crescent rolls, Italian bread and honey wheat rolls. And since I just made sugar cookies for the baby shower, I decided to make Thanksgiving cookies too! Enjoy the day!

Sugar cookies

Decorated sugar cookies are kind of my specialty. I've been making them for most holidays the past few years. And I admit, I'm more into the decorating than the cookie itself. I usually buy sugar cookie mix to save myself a step in the process. But now that I have my mixer and I've been into baking these past few months, I decided I can't cheat anymore and need to make the cookies from scratch, which means finding a recipe to use.

I went to King Arthur Flour and Martha. I'm sure their recipes are good enough, but I didn't want to use either for some reason. I turned to one of my vintage books, Betty Crocker's 1963 Cooky Book. She has two recipes on p. 18, Ethel's sugar cookies and Mary's sugar cookies. Ethel's used granulated sugar, which I'm used to, and Mary's used confectioner's sugar, which I had never used in a cookie recipe before. I would have gone with Ethel, but the former owner of my book had annotated some of the recipes in this book, noting which recipes she liked, and those she didn't. She gave Mary's cookies a "good" beside the recipe. I'll trust her I guess.

Happy Birthday Jiaozi

Tomorrow is my dog's birthday. I know, I'm way too obsessed with my dogs. As if celebrating their birthdays wasn't enough, I also bake them treats for the occasion. Last month, for Siena's birthday, I made a dog biscuit recipe I found online. The girls loved them... until the next day when Siena got sick. I made a dumb mistake, I totally forgot that Siena's tummy cannot handle gluten. I promised her that on Jiaozi's birthday, I would make something gluten free so that she could enjoy them without getting sick.

Healthy muffins

Last week, Ron had his yearly appointment with his cardiologist (he has atrial fibrillation). I went with him for this appointment, I like hearing things straight from the horse's mouth. One of the things Ron needs to work on, his weight. Both of us have been pretty lax in our diets lately (for many reasons) and it's time to get back on track. So no more sweet granola bars for breakfast, I'm making muffins. High fiber, low calorie muffins. I call them "colon blow muffins." Oh how I love classic SNL. Anyways, I started with this apple muffin recipe from KAF, but I've changed it so much, I think I can call it my own recipe. And even though I cut down the sugars by more than half, these muffins still have enough sweetness. Here we go.

Vanilla update

Last month, I began the process of making my own vanilla extract as Christmas presents for my friends. Well, it's been a month, and since then I decided that the three cups I started out with were not going to be enough, so I bought another bottle of vodka, and more vanilla beans. This time, I bought the beans on Amazon, which gave me 7 beans for $7.95. And it was free shipping and they arrived at my house in three days! Since I didn't have another large Bell jar for the extract, I simply added the beans to the vodka bottle. This second batch was made about two weeks ago. But you'll notice that the color of the vodkas are very similar. I think that they will be ready for Christmas, and now I just have to buy the bottles to put them in!

Homemade crescent rolls!

It's the time of year when you start thinking about certain foods. For me, I love crescent rolls. And I really only have them at thanksgiving. Once in a great while, I will buy a package and make a baked brie. Mmmm, baked brie. Anyways, I was flipping through another of my vintage cookbooks last weekend, this time Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book from 1950. There was a recipe for homemade crescent rolls. Wow. Obviously homemade will be better than store bought, right? Well, before we get to the rolls, take a look inside this book.

1947 oatmeal cookies: are these Sverhoeven crispies???

I wanted cookies. I thought I wanted the fatty Martha Stewart chocolate chip cookies. Then I looked on my bookshelf. I pulled down a few cookbooks. One of them was Anna Olsson Coombs' Modern Swedish Cookbook from 1947. I've been having this thing where I'm collecting 1940s, 50s and 60s cookbooks. I was intrigued by the cover, and since I'm part Swedish, I bought this book.

fun with pastry dough

Now, when I started this blog, I thought I'd only be making new recipes to blog about. But there are some items that I make often, like KAF's cinnamon sticks and toaster tarts. They're just so good! I've played with the recipes a little, making the dough with whole wheat flour once, and filling them with goodies other than cinnamon-sugar. Today I saw mini palmiers at Trader Joe's. I've stopped buying things I can bake myself, so I passed them by but thought "Why can't I make my own with the cinnamon stick dough?" So I decided to try.

I made butter!

I was perusing a popular food blog today, and came across this yummy looking item. Cinnamon butter, mmmm. The Texas Roadhouse serves a honey-cinnamon butter with their rolls. And Country Crock made a cinnamon butter for a while but no longer does. Then I thought, I can make butter right? Yes, yes I can. (Oh, and yes, I do most of my shopping at Shaw's. How'd you know?)

whole wheat chocolate chip cookies

I had a thought last week. I've been baking bread and pastries like it's no body's business, but I haven't made a batch of cookies in months. I think the last time I made cookies was when I made decorated sugar cookies in August for a friend's 30th birthday.

Whole wheat bread competition

I bake a lot of bread. A lot. But They're usually sweet breads or in roll form. I haven't been able to perfect a wheat bread that I can use for sandwiches. I'd like to make and not buy sandwich bread every week. So today I chose two recipes to test to try and find a good "go to" recipe for whole wheat sandwich bread.

Garlic knots, mmmm...

After months of wanting, I finally tried the KAF recipe for garlic knots. I first saw these knots about six months ago in an email from KAF. I immediately read their blog post about the knots and then went to the recipe page. I was discouraged, however, when the recipe called for many things I didn't have on hand; dry milk, pastry flour, potato flour, pizza dough flavoring and the rolled dough improver. Well, over the past few months I managed to buy dry milk, and the pastry and potato flours (only the potato flour came from KAF, the others I could find at the grocery store.) Finally, this past weekend, on my trip to the KAF store I bought the pizza dough flavoring and the dough improver. I know, I could have made these without the pizza dough flavoring and the improver, but I wanted to make them correctly, and frankly I forgot about them for a while.

My addiction

I've found my weakness, KAF's cinnamon twists. I literally cannot get enough of them. I've been making them almost every week this month.
Last night I made the dough, and to make it a little more healthy (not possible with two sticks of butter, right?) I used 1 cup of white whole wheat flour instead of using all AP flour. And since I don't have a pastry blender (yet) I got dirty and mixed the butter in by hand. (This is pre-mixed, I didn't want to get my camera buttery)

Apple muffins

This past weekend was great. Not only did I get to go to Maine for the weekend without the girls (my dogs), I also got to go to the King Arthur Flour store in Vermont yesterday. I picked up a few things that I didn't end up ordering when I online shopped a few weeks ago, like a wooden pastry rolling pin, some more potato flour since I'm starting to run low, and some non-diastatic malt powder for the next time I decide to make bagels.

I decided I needed to bake something tonight. Ron, my dear husband, asked me to make bran muffins last week. My mother had given him some from one of the grocery stores and he loved it. I thought, homemade would be so much better. So I decided to make the KAF apple muffins, and modified them a little to make them more healthy.

Luckily I had made some dried apples with my plethora of apples a couple weeks ago.

Experiment time

Last year I had a brilliant idea. I should make my own vanilla extract. It's easy enough, vanilla beans, vodka and time. I can do that. Well, of course I forgot about it until this week. I decided to try it today while my noon rogani rose. All week I had been searching the local grocery stores and online for the best price on beans. Prices ranged from $4 to $8 per bean. And I would have to pay shipping for the $3 beans. Until I remembered the city's Mediterranean food store. I buy my pastry flour there for $.69 a pound! I can't find it that cheap anywhere else. So I stopped there this morning and was able to buy my beans for $2.99 each. So great. Anyways, the process of making the extract is easy enough.

I had a bottle of vodka, 40% alcohol. I guess the higher the alcohol content, the better.

Noon Rogani Bread

Even though my husband and I are going away for the long weekend, I decided I still wanted to bake today. Since I've been on a cinammon kick lately, I decided to make noon rogani bread. I made it once this spring when KAF first emailed me about the new recipe. It came out okay, but not great. I thought I'd give it another go.

I made the dough, as stated in the recipe, letting the flour, yeast and water rest after mixing. This does not look like the "slurry" they describe in the recipe, but I kept going.

Baguettes and Italian Bread 101

So here it goes. I'm delving into what may be a very time consuming and expensive (not to mention fattening) project. But baking makes me happy so I'm willing to try. I actually started this process last night for the breads I made today. I decided to make french baguettes to go with the French onion soup I'm making, and since the baguette recipe on the KAF website requires a starter, I began last night, with my first of what I'm sure will be many mistakes. I accidentally made the starter (twice) with all purpose flour instead of the bread flour it required. I thought I could walk away from the laptop and remember that. Oh well. I decided to use the mistake starter to make the Italian 101 bread, actually I made two loaves with the two false starters.

The starters were nice and bubbly this morning (sorry no pics) and I made the doughs in my new Kitchenaid mixer. (I got a great deal on one, otherwise I like making my breads by hand.)

The baguette dough made three loaves. Unfortunately, I didn't have a really sharp knife to slash the loaves, so they looked a little hacked before they went in the oven.

The Italian breads looked much better. It made two braided loaves.

Into the oven for a second rise.