Many tasty things
So, here are things I've baked since the first weekend of November.
Banana-chocolate cakelets, using up a couple of overripe bananas that were sitting around on the countertop. As I recall, I ran low on chocolate chips, but threw in a teaspoon or so of cinnamon. Reasonable result.
Carrot cupcakes, made from scratch. My big mistakes were A) buying carrots to shred myself rather than a bag of preshredded carrot, B) buying baby carrots so I could stick the leftovers into my fruit cup for my snack at work that night, and C) using too small a grater. I spent too damned long producing two cups of carrot shreds for the recipe, and they wound up too finely ground (more mush than shreds). That being said, at some point I'm going to try an apple-carrot recipe I have.
The recipe claimed to be for gingerbread. The result neither looked nor tasted like gingerbread -- though the cookies did taste pretty good. (The dough was so sticky I could only use it in cutters that had a separate mold plate to push the dough out of the cutter with. Forgot till afterwards I had a set of pumpkin cutters with a choice of jack o'lantern faces I also could have used on this batch.)
Okay, here is the Apple-Upside-Down Pumpkin Cake I made for Thanksgiving. The mistake I made was forgetting the bit in the directions about sticking a round of parchment paper into the bottoms of the cake pans until after I'd already poured melted butter into the first pan. So one got parchment and one didn't, which is why the lower layer held together well and the top layer lost structural cohesion as soon as I lifted the pan away. (After taking the photo, I put the pan back over the top and left it in place until the cake was being cut into on Thanksgiving afternoon.) The cake was aesthetically-challenged but delicious. (Well, the apple layer could have done with a bit more flavor. I threw in a dash of cinnamon into the melted-butter-brown-sugar in the bottoms of the pans, but it could have done with more spice.)
The rest of the pumpkin puree went into another batch of pumpkin-cinnamon cookies, which were once again delicious.
Muffins from a mix (was it cranberry orange?) testing out a new silicone mold I'd gotten. Those are little gingerbread-style houses.
Gingerbread from a mix. Much more like gingerbread. Note that most of the cookies came from molds (especially lots of bitsy snowflakes) but that a handful were successfully produced from old-school metal frame cookie cutters. Note that the cutters gave boring results that really needed decorating with icing or colored sugar or some such. Next time, next time. (I have another couple of packets of that gingerbread mix, as well as one of sugar cookie mix. I need to either figure out what I'm doing wrong with my cookies-from-scratch, or use better recipes.)
And finally, this week's baking -- red velvet cupcakes with holiday sprinkles. From a mix, because I was in a hurry to leave for Dad's later that day.
So that's what I've been doing in the kitchen for the last six weeks or so. And now I need to finish my nails, and then maybe go visit Grandma (having skipped visiting on Monday or Tuesday because I felt so sick) and/or hit the gym. Back to work tonight!
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.
Banana-chocolate cakelets, using up a couple of overripe bananas that were sitting around on the countertop. As I recall, I ran low on chocolate chips, but threw in a teaspoon or so of cinnamon. Reasonable result.
Carrot cupcakes, made from scratch. My big mistakes were A) buying carrots to shred myself rather than a bag of preshredded carrot, B) buying baby carrots so I could stick the leftovers into my fruit cup for my snack at work that night, and C) using too small a grater. I spent too damned long producing two cups of carrot shreds for the recipe, and they wound up too finely ground (more mush than shreds). That being said, at some point I'm going to try an apple-carrot recipe I have.
The recipe claimed to be for gingerbread. The result neither looked nor tasted like gingerbread -- though the cookies did taste pretty good. (The dough was so sticky I could only use it in cutters that had a separate mold plate to push the dough out of the cutter with. Forgot till afterwards I had a set of pumpkin cutters with a choice of jack o'lantern faces I also could have used on this batch.)
Okay, here is the Apple-Upside-Down Pumpkin Cake I made for Thanksgiving. The mistake I made was forgetting the bit in the directions about sticking a round of parchment paper into the bottoms of the cake pans until after I'd already poured melted butter into the first pan. So one got parchment and one didn't, which is why the lower layer held together well and the top layer lost structural cohesion as soon as I lifted the pan away. (After taking the photo, I put the pan back over the top and left it in place until the cake was being cut into on Thanksgiving afternoon.) The cake was aesthetically-challenged but delicious. (Well, the apple layer could have done with a bit more flavor. I threw in a dash of cinnamon into the melted-butter-brown-sugar in the bottoms of the pans, but it could have done with more spice.)
The rest of the pumpkin puree went into another batch of pumpkin-cinnamon cookies, which were once again delicious.
Muffins from a mix (was it cranberry orange?) testing out a new silicone mold I'd gotten. Those are little gingerbread-style houses.
Gingerbread from a mix. Much more like gingerbread. Note that most of the cookies came from molds (especially lots of bitsy snowflakes) but that a handful were successfully produced from old-school metal frame cookie cutters. Note that the cutters gave boring results that really needed decorating with icing or colored sugar or some such. Next time, next time. (I have another couple of packets of that gingerbread mix, as well as one of sugar cookie mix. I need to either figure out what I'm doing wrong with my cookies-from-scratch, or use better recipes.)
And finally, this week's baking -- red velvet cupcakes with holiday sprinkles. From a mix, because I was in a hurry to leave for Dad's later that day.
So that's what I've been doing in the kitchen for the last six weeks or so. And now I need to finish my nails, and then maybe go visit Grandma (having skipped visiting on Monday or Tuesday because I felt so sick) and/or hit the gym. Back to work tonight!
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.