Wow babies! It's been like FOREVER since I last wrote! That's the holiday season....always a whole new set of things to take care of pushing all the old things to the back burner. Believe it or not, I did manage to get some laundry done in there.....but just barely. Let's see how I can do with recapping the entire holiday season in one reasonable post...
So---the fruitcakes. They are absolutely adorable, and so perfect! I gifted a few people with fruitcakes, and they were all impressed. My fruitcakes are not at all like those about which holiday jokes are told. Mine are light and delicate and full of delicious fruits and also completely soaked in southern comfort and triple sec. Yum. There are still some left that may end up in the posession of some of you reading this, if you like. ;)
In addition to the fruitcakes, I had some other baking adventures: pecan lucky stars, lemon basil cookies, peppermint candy canes, apricot cheese pastries, and pepparkakor. This list is basically in order from not at all a pain in the ass to good god these better be good because this is really HARD! The pecan lucky stars are a variation on a recipe my grandmother used to make, and I've made them succesfully before. Basically I just substituted maple syrup and pecans for sugar and walnuts. It's a kind of shortbread cookie that you cut out into star shapes and then you put a tiny bit of the nut mixture in the middle and fold up the corners of the stars. Easy and yummy. The lemon basil cookies are a recipe I got from the very first wedding we ever catered. These cookies are SO GOOD but the recipe is super weird. It involves cream cheese, basil, currants, and lemon cake mix. Next year I want to try to adapt it to leave out the cake mix...there must be a way to do the same thing with actual ingredients. Anyway, they aren't a pain in the ass at all, and they turned out good. The peppermint candy cane cookies is a recipe I have copied down in my private recipe repository which I thought was the recipe my mom used to make. Turns out it isn't, or isn't quite. The ones my mom used to make involved making red dough and white dough and braiding them together and then covering them in crushed candy canes. This recipe doesn't mention the coloring, or the candy canes even. It's basically an oatmeal shortbread with peppermint oil added. Which is fine, really, but not what I was looking for. I had made the decision to adapt it but then when I went to the store I forgot to get the food coloring. Bah. Also, I could not find any candy canes in the market district on the day before christmas eve. WTF? I ended up getting some peppermint stick candy and crushing that up using my muddler. It made a hell of a racket but as my neighbor was blasting Barry White I didn't worry too much. Anyway, the cookies turned out yummy even though they were only vaguely candy cane esque. The peppermint shortbread was good on it's own, and even better with crushed peppermint candy attached. But not the authentic article.
So now we come to the major pain the ass cookies...the apricot cheese pastries and the dreaded pepparkokor. The apricot cheese thingies are definitely a recipe from my mom, only hers were called Blushing Cream Cones. I substituted dried apricots for the garish cherries because I was trying to avoid garish cherries this year. This is a pastry rather than a cookie because it involves yeast. My mortal enemy. I went in with gusto though...and really, it all seemed to be going well. It took forever with the mixing and the kneading and the rising and the rising again. But then I really blew it when I went to form them...I made them WAY too big. Of course anyone who is not enemies with yeast knows that you have to make something a lot smaller than you want it to be when it comes out of the oven, but I was a dork and made them the size I wanted them to be. So after 10 minutes each delicate little cone was a monsterous LOAF. I was sort of crushed, but I was not going to let all that work go to waste, so I cut them up into bite sized pieces and coated them in powdered sugar. Ta-da! Totally delicious and no one was the wiser unless I complained to them.
The pepparkokor, I must say, are freakin delicious cookies and worth every minute of torment that went into making them. And there was torment a plenty. The thing about the swedish ginger snaps is you have to roll it REALLY REALLY thin so the cookies come out super crispy. The other thing is that this is the stickiest dough known to humans, even after sitting in the refrigerator overnight. And the third thing is that I was making them very late at night. So, let's put all these variables together into one big ball of drama. I took a tiny bit and rolled it out. It stuck to everything and was impossible to get off the rolling pin. SO I tried it again with a nice layer of sugar on the counter and the pin. That was better for the rolling, but the cookies stuck when I cut them. So THEN, I got the bright idea of rolling them out onto wax paper coated with sugar, and then peeling the paper away from the cookie. That worked, but it added a whole new level of torment and drama. I ended up making one pan of trees and one pan of bells and calling it a night. SO there is still a big ball of dough in the fridge, which I will probably roll out at some point when the catering madness is over. Sigh. But as I said, the reward of having fresh homemade gingersnaps is worth all the torment. They really are so much more delicious than your regular american style gingerbread cookies.
SO that's it for the baking adventures. I'll move on to Christmas eve next......
So---the fruitcakes. They are absolutely adorable, and so perfect! I gifted a few people with fruitcakes, and they were all impressed. My fruitcakes are not at all like those about which holiday jokes are told. Mine are light and delicate and full of delicious fruits and also completely soaked in southern comfort and triple sec. Yum. There are still some left that may end up in the posession of some of you reading this, if you like. ;)
In addition to the fruitcakes, I had some other baking adventures: pecan lucky stars, lemon basil cookies, peppermint candy canes, apricot cheese pastries, and pepparkakor. This list is basically in order from not at all a pain in the ass to good god these better be good because this is really HARD! The pecan lucky stars are a variation on a recipe my grandmother used to make, and I've made them succesfully before. Basically I just substituted maple syrup and pecans for sugar and walnuts. It's a kind of shortbread cookie that you cut out into star shapes and then you put a tiny bit of the nut mixture in the middle and fold up the corners of the stars. Easy and yummy. The lemon basil cookies are a recipe I got from the very first wedding we ever catered. These cookies are SO GOOD but the recipe is super weird. It involves cream cheese, basil, currants, and lemon cake mix. Next year I want to try to adapt it to leave out the cake mix...there must be a way to do the same thing with actual ingredients. Anyway, they aren't a pain in the ass at all, and they turned out good. The peppermint candy cane cookies is a recipe I have copied down in my private recipe repository which I thought was the recipe my mom used to make. Turns out it isn't, or isn't quite. The ones my mom used to make involved making red dough and white dough and braiding them together and then covering them in crushed candy canes. This recipe doesn't mention the coloring, or the candy canes even. It's basically an oatmeal shortbread with peppermint oil added. Which is fine, really, but not what I was looking for. I had made the decision to adapt it but then when I went to the store I forgot to get the food coloring. Bah. Also, I could not find any candy canes in the market district on the day before christmas eve. WTF? I ended up getting some peppermint stick candy and crushing that up using my muddler. It made a hell of a racket but as my neighbor was blasting Barry White I didn't worry too much. Anyway, the cookies turned out yummy even though they were only vaguely candy cane esque. The peppermint shortbread was good on it's own, and even better with crushed peppermint candy attached. But not the authentic article.
So now we come to the major pain the ass cookies...the apricot cheese pastries and the dreaded pepparkokor. The apricot cheese thingies are definitely a recipe from my mom, only hers were called Blushing Cream Cones. I substituted dried apricots for the garish cherries because I was trying to avoid garish cherries this year. This is a pastry rather than a cookie because it involves yeast. My mortal enemy. I went in with gusto though...and really, it all seemed to be going well. It took forever with the mixing and the kneading and the rising and the rising again. But then I really blew it when I went to form them...I made them WAY too big. Of course anyone who is not enemies with yeast knows that you have to make something a lot smaller than you want it to be when it comes out of the oven, but I was a dork and made them the size I wanted them to be. So after 10 minutes each delicate little cone was a monsterous LOAF. I was sort of crushed, but I was not going to let all that work go to waste, so I cut them up into bite sized pieces and coated them in powdered sugar. Ta-da! Totally delicious and no one was the wiser unless I complained to them.
The pepparkokor, I must say, are freakin delicious cookies and worth every minute of torment that went into making them. And there was torment a plenty. The thing about the swedish ginger snaps is you have to roll it REALLY REALLY thin so the cookies come out super crispy. The other thing is that this is the stickiest dough known to humans, even after sitting in the refrigerator overnight. And the third thing is that I was making them very late at night. So, let's put all these variables together into one big ball of drama. I took a tiny bit and rolled it out. It stuck to everything and was impossible to get off the rolling pin. SO I tried it again with a nice layer of sugar on the counter and the pin. That was better for the rolling, but the cookies stuck when I cut them. So THEN, I got the bright idea of rolling them out onto wax paper coated with sugar, and then peeling the paper away from the cookie. That worked, but it added a whole new level of torment and drama. I ended up making one pan of trees and one pan of bells and calling it a night. SO there is still a big ball of dough in the fridge, which I will probably roll out at some point when the catering madness is over. Sigh. But as I said, the reward of having fresh homemade gingersnaps is worth all the torment. They really are so much more delicious than your regular american style gingerbread cookies.
SO that's it for the baking adventures. I'll move on to Christmas eve next......
posted by sheryl at 4:43 PM
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