All posts tagged baking

B’s Favorite Cookie Recipe

by ohdessa on August 11, 2010 in food with No comments

B and I have a favorite cookie recipe. We’ve tried others, but of all of the recipes I’ve found that involve adding candy bits, this one is the tastiest. We’ve made it with M&Ms, Reese’s Pieces and those little chocolate candy bits, and it was all delicious. I always let B pick out what we are going to put in the cookies when he comes grocery shopping with me. (Except this last week, I went alone, and it was so peaceful!) This time, we had no M&Ms to put on top of the cookies to make them pretty because B decided to dump the whole (luckily small) bag in. He loves making cookies. Mostly sitting on the counter and testing the M&Ms to make sure they are still good. He also likes adding stuff to the mixer. He really likes mixers. I do too! I swear my baked goods are better since I got one for Christmas the year before last. I think its the extra air and stronger arm.

The one thing about this recipe is that it has to be made as written. I’ve tried doing it with butter or margarine instead of shortening, as I don’t typically have shortening on hand, but it just makes them too soft. Since they are pretty soft to begin with, it’s not a good thing. Seriously, these taste like the sort of cookie you’d buy at a coffee house in the good way. Pro-cookies! And they taste terrific dipped in milk (or milky coffee!!)

Selbu-itus (or one mitten-itus)

by ohdessa on July 26, 2010 in knitting with No comments

So as I mentioned in my last post, I was working on some gloves from Selbuvotter. I finished one, but it was smaller than I’d hope. It fits my hand though, so thats ok. I picked up some Palette in Bittersweet Heather and Salsa Heather to start a newer, bigger pair, Annemor #15. I also went up a needle size. I stupidly bought the Susan Bates needles because they were the longest the store had, even though I am sure the longest in the other brand was more than adequete. These needles suck! The joins are so rough and catchy and the cable is so stiff. I love the pattern though. These are going to be some nice mittens. I seriously want to knit every mitten and glove in the whole book, but will probably stop at one more (some moose mittens or gloves! In bright orange and yellow mohair blend!) I must say though that the sizing is really wonky. The last one I did was supposed to be a men’s medium, but the current ones I am doing are a men’s small but have more stitches on the same needles and with the same yarn. Oh well, these ones should fit their intended recipient. 

I have three and a quarter mittens (or gloves) that need friends. So that is what I am going to do over the next couple of weeks. I also picked up some more Noro Kureyon (in the most boring colourway – light beige and medium beige with a bit of light tan) to go with some Noro in my stash for some other mittens I am going to design/make. I am addicted to mittens. No more starting anything until I have three pairs! I do have a shawl (with lacey bits!) and sock pattern in my future, I just want to get all these mittens done first.

The boys are doing great. O has a tooth and is standing up holding on to things more. And I can’t just put him down, he just rolls and rolls all over the place getting into trouble. B knows his right from left way before I ever will. Is there such thing as directional dyslexia? I can’t think in direction. Even something as simple as flipping a pattern or figuring out where north is takes me a lot of thinking. The other day I swear I spent an hour trying to figure out how to place thumbs on a mitten, and trying to figure out which side would correlate to which hand (and I still got it wrong). 

B and I make cookies every Tuesday evening. Usually we make our special recipe M&M cookies. Seriously, they are the best M&M cookies ever. But this week, we are going to make cut-able rainbow chip cookies because I picked up these awesome cookie cutters from Superstore. I had been looking for larger alphabet cutters, because my fondant ones are not so good for cookies. Or even fondant really. So when I saw these I was so excited. And they were only $4.99. Tomorrow is going to be a fun cookie night. 

Baking and making…

by ohdessa on May 3, 2010 in food with 1 Comment


So I decided to take the make-it-yourself plunge today. I really want to reduce the amount of processed junk B eats, and keep O from eating too much. At least when they are at home. I’ve been talking about it for a bit and reading and planning as I am one to do. Last night, I decided to just jump into it. Since we have a lot planned over the next week, I did not need to do too much grocery shopping so I decided we’d go to Organza and the Bulk Barn this morning. Checking their website I found that Organza opened at 10 this morning, which is awesome, because B usually naps around noon,which is when I would have gone. We got some good stuff like blood oranges and butter lettuce grown in Landmark and funny organic cookies shaped like Priuses (is that the plural of Prius?)and windmills. We had some time to kill between Organza and the Bulk Barn so we decided to go to the Forks and get some coffee and delicious cinnamon buns (I always want to try the roasted vegetable bread pudding, but always seem to be there between meals). Then to the Bulk Barn for some baking supplies. I needed stuff to start making stuff. I picked up some organic gummy bears for B, and they are really really good. Organic gummy bears might seem a little overkill, I know, but it’s the junk they replace sugar with that bugs me the most. I mean, if my kid is going to go crazy on anything, it better be the gold standard in sweetness, not corn. Corn is barely nutritious in its unadulterated form other than the fiber, so I don’t like to think about what they do to it to make it sweeten food. It just does not seem right. Anyways. Next weekend I think we’ll go shopping at the Forks, it opens at 9:30 and has cinnamon buns.



So after we got home, I got to some baking. I took the “goldfish” cracker dough that I had made last night out of the fridge and all cut up. I could not find any fish cookie cutters, so I got a hippo, a triceratops, a squirrel, and a bear (which really looks more like a burly dog). And I cut and cut, till I had filled my two cookie sheets three times each. Which is a lot of little crackers. And I baked and baked while they puffed up. B helped by stealing all my kitchen implements and insisting I find more for him to pretend to cook with, while O giggled at me. And when they were done, I gave one to B, nervous over wasting so much time baking something he would not like. And then he left the room and brought me the crackers he had been eating earlier and said “No more this, more THIS!” and pointed at the crackers I had just made. Victory! Flour, butter, cheese, salt, and pepper, so simple but really really good. If you have a cheesy cracker lover in your house, you should make these. Then I got super hippy and made Ryan some granola for breakfast, because he likes it. With oats, brown sugar, raisins, cherries, almonds, coconut and honey. So good. Tomorrow I am going to try to make something Bear Paw like with the old bananas we have around. I can’t find a recipe so I am going to wing it. It feels good to make things. Something about baking elevating your mood.


I also quickly sewed up some snack pouches. They are more prototypes, and I did not have much time to do them, but they turned out pretty good. I dig it. Easier, cuter, and less garbage making than ziplock bags. Especially the cuter part. And when you flip the top they form a nice bowl. After I do a few tweaks (and maybe a trip to Fabricland) I am going to make some more. Making wise, I am still working on the sweater. I just moved the sleeve stitches (I made them extra poofy) to some waste yarn, and don’t have too much more to do. Mostly because I am making it short-sleeved. The flowers are a touch wonky, but they just need some fixing with a crochet hook when it’s all done. Yup. And now I am going to relax and work on it.

Easter

by ohdessa on April 5, 2010 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment



I was up very late last night baking chocolate Babka for easter. I use the same recipe every year, from marthastewart.com and it has served me well. But with the 10 minutes of stand mixer kneading, I don’t know how I did it before my KitchenAid mixer came into my life. 


The dough turned out really well. It turned out super silky. After a lot of rising (it seems fitting that an Easter bread would spend so much time rising) I added the two-and-a-half (that’s right!) pounds of chocolate (mixed with butter, sugar, and cinnamon) to the rolled out dough. I can’t believe that a dough that gets kneaded that long rolls out so easily.


After an hour in the oven, I took out the chocolate Babka. I also decided to make one regular Babka as well, as I was curious how this dough would work with only raisins mixed in (the answer is very well). Usually I don’t do so well with such finicky bread recipes (or bread recipes at all really), but this turned out superb as usual. The chocolate did not melt as well as it should have for some reason. It doesn’t change the taste at all, because the chocolate cools down before serving, but it takes away from the visual effect of the swirls of chocolate. It disappointed me when I first cut into a loaf because it looked more like scattered chocolate chips, but then I took a bite and it was so good it did not really matter anymore. It must have been all the thoughts of puppy dogs and butterflies that I tried to keep in my head while the dough rose. I read somewhere about how it’s believed that the success of your Paska or Babka relies on the purity of thought of its baker. And that some while baking would go so far as to not allow anyone else in the house as to not ruin their golden bread by allowing bad thoughts to enter their home.


I really liked it as a regular Babka as well. Delicious. This is one of my favorite things to bake all year. I always divide the dough into six loaves in those aluminum pans that are slightly smaller than a regular loaf pan. It fills them well, and are a good size to roll out on a counter too. I usually make substitutions or do something different, but other than the smaller loaves (that still bake for the same amount of time) I followed the instructions exactly. Side note: Someone really needs to invent a computing device that has some way to save online recipes in a “cookbook” of sorts and lets me write notes on it. That is my dream app. Maybe the Microsoft Courier will do that. Let me say it here that I thought of  
that, so they better put me in an annoying ad (this ad was way better) about how the Microsoft Courier was my idea. 


Me being the occasional non-thinker, did my nails before baking. Luckily I was able to fix them up. I decided that I wanted nails that looked like Easter eggs. Tiffany-blue with purple tips and a glittery silver stripe. I used China Glaze For Audrey and OPI Do You Lilac It. It was pretty fun.

For the boys Easter basket, I spent some time sewing yesterday. I made O a Stegasaurus with ribbon tag plates down its back. It got a slobbery baby mouth of approval. I based it on this pig pattern from marthastewart.com. If I used it again, I would enlarge it, although I like the tiny dino. For B, I sewed him an Owly from his bedtime book, and a car mat. I really could have done a better job on the car mat, but I only had around an hour to spend on it, and considering that I think I did a pretty good job. I think I might remake it sometime though. Something more like this or this (I can’t wait to make things from B’s drawings BTW). I also got him some Cars Dominoes. “Play game, play game,” he was saying all day. I started to teach him a basic matching version of Dominoes, and he started to get it. He mostly loved dumping them out and putting them back in their tin. I am slowly hoping to work him up to my favorite game, Candyland.

We had a really nice brunch with my family this morning. My sister left for Montreal yesterday, and family gatherings aren’t quite the same without her. After eating too much food we went home and all took naps. Now I am watching the Real Housewives of Orange County (!) and taking a break from knitting Ryan’s hat to type this up while my nails (a deep jewel green) dry. Tomorrow we have dinner with Ryan’s family, and after that I have knitting group. B and I are going to play some more dominoes tomorrow, and maybe break out the glitter glue and safety scissors during O’s nap. O is becoming such a social little baby. He smiles big at anyone who catches his gaze, and carries on long conversations to anyone (or thing) that will listen. It’s pretty adorable. It makes my day.




Mmmmmmuffins

by ohdessa on March 29, 2010 in Uncategorized with No comments

So even though we moved in November, there are still unpacked boxes. In my defense, they are all hidden from view in storage, and are mostly full of stuff that has no where to go right now. We got rid of our falling apart bookcases when we moved, so there are a lot of boxes of books waiting for a new home. And I have no where to put all of my art stuff right now, so that is all hidden away too. Every once in a while I need something I suspect might be in a box so I start searching though them and find other forgotten treasures. Yesterday, I don’t even remember what I was looking for, but in a banana box in the corner of the storage room, I found my Baked cookbook. Which meant of course, being a sucker for antler motifs, I had to bake something.

I had been planning to make these Banana Crumb Muffins last night (Which are greatly improved with some extra cinnamon in the actual batter). I had made them a few weeks ago, and Ryan insisted I make them again, especially after the last time I told him I would make them and I made mini chocolate chip muffins instead. But having found my Baked cookbook, I decided to try the Banana Espresso Chocolate Chip muffins in the book, mostly because it was that or the Red Hot Velvet cake, and I could not think of a good reason to make that. Although when a good reason presents itself, I am all over that. And probably in cupcake form. If only easter were about cake and not Babkas.

So I set out to bake the muffins, and then quickly realized I had a few problems. First off, I only had one mushy banana, but the recipe called for four. So I quickly microwaved another one mushy, and decided to halve the recipe. Then I could not find any muffin tin liners. Seriously! I should have millions leftover from various cupcake baking expeditions. Where do they go? I just greased the pan, but really, I should have some. I bake a lot of cupcakes, and I always buy too many liners and put them aside for later. They are probably in an unpacked box in a storage room. Or B and the cat got to them. Finally, I realized we had no brown sugar, or even molasses so I could doctor some up. Oh well. I did have a jar of espresso powder for some reason though. So with all that in mind, I got to baking.

Before I popped the muffins in, I tasted the batter. Delicious. Although I think that the espresso flavour was a bit more pronounced before the baking, and I’d probably add a bit more if I make them again because it brought out the chocolate and made it taste so much more rich.The batter was not quite dense enough to support the chocolate chips either (and I used mini ones) so they kind of sunk a little, but it looks nice when you cut them open. They turned out really well despite my ill preparation. Fresh baked muffins for breakfast are delicious! And Ryan approved, even though they have chocolate bocolate in them.

After taking a break from doing much baking due to being too pregnant to move, and too busy with a new baby to breath, it’s great to finally have some time. They say baking is a mood elevator, and I’d have to agree. And this week being Easter and all, I need to make some Babkas! Chocolate ones specifically. But more on that later this week.