Category: Cooking and Baking

Cooking and baking experiments

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Carbohydrates make the world a nicer place

It’s raining here, which is wonderful because we have had a terrible drought, but it is also quite dark and dreary this morning. I woke up feeling melancholy and decided it was a pancake day. These are “Vineyard Pancakes” from Beth Hensperger’s The Best Quick Breads: 150 Recipes for Muffins, Scones, Shortcakes, Gingerbreads, Cornbreads, Coffeecakes, and More, or, in other words, 150 shortcuts to happiness 🙂 I know…carbohydrates are just a temporary high, but, well, who cares?

These are really good pancakes. They have a little cornmeal and whole wheat flour in them, which gives them a nice texture, and they puff up nice and big. We all sat down and ate them together, which was fun too.
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Big Cookie, Little Cookies

Someone’s birthday is near and so it was time for a big cookie. Hopefully that someone does not read this blog 🙂

These were made using the Nestlé Toll House cookie recipe on the back of their bag of semi-sweet chocolate morsels. Once you make up the cookie dough, divide it in half. One half goes in a buttered 9 inch round spring form pan and bakes at a slightly lower temperature, 350 instead of 375 degrees, for a longer period of time, about 25 to 30 minutes. I found this suggestion in The Family Baker by Susan G Purdy. It’s a fun cookbook full of traditional treats.
The other half of the cookie dough is baked according to the package directions. This way, even though the big cookie is leaving for a far away place, we still have a plate of chocolate chip cookies to enjoy here.
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Best if used before 1982

I woke up again not well, headache, stomachache, etc, and thought it might be nice to make peach muffins for breakfast. Without being truly awake, I just started to follow the Basic Buttermilk Muffin recipe in Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, using the Fresh Fruit Muffin variation. I remembered making these before and they were quite good, only I didn’t remember how long ago that was.

I scooped out some whole wheat flour (it was supposed to be whole wheat pastry flour…but that’s what I had) from I don’t know when. It smelled, um…a little dusty. I threw it out and found a “new” bag I must have gotten to replace the first one, but even that expired a year ago. Then there was the bag of peaches that I obviously hadn’t checked on in a week. Out of three, I got almost enough fruit. I threw out two bags of shriveled frozen fruit, two jars of old baking powder, didn’t even have enough vanilla, but I still went through with my plan to make muffins.
Well, I know they were good the last time I made them. Sorry to Deborah Madison…all the recipes I’ve tried from this book have been good. I just didn’t do her proud this time around. That’s all I’m going to say about that! 🙂

We did get some art doll photography time in yesterday and the day before. I’ve got to edit and upload Max Bailey’s new kitty doll photos to Flickr and then we’ll get them up over on the Ruffing’s blog.
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Soft pretzels

While working on a new doll pattern today, I had a mad, desperate craving for soft pretzels, the kind you buy from street vendors in NYC. I was frantically looking for a recipe, going through my pile of cookbooks, until I finally found one in Beth Hensperger’s The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook.

I loaded up my bread machine, forgetting to put the paddle in the pan so that it sounded like it was kneading the dough, when it was really doing nothing. I’ve been a bit spacey lately. Fortunately, I checked on the dough in time to reach in and insert the paddle.

After the dough finished the bread dough cycle in the machine, I shaped it into pretzels, left the pretzels to rise a second time, then boiled each one in a couple quarts of water with two tablespoons of baking soda for about a minute each. This is what makes them chewy.

I brushed them with an egg white beaten with a tablespoon of water, sprinkled them with Kosher salt, and put them in a 400 degree oven for about sixteen minutes until they were golden.

Then…carbohydrate relief. Sigh.

A similar recipe can be found here.