What are you Baking the Week of August 17, 2025?

[Mike Nolan]

I'm making oatmeal crisp M&M cookies today, Diane is back to full-time on campus on Monday as the fall semester starts in a week, and she need snacks.

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[BakerAunt]

We got 0.7 inches of rain from early Saturday evening into early Sunday morning, but there was a lot of thunder starting at 6 p.m. Saturday, which caused our dog to cower in her bed and not eat her supper. Her nerves were clearly frazzled this morning, even though the thunder had ended, so I decided to make her favorite, Cornmeal and Pumpernickel Waffles, for breakfast. Once we administered some waffle pieces, she was back to her old self again. (Who needs Xanax?)

In the afternoon, I baked Squash, Whole Wheat, and Oat Quick Bread, using my Nordic Ware 4-loaf Bundlette pan, which has the older kind of coating. Even with the grease, I had a bit of sticking, also in part due to the cinnamon chips. (Yes, I am still using them up--expiration year 2017--and they are still good.) I also should have waited a bit longer before trying to remove them from the pan. Ten minutes was not enough. Two of the loaves broke a bit. I also used half whole wheat pastry flour and half King Arthur AP; I might want to go back to using slightly more (1/4 cup) of the AP than the whole wheat pastry flour. We went ahead and cut into one of the damaged ones while it was slightly warm. It crumbled, but oh, did it taste good! I used one of the golden arrow zucchini, which has a milder taste than the green ones.

[cwcdesign]

I baked a batch of the KAF fudge brownies for dessert today. I sent most of them home with my friends and froze the rest.

They were a little bit dense due to the fact that I tried to be clever and use the whisk from my Cuisinart hand blender - I thought it might save time over the stand mixer. Big mistake - cocoa powder started flying, so I had to move the batter from the bowl to the stand mixer which was messy. I think I over mixed the first par - the rest was easy. I also used minimally processed cane sugar, which didn't completely melt, but I think if I heated it more and then let it cool down it would work better. They are still delicious.

[skeptic7]

I am making another batch of the Taiwan Breakfast Bao. I started last night. Looks promising so far except that the second half might have thumb prints in the dough. My father insisted on moving the second half of the dough to the steamer. I normally do this myself.

[Mike Nolan]

I made Banh Mi yesterday, increasing the recipe so I got 8 hot dog buns (@ 50 grams of dough) and 8 Banh Mi rolls (@ 80 grams of dough). I didn't add either rye or whole wheat flour to this batch.

Most of them went in the freezer. 2 of the rolls were for supper last night.

I'm trying an experiment I read online with some of them, I put them in a paper grocery sack and then in my bread box. That's supposed to help keep them from going soft and also from being so damp they mold in a few days. I'll let you know if it seems to work.

I also made a batch of oatmeal crisp cookies with M&Ms using a bit more flour and oatmeal, since the last few batches have been coming out pretty flat. These are more like the ones I make with chocolate chips, with nice air-holes in the middle, making them perfect for dunking in milk. I'm not sure why M&Ms would be that different from chocolate chips in this recipe, though.

[BakerAunt]

I baked two recipes of Scottish Oatcakes on Monday afternoon. I have packed most of these to send to one of my sisters, along with four different jars of jam. She will be having surgery to deal with scar tissue sometime in the next month or so, and I wanted to send her an advance care package.

[Mike Nolan]

We've made up a care package to send to our granddaughter, who is moving into the dorms at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute this week, but there won't be any baked goods in it due to her food sensitivities. They have a staff of nutrition counselors that work with students on making sure the dining facilities can address everyone's food sensitivity issues, something that was unheard of when I went to college in the 60's, you ate what they had, even when you weren't always sure what it was. 🙂

[Joan Simpson]

I'm trying to clean out the freezer so I'm making 2 loaves of banana bread which I will give to my sister in law and one for my best friend.

[BakerAunt]

I made dough for Whole Wheat Sourdough Crackers on Tuesday. I will bake them either at the end of this week or early next week.

[chocomouse]

Today I made a lemon-zucchini cake with a cup and a half of blueberries, in a 9x9" pan. I also froze two 8-ounce yogurt containers of shredded zucchini to use in baked goods next winter. It's a tough year for gardening here, as we've had almost no rain, just light sprinkles a couple of times for the past month. But the zucchini is thriving - I swear nothing can stop it from growing!!

[RiversideLen]

I haven't been doing too much baking in this hot weather. Today is cooler and I needed bread. I was debating between a braided loaf and burger buns, the burger buns won.

[BakerAunt]

We have had two days now of cooler weather, with temperatures in the 70s, so I took the opportunity to make Sourdough Pan Pizza for dinner. It has been a long time since we have had pizza for dinner, and Len's pizza pictures on Nebraska Kitchen reminded me of how much I wanted pizza!

[BakerAunt]

On Friday, I baked six Blueberry Oat Muffins for breakfast, which is a half recipe. We had about 1/3 cup of blueberries that we have accumulated from our two blueberry bushes (well, one underperformed, so mostly from a single bush), and these small berries have been drying out in the refrigerator. They made excellent muffins, and we reveled in having used ones we grew.

My other baking adventure was to take, as my starting point, the Lemon Oatmeal Sugar Cookie recipe that Joan bakes and to which she posted a link. I wanted to see if I could adapt it as an oil cookie with a more nutritionally dense profile. I had one last night, about an hour after baking, and thought that I was close. However, after eating one today, I know that I nailed it. The cookies need to rest overnight in order to come into their full flavor. Because I made so many changes, I have typed the recipe and will post it here at Nebraska Kitchen in the recipe section, along with a picture.

Scott was dubious about a Lemon Oatmeal Cookie recipe until he tasted them. He is now a convert.

[Joan Simpson]

Baker Aunt I'm so glad you got the recipe to your likings and I'll be trying it that way too.

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