Week 13 Part II

Cranberry Scones ☆☆☆☆☆ [pg. 33 FBB]
(Sorry I can't link the copyrighted recipe. You will need to borrow the cookbook from the library. :-P)

A friend of mine makes the best scones and she had posted on facebook that she needed some help with a church project and all helpers would be rewarded with scones. Project day was, of course, scheduled for one of my work days so I would miss out on her scones but I decided I would try making my own.

This recipe is not part of the family cookbook, but is in my new cookbook. (The America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book) I believe the key to scones is to not overmix; handle the dough as little as possible. These scones are the best I have made and I am sure the butter and heavy cream are the main reason they are so tasty. Scones are best with clotted cream and jam but I had to settle for just jam. These scones disappeared in just two days, a sign that the recipe deserves five stars.

Week 13 Part I

Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies ☆☆☆☆ [pg 97 HFC]
These cookies went together very similar to Checkerboard Cookies, ☆☆☆☆☆ [pg 112 HFC] which are a huge favorite at our house, and the cookies ended up being judged with those cookies in mind.

The dough went together very easily and the rolling into a log went as expected. The dough was a bit sticky, but the addition of a small amount of flour on hands and the waxed paper prevented the dough from sticking too much. You need the dough to be a bit sticky so the pecans will stay put on the roll. This ended up being my biggest pet peeve. Pecans are expensive and the finely chopped nuts would stay on the roll. Through the whole remaining process, my cookies were losing their nuts.

As I frosted the cookies, I was envisioning the mess these cookies could make if carried into another room while we are eating them, which often happens at our house. Granted, we have two furry little vacuum cleaners who are more than happy to sniff out the offending crumbs dropped to the floor, but not all homes are as lucky.

The frosting gives the cookies a better balance of bittersweet and semi-sweet, but dear hubby claims he would like them to be a bit more sweet. I admit to trying these cookies without the frosting and immediately noted I liked the chocolate part of the checkerboard cookie much better. If I desired a chocolatey, buttery cookie I would use checkerboard cookie dough and just make it all chocolate flavor.

Our cookie crumb scavengers.

Overall, these are a very pretty cookie and would be attractive on a cookie plate. They are very good, and few will find fault with them. They only earned four stars because they can't beat a checkerboard cookie and I don't like my expensive pecans dropping to the floor as treats for our Penny and Zoey Lyn.

Week 12 Part IV

Banana Split Cake ☆☆☆☆☆ [pg 99 HFC]
As mentioned before in my blog, our family is not big on cake so I had skipped over this recipe several times in past years because it said cake in the title. Let me assure you that this is not cake. I think it should be titled Banana Split Dessert, but let's get on with the evaluation.

The dessert starts with a graham crocker crust, which is always a good start. The second layer is very simple and ends up being quite like pudding. Its ingredients are powdered sugar, butter, and egg blended together for 15 minutes. Wow, that seemed like a long time, but I assure you it is worth it.

Next layers are simply bananas and drained crushed pineapple. Now, regarding my whipped cream layer, I did not have a large tub of Cool Whip (which I assume is 12 ounces). My 8 ounce container had about 2/3 of the whip cream as the other part was used elsewhere. This did not bother me because I am not a huge fan of Cool Whip. Then there was the matter of the chocolate syrup. This is an item we always have on hand, but someone in our house has apparently been having ice cream lately and I found an empty chocolate syrup container in my fridge. GRRR.

Dessert shown with just caramel sauce. Chocolate sauce was
added the next day for our 8 person tasting test.

Right next to it though, was a brand new container of caramel sauce. Well, I reasoned, real banana splits have chocolate, caramel, and strawberry topping, so I opted to use the caramel. At first taste, I was very pleasantly surprised. This is not one of our usual types of dessert, but it was quite yummy.

The next day, I got chocolate sauce to add to the dessert, and later in the day we went to a friends to share the dessert. After the 8 person tasting panel was finished, it was decided this was a definite four star recipe and several indicated it to be a five star dessert. Our youngest taster, at the age of five, was allowed to have two helpings and she loved eating the layers off to get to the "cookie" at the bottom. Only one of our testers rated the dessert a three. They couldn't identify exactly what it was they didn't like but that was fine. There were plenty of volunteers willing to finish up his piece.

Today, I finished off the dessert and was lamenting that this recipe made such a large dessert, one that could easily be shared at a potluck, but it was probably too much for Tom and I to have around. As I savored the last few morsels, I realized each of the dessert ingredients could be easily cut in half and all that left over crushed pineapple can go on our next pizza. (A weekly meal at our house.) This will be great to have again this summer, a nice refrigerated dessert, made in an 8 x 8 for the two of us to share. Yum!

Week 12 Part III

Danish Braid with Cream Cheese and Cherry Filling* ☆☆☆ ☆ ☆ [pgs. 444-447 FBB]
(Sorry I can't link the copyrighted recipe. You will need to borrow the cookbook from the library. :-P)

Recently, I borrowed a cookbook from the library called The America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book [FBB] and I loved it so much I bought a copy. The first recipe I attempted was a Danish Braid. I love sweet breakfast stuff and the book made this look pretty straight forward.

Surprisingly, my finished product looks very similar to the picture in the book. I had trouble getting my cherry filling to thicken and so the finished product is quite messy despite my efforts to try to clean it up before I put it in the oven. I should have stuck with just the cream cheese part of the filling. My pastry didn't puff during the rest period and it is possible the house was too cold. As the pastry baked, there was sort of a puddle of butter around the pastry, which was not very appetizing, and it created quite a mess in my oven. (Oh well, it was time to  clean the oven anyway.)

I appears, pastry chef I am not. At least not the sort of pastry with a flaky, buttery crust. I am thinking this is one pastry better left to professionals, especially since it should be a rare treat anyway. However, after fussing with the pastry to get it off the parchment paper and giving the finished product a taste test, I have changed my mind. Certainly, this is not something I will make on a regular basis, but I believe I will give it another try later this year.

Solutions to a few problems include baking the pastry on a cookie sheet with sides to prevent the problem in the bottom of my oven. Measuring the ingredients for the cherry filling more closely to insure the juice sets up correctly. Creating a warmer spot in the kitchen for the pastry to rise and/or allowing a bit more time for the rising.

Regarding taste, this pastry was very good. It is buttery (love!) and I particularly enjoy the combination of sweet cream cheese and tart cherries. My only disappointment is that the crust wasn't more flaky. Both Tom and I would give it five stars, but then how could you not considering all the butter. Yum! Julia Child would agree, everything is better with butter; lots and lots of butter.

Are Apologies Heard in Heaven?

Spring break gives me a chance to slow down, and slowing down allows me to think, and thinking these days is not recommended for me. I am at "that" age, the change is upon me, as my mother might say.  She would rarely use the word menopause, but I am approaching that stage of my life; the signs have been more and more evident. As my schedule has allowed for thinking this week, I realize that my brain doesn't say much that is nice. It is time to do something about that, but that is not the reason for this post.


My symptoms have caused me to wonder how my mother handled her menopausal period of life? What were her symptoms? How long did it last? As I thought about my mom, I realized how little attention I paid to my mom and her emotional well-being when I was at home. She had five kids; she had cancer at 40, again in her fifties, and again at 70 when the cancer finally killed her. Reflecting on all this allow me to see how selfish I was back then. I don't ever remember wondering how my mom felt about anything. It wasn't until my eldest was headed to college that I wondered how my mom handled two girls leaving for college on the same day. Mom died four years before my first went to college—I knew how I felt letting one go away, it was too late to ask her how she had felt on that day. And now, ten years later, it is too late to ask her about "the change" too.

More importantly, it is too late for me to apologize for being so self-centered and oblivious to her emotional needs for so long. All week I have prayed for understanding. Understanding of what is happening to me and understanding from those around me. I have prayed for clarity of thought and it has brought me to the place where I wonder if she can hear my apology in heaven. The best apology I know is to rise up and call her blessed. And so, with the following quote from Scripture, I apologize mom, and pray you will be with me through this stressful time of my life.

She watches over the affairs of her household
and does not eat the bread of idleness. 

Her children arise and call her blessed; 

   her husband also, and he praises her: 

“Many women do noble things, 

   but you surpass them all.” 

(Proverbs 31:27-29 NIV)

And my mom surpassed them all.

Week 12 Part II

Special K Bars ☆☆☆ ☆ ☆ [pg 150 HFC]
So, today I was left craving a chocolatey treat. (see previous post) I still felt the need to satisfy a comfort chocolate craving, and I was delighted to find Special K cereal in the house. Special K Bars, which are in the family cookbook, have made them many, many times before, however I indulged my craving and will review them for you readers, few that you are.

Special K Bars are a five ingredient dessert. I usually have all the ingredients on hand just in case I need to throw together a dessert for unexpected guests, or because I forgot it was my week to bring treats to Bible study. Not only is the ingredient list short, but the total time for assembly is about 10 minutes. It will take a bit longer for the frosting/topping to harden, but then that never stopped me from eating them warm.

Special K Bars could be compared to marshmallow treats, and in fact I have known people who make a peanut butter and marshmallow treat very similar to these bars. I figure, when you have a great thing (notice I didn't say good thing...a Great Thing) why mess with experimenting with something else so similar. I've never varied from the original marshmallow treat recipe, which has more butter than the one on the box now-a-days, and I shall never vary from the Special K Bar recipe. These bars were just what I needed today. Later in the week I will try a new Hayes Cookbook recipe. These bars won't last long at our house.

Week 12 Part I

Upon final consumption of the final Fudge Meltaway, I was seeking another chocolaty dessert, but I didn't want to go to the store. The search was on for a dessert I could make with ingredients on hand. And this was just to satisfy a craving, not to complete a portion of my baking quest. I came across a recipe called "Girls Just Want to Have Fudge"; a low calorie fudge recipe in a random cookbook, and I decided to try it.

Licking the bowl after putting together a recipe is half the fun, right? When the leftover fudge bits had sufficiently cooled, I set to the work of cleaning up the pan, with my tongue. I was not impressed with the morsels in the pan. They seemed dry, not creamy as fudge should be. I attributed this to them being small bits and waited to give the fudge a true test when fully cooled.

Today the fudge got its true test. Upon removing the fudge from the pan, I could see that it was dry, as I presumed it would be. The fudge has peanut butter as an ingredient, and I admit I am not a fan of peanut butter fudge, even with all its fat, so the fudge had two strikes against it before the tasting began.

Sadly, this fudge had no creaminess and not enough chocolate flavor, and I consider these two things most important in a fudge. If I am going to consume calories, let them be good ones, tasty ones. This fudge falls far short. There is not much more to say except, the whole lot, short one small bite, went into the trash.

Week 11 Part I

Georgia Street Slices ☆☆☆ [pg 125 HFC]
No bake recipes are always interesting and certainly welcome in the summer months. This recipe seemed familiar as I was making it, but I knew I had never made this particular one before. When it was finished, it resemble Mom's Fudge Melt-aways ☆☆☆ ☆ ☆ [pg 127 HFC] that I remember from my youth. It was difficult to wait for the dessert to freeze so that I could try it.

Upon tasting, I realized the reason this recipe seemed so familiar—it looks and tastes much like the
Fudge Melt-aways mentioned above. The similarities prompted me to do a side by side recipe comparison. They are very nearly the same. The Fudge Melt-away recipe has half the butter in the middle layer, and no butter in the topping. Also, the topping of the Fudge Melt-aways is unsweetened chocolate rather than semi-sweet chocolate, and this, along with the less butter in the middle layer, lowers the overall fat content of the dessert.

On another note, it seems wasteful to me to purchase a package of pudding and use only 2 Tablespoons. This ingredient is not used in the Fudge Melt-aways. Their middle layer is more like frosting while the Georgia Street Slices middle layer is more like custard or pudding.

Regarding storage, the recipe says these should stay in the freezer. I remember Mom's Fudge Melt-aways being in the refrigerator, so that is where I have stored this dessert. It doesn't seem to affect the taste or texture and so I will note this in my cookbook.

It has been along time since I have made the Fudge Melt-aways and I plan to make some later this week so that I can do a side by side taste comparison. I shall reserve final judgement until that time, but for now I give this recipe three stars; tasty but I doubt I will make it again without some adjustment to the amount of butter used.

Week 10 Part I

Bits of This and That Cookies ☆☆☆☆
It was only a matter of time until the monthly purging activity hit the kitchen pantry. I could no longer tolerate the accumulation of ziplock bags containing leftover bits of chocolate chips and such. This week I opted to clean up these bits of ingredients and see what could be created.

The cookie base for Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookies seemed a good place to start. My brother's chocolate chocolate chip cookie recipe twirled around in my head and I decided to melt 3/4 cup dark chocolate chips, and I added this to the dough before all the little bits. My collection included about 1/4 cup heath bar bits, 1/4-1/3 cup milk chocolate chips, 1/2 cup dark chocolate chips, and 1 cup vanilla chips. A total of 2 cups of "chips" were added to my chocolate cookie base.

As I look back, I can see that I should have added a bit more flour to prevent the spreading that occurred as the cookies baked. What was produced was a thin cookie, rich in chocolate flavor and perfect for dunking in a cold glass of milk. Mmmm, delish. Today I found that 10 seconds in the microwave warms the cookie enough to be enjoyed without the milk.

These cookies aren't in our family cookbook, and I couldn't really reproduce them without creating bags of leftover bits again. Suffice to say, the cookies will be enjoyed and my pantry is a bit cleaner.