Chocolate Cardinals...

I was going to do a post about the wheat bread recipe I came up with last week. I had plenty of pictures to post with it, but then my Blackberry went haywire on me. I'd been using it to take pictures because it's always with me and it has a 5 mega pixel camera, which is almost as good as my regular camera. Plus I can just email them to myself as soon as I take the picture. But when the media card on the phone gets an error message and wipes out all of my pictures, I'm stuck. Oh well. I plan on making that bread again so I will take pictures and do a post on them.

Even more cookies

I know. This isn't a cookie blog, but I've been making a lot of cookies lately, and I might as well show them off a little, especially since I'm sitting here waiting for bread to rise. Why am I baking today? Because for the second time in a week, the library is closed and I am at home during this snow/ice storm. If I had known I would have today off, I wouldn't have spent all day yesterday making the cookies for my co-worker Tracey's baby shower at work tomorrow. Though the cookies I made for Sam's shower were well received, I needed to up the ante a little and put more effort into these. They came out pretty well, although I am not very precise in my piping and can't pipe a good circle to save my life! Oh well, here are the newest batch of baby shower cookies for Violet (that's what she's naming her girl-to-be.)

Patriots cookies

So, it seems the chocolate chip cookies I made yesterday were as good as the Pats performance. My brother wanted cookies for his birthday, and I suggested chocolate chip because I found this recipe on one of the cookie blogs I now follow and thought it would be awesome to have decorated chocolate chip cookies. I was not a fan. To me, they tasted like a shortbread, and I do NOT enjoy shortbread. Plus, I didn't like them iced. Oh well, my opinion obviously isn't important since Ron loved them, and my grandmother took half of them home with her. I realize Pat the flying Elvis doesn't really have a face, I knew that if I tried to do the detail work, it would look worse than leaving it out. And since I didn't have a cookie cutter for it, I just used my bench scraper to get the triangle design. I'd say I'd try them again soon, but since they won't be playing again for another eight months, I should just make orange C's when da Bears make it to the Superbowl!

It's a barnyard symphony!

It's been a busy week of cookie making, and it's not over yet. Yesterday was my friend and coworker's first birthday party for her twins. She and her husband enjoy my sugar cookies and they asked me to bring some to the party. Since there was no theme, and she has a boy and a girl, I wasn't sure what to make. I thought about doing "boy" cookies and "girl" cookies on one platter, but decided against it. I then decided on a farm theme, animals and produce. I went to my stash of cookie cutters a few weeks ago to see what i had in a "farm" theme, not much. I had a small cow cutter, an apple and a carrot. I started searching online for cheap cutters, and luckily Sur la Table was having their after Christmas sale and I was able to snatch up 25 cutters for $.76 a piece! Not bad. I bought a barn, a rooster, a pear, a sheep and other cutters. I also decided to be a bit more professional in my decorating and invested in a set of piping tips and couplers, along with disposable piping bags. I did, however, decide to keep it simple with the flooding icing and use my trusty ziploc bags. I'm not usually a fan of my own work, but these came out pretty good. The twins loved them too, which was the best part!

Homemade yeast...Fail.

Update: My yeast didn't take. Oh well. Somehow I knew that some Sunmaid raisins and Worcester water wouldn't give me workable yeast for breadmaking. But it was worth a shot, right? Maybe I'll try again someday with better ingredients. For now, I will stick to buying my jars of yeast at the grocery store.

In other news, I've updated the design of the blog. I wanted something brighter, cheerier. So I went with my favorite color combo, pink and green and found some cute illustrations from a 1950s Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. I think it's really cute! I may keep working on it for the next few days, but I think that this look is much happier than the old design.

Mmmm, bagels

Happy New Year all! What better way to start off the new year then with a fresh bagel. I know. That's why I made them this morning. I hadn't made bagels in a few months and realized that I hadn't shown them on the blog yet, so I decided to illustrate the process. King Arthur flour has a few different recipes for bagels, but the one I like best is their recipe for Water Bagels. The recipe makes 16 bagels, about the size of Lender's bagels, not too big, but satisfying. I made 8 cinnamon raisin, and 8 everything bagels, using my homemade everything bagel topping.