The past five months

It's been a while. Almost five months to be exact. A lot has been happening, and nothing all at the same time. My kitchen is still not done. It's getting there, but there's been a lot of hiccups this summer keeping it from being finished. I'll update the progress on it soon. The other thing that's kept me from baking and therefore blogging... the fact that I'm pregnant. Now pregnancy does not mean I can't bake, but when morning sickness took over my life and I couldn't even keep water down, baking was the last thing on my mind. I didn't start feeling like a normal human being until the middle of August. (Side note: Zofran is one hellofa drug. It made me able to get out of bed in the morning.) So, in the past few weeks I've been baking again. Alot. I've been making a lot of sugar cookies. I'm actually working on an order for 250 cookies for a co-worker's daughter's wedding this weekend. I'll post on that after they're done. So, a few things I've been baking this month, plus one order I forced myself to do in June for a birthday party. Enjoy!

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.

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.

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.

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.