Holiday Baking 2014 Edition

One of the Christmas traditions I most fondly remember of my youth was helping my mom with the annual Christmas baking. We would make tons of cookies, fudge, and divinity to divvy up and pass out to friends and neighbors. It's something I've always done and it was great to do it again after a break last year. I may have gone a little overboard with how much I baked but I had a very eager helper in the form of Zara. Even though I gave a lot of our goodies away, I still have way too much left. 

I normally vary what I make each year but I always ALWAYS make sugar cookies. I don't make them often because how time intensive they are but I think they're my favorite ones to eat. Zara was very excited to help with the sugar cookies, but most of her creations aren't pictured. They were very light on the frosting and very heavy on the sprinkles. I also ran out of red food coloring so my stockings were a light pink rather than Christmas-y red. 

I made two types of fudge. I made this Rocky Road Fudge and Creamy Chocolate Fudge. The rocky road fudge wasn't as creamy or fudgey as I had wanted but the chocolate fudge (one side was plain and the other I topped with toffee bits) was delicious. I'd never made fudge that way before and I was skeptical at first but it did turn out really well. 

I also made angel thumbprint cookies which we used to always make as a kid. They were also more time intensive than I remembered and not as good. I don't know that I'll be making them again next year. 

I rounded out my baking with two new cookie recipes, a chocolate and butterscotch chip cookie and peppermint patty chocolate cookies. I think the peppermint patty cookies were my favorite of all the new recipes I tried this year. I love the combination of chocolate and mint which just feels so perfect for this holiday season. 

I think I'm going to go eat another cookie. I hope your holiday baking was just as successful and enjoyable this year. 

Holiday Baking

It's time for my annual holiday baking report. In years past, I've gone a tad overboard with the cookie-making and have baked anywhere from 5 to 7 different holiday treats to pass out to friends. This year I decided to simplify my life just a tad and only pick four different cookies.

One had to be sugar cookies. I remember making them with my mom every year to leave out for Santa and I just don't feel that it's Christmas without them. To be quite honest, I love a lot of other cookies more than I love sugar cookies and they are rather time consuming, but I still do them every year. I thought these ones turned out particularly good this year.

Another must cookie are my pumpkin cookies with brown butter maple frosting. They might just be my very favorite holiday cookie ever. Pumpkin and maple are amazing together and are flavors you don't often see in a typical holiday cookie plate.

So I had my sugar cookies (no chocolate) and my pumpkin maple cookies (again no chocolate), so I decided to do a standard chocolate chip cookie. Except these are not your standard chocolate chip cookie, these are Jacques Torres' ("The King of Chocolate") famous chocolate chip cookies which are oh so delicious. David doesn't agree with me, but I think these are the best chocolate chip cookies in the world. (But be warned, they take a while to prepare.)

For my last cookie, I decided to try a brand-new recipe. I knew I wanted something very chocolatey and when I stumbled upon these chocolate cookies with mint chips, I knew I had a winner. Plus I liked that it added another flavor (mint) to the overall composition of the plate. Strangely, this recipe does not call for any eggs, which I liked, but it did leave the cookies a tad crumbly, so you have to be careful about that. I decided to use mint M&Ms to give my chocolate cookies a noticeable punch of green and red color. Above are all my cookies prepped and ready to be packaged.
In the past, I've piled cookies on plates or in metal tins. I prefer using tins but they are a tad pricey, especially to give to each friend (and we are kinda poor right now). Plastic/styrofoam plates just don't hold many cookies and they shift around a lot in transit. Plus, I've never found an adequate way to cover them and still have them look pretty. This year I remedied the situation by picking up these cookie boxes. I found them at Big Lots for $2 for a pack of two. (I saw them other places as well.) They held far more cookies than a plate and kept them secure and snug during transport. Plus, they provided a little window to display the goodness inside. All around a great idea, and one that I'll be using again in the future.

How was your holiday baking this year? Any good new recipes? I've included my recipes for sugar cookies and pumpkin cookies with maple frosting below. :)


Tessa's Sugar Cookies

3 1/4 c. flour
1 tsp. soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 c. margarine
1 c. sugar
1 egg
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 sour cream

Sift together dry ingredients, set aside. Combine margarine, sugar egg, and vanilla. Add 1/2 flour mixture and sour cream until well blended; add remaining flour. Roll out to 1/4" thickness (or if you're me, even thicker :) and cut out cookies using cookie cutters. Bake at 400 for 8-10 minutes.

Frosting:
1/2 c, unsalted butter, softened
1/4 c. milk, room temperature
1/8 tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla
1 lb. powdered sugar

Pumpkin Cookies

1 cup pumpkin
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup canola oil
1 egg, lightly beaten
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon milk
1 cup chocolate chips (optional)
1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees

Dissolve baking soda in milk and set aside. In large bowl whisk together pumpkin, sugar, oil, vanilla, and egg.
In a small bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the pumpkin mixture and then. Stir in the baking soda mixture and then chocolate chips. Spoon onto cookie sheet. Bake 12 to 15 minutes or until done.

Brown Butter Maple Frosting

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.

Holiday Baking

I was quite pleased with my holiday baking this year. (And the four pounds of butter I used.) I made a lot of delicious treats and there's nothing I love better than sharing them with all our friends each year. But I think that next year, I'll pick only 2 or 3 items to make and give everyone a lot more of each item. Most people only got 1-3 of each cookie and I definitely preferred some over others. Plus, I think some of my baking suffered because I made so many different types of cookies. Better to focus on a few and make them really awesome next time.

For starters, I made my favorite chocolate chip cookies with toffee and oatmeal. I covered a few of them with leftover chocolate from the Oreo truffles.
Then came angel thumbprint cookies. My mom and I used to make these every year for Christmas. I hadn't made these in awhile, so I decided to give them another go. (And filled them with my homemade strawberry and peach jam.) Sadly, I wasn't as impressed with these as I used to be. Probably because they didn't have any chocolate in them....

I also made Oreo truffles which are seriously one of the easiest things in the world to make. They look all fancy and nice and they certainly don't taste like Oreos but they are delicious. All you have to do take one package of Oreo cookies (minus a few cookies), crumbify them in a food processor (yes, I totally made that word up) and mix with one package of softened cream cheese. You roll them in balls and then cover with some melted chocolate.

So awesome. And of course, I had to made sugar cookies. It's the one thing I just have to make every Christmas. And every Christmas, I contemplate not making them because they are rather time consuming and I like other cookies better. But every year after making them, I eat like 12 and remember why I love sugar cookies so much. This is a great recipe which I got by way of my friend Kara, who in turn stole them from our friend Tessa. I love how recipes get passed and exchanged among friends. And now, every time I make these sugar cookies, I think of Tessa and the time we baked a peach and blueberry pie together in her tiny kitchen in San Francisco and I start to miss her and all my old friends so much that I have to eat 10 more cookies to stop feeling so depressed.

I also made two types of fudge. I made hazelnut chocolate fudge from a recipe my sister sent me but I really wasn't that impressed with it. So I made a second batch (the kind I normally make) from the recipe on the back of the marshmellow fluff jar. Last, I made a new type of cookie: 1785 Inn's Ten Layer Cookies. They were divine. But it's a good thing I only made one pan because they are heart-attack-inducing. Graham cracker crust. Dark chocolate chips. Milk chocolate chips. Butterscotch chips. Toffee chips. Coconut. Sweet and condensed milk. Yup. They'll kill ya. But oh, they were good.

Here's the plates all assembled. I hope that my friends here in Korea that received them enjoyed them. I love to bake and I love sharing all my favorite holiday goodies with my dear friends. It's my way to say thank you for their friendship. I've done it every year since I was a little girl helping my mom with her Christmas plates and it's something I hope to continue to do with my kids. Because Christmas is just not Christmas without Christmas cookies.

If anyone would like any of the recipes I didn't post, let me know and I'll share them. And if you've got some good recipes you love, please share! I'm always on the look-out for new cookie recipes.

A Recipe for Disaster

I'm a big fan of Bakerella's adorable baked creations. So last year, when she posted these adorable Easter cupcakes, I vowed that I'd make them for Easter this year. I mean, how hard could they be? It's just cupcakes with Easter candies arranged on top. I can handle that. (On a random note, Easter has the best candy. Just saying.)

For the last few weeks, I've been eagerly awaiting Easter's arrival so I could finally make the cupcakes. I bought cute Easter-themed baking cups and pastel-colored sprinkles. I stockpiled Easter candies and spent too much money on minature Easter bunnies. I could just imagine the gasps of delight and awe when I gave them away to my adoring friends. And everyone would clap their hands together and exclaim, "Oh Liz! You're so amazing!"

Yes, I realize that in my daydreams, I'm quite delusional.

Anyway, I just finished making my Easter masterpieces and they are anything but that.

In fact, they're an Easter trainwreck. Now normally, I wouldn't come onto my blog to boast about my failed baking experiments except that my expectations were so very high and my results were so very poor that I couldn't help but laugh over my pathetic cupcakes.

I started out by making the cupcakes out of a Funfetti cake mix I've had lying around forever. I figured Funfetti was a festive way to go for cupcakes. Plus, cake mixes are just easy. The cupcakes baked up moist and fluffy, so no problem there. On to the frosting.

I've got a bit of a frosting complex. I've never found a frosting recipe that I've really liked. But then the Pioneer Woman posted the best frosting recipe ever and I figured if PW said it was good frosting, it had to be great. I don't use two sticks of butter on just any frosting.

The ingredients were easy enough and I followed the directions but instead of producing fluffy, whipped frosting, I got a big bowl of runny liquid. I tried to do damage control and add more sugar to thicken the frosting up, but it was beyond repair.

I'm still mourning the loss of those two sticks of butter. What a waste.

Instead, I whipped up a quick buttercream frosting and set about frosting and decorating the cupcakes. I couldn't find any Sour Patch straws like Bakerella had used in her cupcakes, but I thought that Twizzler's would be an adequate substitute.

They were not. The Twizzler's ripped through the cupcakes and started to push out the sides of the baking cups. So I had to ditch the cute Easter basket handle look. No matter. I had plenty of candy to use anyway.

Except that arranging candy on a cupcake is much harder than it looks. The bunnies that I had bought had to be shoved deep into the cupcake to stand upright and the other candies either looked oddly large next to the bunnies or just plain funny.

Eventually, I just got lazy and laid the bunnies straight on the cupcakes like this.

Sadly, I think this cupcake with the pastel-colored bunny sprinkles turned out the best of all of them. How pathetic is that?

Oh well. I'll still hand them out to my friends and I'm sure their kids will still enjoy them even if they aren't the baked masterpieces with the most amazing frosting ever on them. They still taste pretty good.

Not that I've already eaten three of them or anything.....

Lofthouse Cookie Attempt #1

There is nothing I love better in the world of store-bought baked goods than a Lofthouse sugar cookie. They are my addiction and my crack and I have inhaled more boxes of these delectable treats than I care to admit. Little did I know that Lofthouse is a Utah company, based out of Ogden so they predominate on the West Coast, but I was often able to find them in Virginia and occasionally, in Hawaii (especially around holidays). Before we left Georgia, I insisted on buying two boxes of Lofthouse cookies (one I ate there and one I polished off in our first week in Korea) because I feared that I wouldn't see them again for another two years.

However I did see them at the Commissary over the Fourth of the July weekend. They were very patriotic. I rejoiced in seeing them and exercised extreme willpower and did not purchase them. I have come to regret that decision since I have yet to see them there again. They are probably only brought in during certain holidays and so I will have to bide my time until the next cookie worthy holiday arrives......which means I've got a long wait until Halloween.

So I began searching for a Lofthouse cookie recipe. And I found many a recipe claiming to recreate the splendor of the cookie; one even claimed to be the original recipe. I've decided to work my way through the collection of supposed Lofthouse cookie recipes I've amassed to see if I can come close to its cookie awesomeness.

Here's the recipe I chose to make today:

Ingredients:
1 (18.9 oz Pkg.) Pillsbury French Vanilla cake mix
1/3 C vegetable oil (Crisco)
2 eggs

Preheat oven to 375F. Blend, cake mix, eggs, and oil until moistened. Roll into 1" balls. Place on ungreased cookie sheet. Flatten with a glass or cookie stamp. Bake at 375F for 6-8 minutes. Allow to cool 1 minute before removing to cooling rack. While the cookies are still a little warm, spread on some buttercream frosting. Allow the frosting to set up before storing.

Buttercream Frosting
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
6-8 cups confectioners sugar
1/2 cup milk
2 tsp vanilla extract

Place butter in a large bowl. Add 4 cups sugar and then milk and vanilla. Beat on medium speed until smooth and creamy, approx 3-5 minutes. Gradually add remaining sugar, 1 cup at a time beating well after each time, about 2 minutes, until the icing is thick enough to spread. Add food coloring if you'd like.

I liked the idea of this recipe for several reasons: it had a simple ingredients list, relatively clear directions (some have no directions), and derived from a cake mix. I like the cost effectiveness of using cake mixes. Plus the Lofthouse cookie is a cakey sort of cookie and I thought using a cake mix might be a good step towards recreating that soft flakey cake-cookie hybrid.

I made the dough according to the instructions but added some sour cream (for moistness) and more flour. It was too wet a dough to begin with and so I added maybe 1/2 - 1 cup extra flour but I don't think it was near enough.

I shaped bits of the dough into balls and rolled them in extra flour. Otherwise they were slightly too sticky to work with.

I then used the bottom of my measuring cup to smash them into circles. I popped them in the oven for about 8 minutes.

And here they are fresh out of the oven. I think, in addition to more flour, I should have also cooked them for a little longer but I was afraid of over cooking them since Lofthouse cookies are never golden brown, but rather delicately white.

In the meantime, I whipped up the buttercream frosting. Now, you must understand that frosting is my Achilles Heel when it comes to baking. Aside from my brown butter maple frosting, I have yet to find a frosting recipe that I like and I can never seem to get it to the right consistency. I was wary about this frosting and thought about cutting it in half but I decided to be brave and go for the whole thing. I should have cut it in half. It was no where near thick enough for a Lofthouse cookie and did not have the right taste, texture or flavor. And, of course, I had a TON left over. It's a good thing I was planning on making cupcakes later this week or else I'd be rather perturbed by how much extra frosting this recipe produced.


And here's the finished final product. I thought they looked tasty despite the inadequate frosting and after waiting for them to finish cooling down, I tried one.

I was not impressed.

Oh, don't get me wrong. They're are perfectly acceptable sugar cookies. In fact, they are moist, soft and chewy. But they in no way resemble a Lofthouse cookie. The cookie itself was not cakey (needs more flour) and the frosting was not thick enough (less milk, more butter). So this recipe will get written down as a fail. I'll just have to keep trying. And now I need to find someone to eat these cookies. I can't even look at them without being utterly disappointed. Plus, I really went crazy with the frosting. Hee.

Goop-da!

The Korean word of the day is 굽다 (goop-da) which means to bake! I'm actually surprised that the word exists in the Korean language since Koreans (or most Asians, for that matter) do not bake. Most homes do not have ovens or if they do, they are very, very tiny.

This, for example, is my oven. It's located in the utility room next to a sink, the washer and dryer. It's obviously an afterthought added by the landlords for their predominantly American tenants. (For which I heartily thank them.) The top portion is a broiler rack and the bottom is the regular oven. I'm still learning how to manipulate the gas oven because it's difficult to get a set temperature that stays there for any length of time. Plus, I'm doing it in Celsius. Luckily, the previous tenants printed up a big list of conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit and I bought an oven thermometer which dangles from the rack so that I can get an accurate reading of the real temperature. It's always an adventure cooking in this oven but I'm sure I'll eventually get the hang of it.

Aside from my tiny oven stuck in the laundry room, the rest of the kitchen is spacious, with lots of storage space and countertop room, which is a marked difference from the shoebox kitchen we had in Hawaii. I'm most excited about what I've dubbed my "baking corner."

Here you can see my Kitchenaid and all the workspace underneath my cupboard full of my baking supplies. Conveniently, this is the space closet to the oven as well. I stocked up on cake mixes and brownie mixes. I like to make certain things from scratch but cake mixes often come in handy as a quick base for a lot of different items. And I find it to be more cost effective.

I have my containers of flour, sugar, brown sugar, powdered sugar, toffee bits (love toffee bits!) and chocolate chips. (I prefer to use real chocolate instead of chips, but I can't find good baking chocolate here, so I'm reduced to using chips again. Oh well.)

And of course I have my baking agents (salt, baking powder, baking soda, cocoa) and a bin full of sprinkles, flavorings (vanilla, rum, maple, lemon extract, etc.) and food coloring. Everything I need to bake within an arm's reach.

Underneath it all is my cabinet full of my essential baking items including Pyrex glass dishes, cookie sheets, muffin pans, wire racks, pizza stone, bowls, cookie cutters (located inside the cake container), round cake pans, pie pans, springform pans, measuring cups, pastry cutter, flour sifter, rolling pins and my ice cream maker.

I'm so excited to do more baking in my new baking corner. I'm anxiously awaiting the arrival of the Martha Stewart cupcake book that I just ordered which, I have on good authority, is pretty awesome. Hopefully soon, I'll be able to share some more recipes and baking successes with you.

The Most Delicious Chocolate Chip Cookies Ever!

I'm feeling rather magnanimous today so I'm going to share my absolute favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe with my loyal blog readers. Only they're not just chocolate chip cookies. They're so much more. And since a good number of you lived at the Enclave during our BYU days, I'm going to let you in on another secret. I got this recipe from none other than the Culter brothers--Quinn and Drew. In fact, I call them Cutler cookies for lack of a better name since "awesome chocolate chip toffee oatmeal cookies" is quite a mouthful and I'd rather that my mouth were full of these delicious morsels.

Another secret? I LOVE cookies. I used to think that cake was my favorite thing ever, but I've recently determined that cookies quite literally take the cake (pun intended.....another sad example of how David has rubbed off on me). So without further ado, here's the recipe:

1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups oatmeal, powdered
1 tsp. baking soda
½ tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
2 cups flour
12 oz. chocolate chips (See below)

Preheat oven to 400. Cream butter and sugar. Blend eggs. Add powdered oatmeal and mix. Sift together salt, baking powder, soda, vanilla and flour. Add in batches to creamed ingredients. Batter will be very stiff—you might need to use a spoon or your hands. Mix in chips. Place gold-ball sized pieces of dought 2” apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. Do not mash flat. Bake 8 minutes

While the sugars, butter, and eggs are blending up in my Kitchenaid mixer, I powder the 2 cups of oatmeal. I use my food processor for this, but you can use a blender if you don't own a food processor. For the record, I love my food processor. It was my Christmas present from David. He felt a little guilty buying me a kitchen appliance as a gift, but I totally loved it. I love kitchen gadgets. Now, I just need a new blender. Anyway, back to the powdered oatmeal. You don't necessarily have to powder the oatmeal, you could just pour it in as is, but I like that the powder makes the oatmeal less obvious (and less chewy) and helps cut down on the need for more flour.

Once all the ingredients have been mixed together, you should have a nice stiff dough. I'll let you in on another secret. I've discovered that any baked good is only as good as the chocolate you put in it. The better the chocolate, the better the cookie--or brownie, or cake or frosting--will taste. You can use regular old chocolate chips and these cookies will still taste just fine, but I prefer to use a special chocolate bar for these cookies. It adds something extra double special.

I use Hersey's Symphony bars with toffee and almonds bits. The tiny bits of toffee and almonds really add something extra to the cookies themselves and the chocolate is very rich and delicious. Far better than some run-of-the-mill semi-sweet chocolate chip. I chop up between one to two Symphony bars (depending on size) or whatever other quality chocolate I have and dump that into the dough, like so.

And because I like toffee so much, I often pour in some extra heapings of Heath's toffee bits.

It adds some more crunch and bite to the cookies. Trust me, it's worth it.

Mix everything up real good.

Now, another word of advice when baking, especially cookies: use parchment paper. The parchment paper prevents the need of using Pam or other sprays to prevent your cookies from sticking to the cookie sheet, it reduces the mess left on the cookie sheet after baking and helps keep your cookie from burning on the bottom. It's an all-around good idea.

I like to put big globs of dough on the cookie sheet because I like my cookies to come out fat and delicious. When the Cutlers made these cookies, they were always big and round and never flattened out. I think they forgot to put in the baking powder/baking soda. I've never figured out why my cookies turn out so differently than the cookies they used to always make for open houses....

....but either way, after 8 minutes, they come out golden and absolutely delicious. I promise. These cookies will ruin all other chocolate chip cookies for you.

They're just that good.

I Am My Mother's Daughter

As the baby of the family, I like to pretend that I'm my mother's favorite child. Sure, I've got some worthy contenders in the form of my siblings [especially my sisters for having the first grandbabies], but if nothing else, I am most certainly my mother's daughter in a way that my sisters are not.

Christmas has always been one of my favorite times of year because my mother is a woman who likes to decorate, who likes to bake, and who likes to celebrate the holidays in style. Most of my Christmas memories involve helping my mother bake Christmas goodies, hang ornaments on the tree, or lug tubs and tubs of Christmas decorations into the house from our shed in order to transform our home into a Christmas wonderland.

In honor of being my mother's daughter, and the fact that I'm spending my first Christmas not in her home, I'm here to share my holiday baked goods and sparse decorations with you.

I spent the majority of Saturday and Sunday baking five different types of cookies and two types of fudge and packaging them up in little Christmas tins and then hiding the results from the crafty ants. I went through nearly three pounds of butter, a bag of walnuts, half a gigantic bag of chocolate chips, four pounds of powdered sugar, three pounds of flour and sugar, and a dozen eggs. The results? Totally worth it. Though the waistband of my favorite pair of jeans has started to complain.

To me, Christmas is just not Christmas without sugar cookies. We always made sugar cookies for Santa Claus' plate.

This recipe is one of my favorites because the cookies bake up fat and moist.

Next up was fudge, another holiday staple in our home. I generally use the fudge recipe on the back of the jet-puffed marshmallow creme to pretty consistent and delicious results [although this batch did not firm up as much as I would have liked]. This batch was just plain chocolate fudge.

And this batch included chopped walnuts and toffee chips.

Another popular cookie in our home is the angel thumbprint, rolled in nuts (walnuts again) and filled with jam or jelly (strawberry and boysenberry in this case). The jelly centers always fool me into thinking that these cookies are not as bad for me as other cookies.

I also attempted to make "magic bars," which has a graham cracker crust, condensed milk, chocolate chips and coconut. It was a first time for me and it didn't turn out as I remembered it. Still tastes good though.

And then, of course, I baked my pumpkin cookies. Here they are waiting to be slathered with maple frosting. Have I mentioned recently how much I've come to love and adore maple frosting? Because I really, really do.

I'm keeping all the leftover pumpkin cookies for myself. They're that good.


I also baked some peanut butter cookies. Normally I roll them into balls and then stick a Hersey's kiss in the center. This year, however, I took mini Snickers and rolled the dough around it so that when they baked, the chocolate and caramel and peanuts inside the Snickers all melted and oozed into a delicious center surprise.

I'm sending most of the leftovers with David to work on Christmas Eve, which is good because I've got a ton of fudge left. The other cookies may not survive until then.

On the decoration side of things, I've been having a hard time finding just the right kind of decorations that I like. Then again, my mother has been collecting her warehouse of decorations over the past thirty years so I guess I can exercise a little patience. I've already shared our tale of two Christmas trees, so I'll move on to other decorations.

Our stockings, which are not hung by the fire with care. We don't have a fireplace. That would be a waste of space in Hawaii.

Our Hallmark dancing snowmen, sent to me by my mother during previous Christmases. I went to Hallmark to get this year's version and they were all sold out! I was very sad.

My small Fontinini nativity set. It seemed only appropriate that our shelf of foreign scriptures be the backdrop for this scene.

And finally, let's not forget our bathroom wreath which I hung there mostly because there was a random, unused nail there. Also, cinnamon scented pine cones. It's about as close as I'm going to get to getting that pine fresh Christmas smell.

I think my efforts would make my mother proud. If she could eat my fabulous baked goods, I'm sure she'd declare me her favorite child.

Seriously, maple frosting is that good.

And if I don't get a chance to blog before Thursday, have a safe and merry Christmas!

Thanksgiving Bounty

This Thanksgiving, David and I ate our delightful feast at the home of our good friends. They prepared the turkey and several other fixings; I signed up to make rolls, mashed potatoes, and several desserts because dessert is my absolute favorite part of the whole Thanksgiving meal. I decided that this year I would make everything from scratch. Absolutely everything. I don't think there's anything bad with cutting corners, but I happened to have a lot of time on my hands and I wondered if something--say whipped cream--would make my banana cream pie taste better than Cool Whip (which I don't really like). I've learned quite a bit in the last few days of baking and eating and baking and eating and I've documented the whole thing for my loyal readers (all 5 of you :-).

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!