Tag Archives: baking

Bread

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I didn’t have time last week to blog or do much of anything. I was busy, busy all week. But one thing I did is bake some bread. I didn’t have class this past Monday but last week we spent the morning making bread from scratch and it was so much fun. I’ll be doing this a lot more in the future.

Challah Bread

First we made some Challah. I’ve actually never had Challah before but I’ve seen recipes for it online and I’ve wanted to try making it for a long time, so I was excited about this. We did three-strand braids for both loaves and I topped one with some black sesame seeds and left the other plain. This bread didn’t last long at my house. It was a rich, soft, chewy bread that was good hot with a little butter. It was a lot easier to make than I thought it would be so I’ll be making this again soon.

Baguette

Then we took the poolish we had started the week before and made baguettes. These are a good dense bread with a nice crispy crust and they would make a really good sandwich. I liked these a lot but not as much as the Challah.

So, bread was fun and now I can’t wait to take my bread class next fall. Next week in baking we’re doing laminated dough and making pinwheels and turnovers and the week after that is pies. Yum.

I had my savory cooking class today and we broke down chicken, made stock, and then we took some of the chicken breast and sautéed it, made a supreme sauce and served it with our choice of starch and a vegetable. I made some boiled new potatoes with a little salt, pepper and fresh parsley and stir-fried some asparagus with lemon juice and a tiny bit of garlic. The potatoes and asparagus were good but I didn’t taste the chicken. The sauce was pretty good, though. It’s really hard being a vegetarian in that class. Not just because I don’t get to taste much of the food but I haven’t cooked meat in a long time and it’s just as gross as I remember. The class is fun, though. Next week in that class we’re doing sandwiches and bound salads (these are salads that have a thick dressing, like a potato or chicken salad or cole slaw). Maybe I can sneak a vegetarian meal in there.

Now, I’m also blocking my shawl today and I’ll try to post something about it Friday.

First Day in the Kitchen

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Strawberry Rhubarb Cobbler

Today was our first day in the kitchen in my baking class. I had so much fun, it was just what I expected. We made a chocolate cake that we’re going to use to make bread pudding next week and then we made strawberry rhubarb cobblers with pâte brisée crust. Everything was made from scratch and it took a long time. Plus there were tons of dishes to wash (yes, we wash our own dishes) and a huge mess to clean up when we were done. Honestly, the dishes weren’t that bad, but there were a lot of of them. I had a blast cooking, I always do. I’m really starting think I found something that fits. I’ve been trying to find something I really love to do for a long and I never dreamed it would be any kind of cooking but here I am.

I’m out of school tomorrow and then I have my cooking class Wednesday and we’re starting stocks, sauces, and knife skills. I think we’re going to make soup, too. I’m really looking forward to it.

Have Some Cupcakes

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I have things that I really need to be doing this week but I’m putting it all off, I just have no motivation. Yesterday I needed to go buy my uniforms and books but I made cupcakes instead and today I had planned on cleaning out my closet but I’m washing some Shetland fleece. I know that I could do both, wash the fleece while I’m cleaning my closet but I don’t want to.

Anyway I made some really yummy cupcakes yesterday so if you would like to make them, too, here’s how.

Dickinson's Creme Coconut Curd

This little jar is the secret to these cupcakes. I filled them with this coconut crème curd and it is so good, it’s all creamy and smooth and there are these tiny bits of coconut, yum. I found it at the grocery store with the jelly.

Cupcakes

Here’s my finished cupcakes. I didn’t even try to frost them neatly, this frosting didn’t want to stick to the tops of the cupcakes so I just kind of piled it on and smoothed it out a little. They still taste good.

Pineapple Cupcakes with Coconut Curd Filling and Vanilla Frosting with Toasted Coconut

First, make the cupcakes. These are adapted from Who You Callin’ Cupcake? by Michelle Garcia

Ingredients:

  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 1 2/3 (that’s one and two thirds, it looks weird to me) cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 cup butter
  • 1/2 cup milk, divided
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 Tablespoon vanilla extract
  • About a cup of pineapple tidbits or you could used crushed pineapple. Next time I make these, I’m going to use a little more pineapple.

How to:

  1. Preheat oven to 350° and line a cupcake pan with liners.
  2. In a medium bowl, mix together the sugar, flour, baking powder and salt.
  3. Add the butter and mix (I did this by hand, you can use a mixer) until the butter is completely mixed in and there is a mealy consistency. It’s going to be dry, like sand.
  4. Add 1/4 cup of the milk and mix slowly to make a dough-like paste. This should break up any lumps that are forming.
  5. In a separate bowl, combine the eggs with the rest of the milk and the vanilla, and slowly pour this mixture into the batter. Mix for about ten seconds with a mixer or by hand until combined.
  6. Fold in the pineapple.
  7. Fill the cups in the cupcake pan about 3/4 full and bake for ten to fifteen minutes. The cupcake tops will slightly golden.
  8. Let them cool.
  9. This will make 12 cupcakes

Make the Frosting:

  • 4 Tablespoons unsalted butter, room temp.
  • 2 cups confectioners’ sugar (powdered sugar)
  • 2 Tablespoons milk
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • Pinch of salt
  1. Mix everything together until light and fluffy, easy.
  2. I don’t know where I got this recipe, I found it on a post-it in a drawer in my kitchen. Yay, organization!

Toast the coconut:

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°.
  2. Spread out a handful of coconut and let it cook for about five minutes, then stir and let it cook for five more minutes. Repeat as necessary until your coconut is toasted.

Put it all together:

  1. Fill the cupcakes with the coconut curd using whatever method works for you. I poked a hole in the top of my cupcakes with a spoon handle and used a Ziplock bag to pipe some of the coconut curd into the middle of the cupcakes. If you have a piping bag use that.
  2. Plop some frosting on the tops of the cupcakes.
  3. Top with toasted coconut.
  4. Eat the extra toasted coconut because you made way too much. That could just be me, though.

And that is it. The coconut curd needs to be refrigerated so I would keep these cupcakes in the refrigerator, not that they’re going to last very long.

4th of July

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Stars

It’s a couple days late but here’s a few pics from my Independence Day. I even did my nails. They’ve been dry and splitty so I haven’t been polishing them lately. The base is a blue by Wet n’ Wild, the name of the color isn’t on the label anymore but it’s a sparkly medium blue color. I used the BundleMonster BM5 plate’s star stamp in Sally Hanson White. The white polish isn’t quite thick enough. I’ve tried three different whites with both my BM and Konad stamps and they don’t work so I think I’m going to break down and buy the Konad special white polish and save myself the trouble. I think this came out pretty cute, though, and the manicure is holding up pretty good on it’s third day.

FireworksSparklers

I took a lot of fireworks pictures but these were my two favorites. We had a small storm pass to the west of us. We got a few sprinkles but a ton of lightning and thunder. I was lucky enough to catch this one shot of lighting and fireworks together. My neighbors go crazy on the fourth and buy a ton of huge fireworks so we had a good show that lasted until well after midnight.

Cake

I made a cake.  It’s a vanilla two-layer cake with whipped cream instead of frosting and strawberries in the middle and on top, it came out really good. Like, really really good. We devoured it. And I used almost two tubs of Cool-Whip to coat it, it’s about a half inch thick, seriously. It is obviously not vegan, I wasn’t even trying because I wanted to bathe in the Cool Whip. I love that stuff.

I have some knitting stuff, too, but I think I’ll hold off until Friday to post it. This is long enough.

Hey There

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Orange glazed orange scones

Remember me? I used to blog here. Oh, whew. The last month has been nuts and I just haven’t wanted to write about anything, even knitting. But things are settling down now and I’m trying to get back into my normal routine and blogging is a part of that. So here’s some pretty orange scones. They’re vegan, they’re tasty, they are covered with orange glaze. Yum.

Chiton Pullover in Progress

This is my mom’s Mother’s Day present how it looks today. Obviously I didn’t give myself time to knit it, I only started the pullover on Friday and had no illusions about finishing it on time. This is the Chiton Pullover from the Winter/Spring 2011 Knitscene and I’m using the KnitPicks Cotlin that looks horrible on me. My mom’s complexion is different and I think it will look good on her, she’s not as pasty and pale as I am.

Handspun Shawl

The last time I posted I promised pictures of my blocked Rosebud Shawl and here they are. The shawl is about 36” across the top edge and around 19” from the center neck to the bottom point. It’s small but I like it.

Edge Detail

Here’s a better shot of the edging. It really surprised me but this was one of the most difficult shawls I’ve ever knit. The lace pattern doesn’t repeat so it’s impossible to memorize, each of the points are worked one at a time in short rows so they took forever (and I knit them three times before I got the pattern right), and the body has a lot of shaping at different intervals plus the lace in the center panel. It was a challenge but a good one. I liked knitting this I just wish it was bigger.

Shetland Wool Rolags

And last but not least this is Shetland, lots of Shetland carded by hand into little tiny rolags. I’ve been carding and spinning on this a little bit here and there. I have a little over two pounds of this Shetland and I haven’t even spun one bobbin yet. This is going to take a while but that’s ok.

Also, last weekend I bought a new computer, finally. Best Buy had a pretty decent little HP laptop on sale so I thought I’d go look at it. I decided to just buy it since the price was so good (and I was really getting sick of not having a computer). I don’t think I’ll ever buy another computer from them again. I’m not a huge fan of Best Buy anyway and I know their sales people are under a lot of pressure to push their Geek Squad set up (all they do is turn the computer on and make a rescue DVD, you’re walked through it when you power up the computer the first time, they just charge $100 for it) and stuff but it was just ridiculous. Once I had the computer it took me about half an hour to get it out of the store because I had to listen to three people explain how hard they are to set up. I kept telling them that I’ve been using PCs for a long time and I’ve set them up and made rescue disks before but they wouldn’t listen. I finally just told the last guy to let me pay or I was going somewhere else. He said “Now are you sure your husband can set this up? Has your husband ever done this before? Has he ever connected DSL?”  And I lost it. I told the guy that I wasn’t married, I’ve been using computers since 1986 and I think my being a woman won’t interfere with turning the laptop on and burning a DVD and that I was leaving now and they could either let me pay for the computer first or I would buy one somewhere else. The guy got all flustered and let me pay but that was the third sales person who had basically told me that girls can’t use computers and I just won’t put up with it. So, yeah, last time I buy a computer from Best Buy, I’ll just do it online next time.

Of course, things can never go smoothly for me and the day after I got my laptop our DSL went out. It took three days of calling AT&T to get a technician out here (they kept saying our wireless was out but we had no DSL service at all) turns out there was a problem with switch at their box down the street and it needed a few hours worth of repairs and it’s been working pretty good since then, except last night when it was out all evening. I just wish things would work like they’re supposed to.

That doesn’t even scratch the surface of the crap that my family has delt with this month, the Best Buy thing and the DSL trouble was just last week. But things are settling down for the time being and that makes me more nervous. What’s going to be next? I think I’ll just hide in my room and play the Sims.