I began my baking journey on Wednesday morning by making the dough for no-knead dinner rolls, also sometimes called Parkerhouse Rolls. I love to watch dough rise. It's so fascinating the way it slowly creeps up and up and up and how it gets all springy and soft. I like to poke dough as it rises. After my dough had risen an adequate amount, I set about rolling the dough into little balls to rise in a muffin pan. The recipe I used (from the Pioneer Woman, whose recipes I love), did not mention how many rolls the dough would yield.
For those who might want to use the recipe in the future, here's my advice: cut it in half. I was rolling and rolling my little dough bits and I filled one muffin tray. And then I filled the two cheap aluminum foil ones I had bought for the extra dough. But that still wasn't enough. I had to break out my little muffin pan to fill with baby bite-sized rolls. Here are my many, many trays of rolls rising on the oven.
Look at them rise!!! Did I mention I love watching dough rise? Once my rolls had risen for another two hours, I set about baking them. My oven tends to run on the hot side, so I often have to fiddle with the temperature and placement to ensure that everything gets thoroughly cooked and doesn't burn. It's very annoying. But after baking at 375 for roughly 16 minutes, I had lots of delicious rolls.
I had rolls coming out my ears. I still have a ton of rolls left over. It's a good thing they're so tasty because I'm going to be eating rolls until Christmas.
Next up, I made pumpkin cookies. (And okay, I cheated a little because I used canned pumpkin puree.) I'm not the biggest fan of pumpkin pie and I know it'll take me several tries to figure out how to make pumpkin pie just the way I like it (with lots of spices), and I hate to waste all the extra pies I know I won't eat on my way to culinary perfection. But, it didn't seem right to NOT have a pumpkin dessert of some kind, so I made these pumpkin chocolate chip cookies.
I love the mixture of chocolate with pumpkin, but most of all, I love the cakey quality of these cookies. They bake up nice and plump and are so tasty, especially right out of the oven. (Caution: Don't use big blobs of dough, because they do expand quite a bit while baking and then you're left with a monster cookie.) Then, I remembered these pumpkin cookies that MJ made last year with no chocolate chips and frosting and I thought those were quite tasty, so I made another batch of the same pumpkin cookies without the chocolate chips. Instead of using regular vanilla frosting, I used this brown butter maple frosting recipe from Bakerella's blog:
3 cups sifted confectioners sugar
1/2 cup butter
1/4 cup milk
2 tsp maple flavoring
Sift sugar and set aside. Melt butter over medium heat until golden brown. Watch closely so it does not burn. Add butter to sugar, scraping all the butter into the bowl. Add milk and maple flavoring. Stir until smooth.
And it was heaven. Seriously. The maple frosting was so, sooo good on the pumpkin cookies that I want to make another batch right now. I spent most of last night wondering what other types of cookies would taste really great with maple frosting. The maple obscures quite a bit of the pumpkin flavor but the two still mingle together so nicely. And well, maple frosting is just all sorts of decadent. Forget the cookies, I think I just want to eat maple frosting with nothing else. Mmmm. . . . .
Oh right, I was still talking about desserts. I also made two types of pies: apple crisp pie and banana cream. I'm really weird about apple pie. I really love apple pie, but I can only eat it warm with vanilla ice cream. I cannot consume apple pie cold or with whipped cream or no ice cream. And I've been trying, unsuccessfully, for the last three years to perfect my apple pie. This year, I decided to try a new recipe (again from the Pioneer Woman) that uses a layer of maple sugar, oats, butter and pecans as the top crust.
It was very rich, but still rather tasty, if still a little runny inside. (My apple pies are always a little runny.) I might use the recipe again with a little tweaking, but I love, love, love the new pie crust recipe I used. It was super easy to make and oh so flaky. I love flaky crusts.
For my second pie--the banana cream--I used a recipe from Dorie Greenspan's book Baking, From My Home to Yours. I've liked a lot of the other recipes I've used from this cookbook, but I always feel like there's something lacking in her recipes, or at least in her instructions. I made the pastry cream from scratch (a first for me) and while it had good flavor, it was a little too dense for me and made the pie too heavy. I also whipped up some fresh whipped cream with a touch of sour cream. I enjoyed the whipped cream, but its lightness contrasted sharply with the density of the cream. While the bit of banana cream pie I ate right after making the pie tasted good, it did not sit well and tasted rather heavy and flavorless once we got around to eating it later that evening. I think I need to find a new pastry cream recipe....one that's light and fluffy and subtle. Normally, I love banana cream, but this one fell a little flat.
But that's the price you pay for trying out new recipes. Some--like the maple frosting and pie crust--turn out fantastic, while others--like the banana cream--did not live up to my expectations. But, I had a lot of fun in the process and I now have a lot of leftovers to enjoy this weekend.
I also learned that food photography is a lot harder than it looks and that taking pictures of tasty food only makes me want to eat more of such tasty food.
Excuse me while I go consume a lot of pie. And rolls. And if the ants hadn't discovered the pumpkin-y goodness of maple covered cookies, I could enjoy some of those too. Maybe I'll just go make some more.....
>Anyway, I hope everyone else had a happy Thanksgiving!
4 comments:
I was thinking your food photography was good. Especially the part about the rolls. I have a recipe for pumpkin pie for people who don't like pumpkin pie. I made a pumpkin-apple butter pie. If you can find apple butter in your neck of the woods, it's worth a make. I went to three stores before I found apple butter which I realized was more of a Pennsylvania thing than a Virginia thing.
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/recipes/2006/11/19/apple-butter-pumpkin-pie/
That all looks really yummy. I'm far enough from the feast to think that masses of food look appealing again. Those rolls look especially tempting. Good job with all the cooking! I'm impressed.
And good luck finding World Tour or Rock Band. We stopped by Toys R Us (for the Babies R Us side) and they had THREE complete World Tours sitting there. I guess our find wasn't so special. But I can imagine that somewhere limited like an island would be rather challenging. You just never know. When I tried to find a Wii, since it was really hard then, I knew which stores received shipments on which days. If you get nice employees, they'll tell you. :) Oh, and I totally know what you mean about finding the guitar everywhere but not the complete set. The whole point is to have the big set, so it's annoying to have so many guitars floating around!
Abs, thanks for the pumpkin pie recipe. I think I may have more difficulty finding apple butter here but I'll give it a shot.
Emily, I guess I didn't have to work too hard....I found the complete World Tour set today so I bought it. :-) I went to Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Circuit City with no luck but they had one (just one!) at Gamestop. Now if I could just find a Wii Fit....
Mmm, baked goods. Well, ok...the pies don't appeal to me personally, but they still look good. John's family (being the pie fanatics that they are) dubbed Thanksgiving week "Pie Week '08, so we had a different pie every day, plus six pies for Thanksgiving. Whew, there was a lot of pie making going on...
And I know what you mean about food photography...it's so much harder than you'd think!
Good luck finding the Wii Fit...I search every store I go to, to no avail...sigh.
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