What are you Baking the Week of December 11, 2022?

[skeptic7]

I did an apple pie to use up some not very sweet Honeycrisp. I bought them because they were on sale but found they were too sour for a table apple. I cooked with Honeycrisp before and expected them to make a good pie. They might have but I think I forgot to add flour to the sugar and spices when I made the filling.

[Mike Nolan]

Honeycrisp is a medium-sweet pie, I don't personally think it makes a good cooking apple, it is a large-cell fruit and I think it gets a bit mushy when baked.

[skeptic7]

I'm used to Honeycrisp being a very sweet apple, almost too sweet for my tastes. This batch was slightly sour so the idea of the pie was born. The apple held its shape well when cooked. Does large cell/small cell make a difference in cooking? I hear that it gives the crisper texture when eaten raw.

[Mike Nolan]

The best pie apples are small cell, large cell apples tend to be good eating apples, the kind you take a bite out of and the juice dribbles down your chin.

This was a strange year for apples, that might have affected the Honeycrisp you bought.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Here is our gingerbread house.

It is very hard and has a bitter aftertaste from the molasses. But, my boys, when they were younger, would still have eaten it. 🙂 Now people just pick the candy off!

Attachments:

You must be logged in to view attached files.

[Mike Nolan]

What kind of molasses did you use?

I find the decorating the part I'm worst at.

When Necco wafers were discontinued (thankfully only temporarily), I think it was the fans of gingerbread houses who raised the biggest fuss and helped get them back into production.

[Joan Simpson]

Aaron I like your Gingerbread house especially the candy windows.I've never attempted one myself.Glad you and Violet got to do this together.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Mike - like you, I am not much of a decorator. I have done it a few times in my life (like my infamous rollercoaster cake). Violet, on the other hand loves this. She could not and did not wait for me to finish putting the house together but began as soon as there was a structure to work on. we even had to remove some of her decorations to allow me to finish putting the roof on. I wish I had some pictures of that process.

Thanks Joan. This is something my nine-year-old clearly loves to do with me and I'm going to keep on hoping it survives her becoming a surly teenager. 🙂

I have been using Grandma's unsulfured molasses. Whole Foods has some black strap but it is hugely expensive and Big Y has big jars of Grandma's on sale so I bought two bottles. I have used it in other cookies but didn't notice the bitter taste.

I think the molasses helps keep things pliable. But I also noticed the gingerbread needs to cure for about 12 hours otherwise it is very soft. So trim the edges right out of the oved then let it sit for a day or so (not in a plastic bag).

BA, I thought gingerbread was actually a cake/quick bread and that the flavors were adopted for cookies like the pumpkin spice-ification of everything this time of year. I also used Crisco instead of butter to reduce the spread and this spreads more on silpats than on parchment which wasn't necessarily bad. I suppose if I were making cookies for eating I would cut back on the molasses, up the sugar a little, and chill them before they went in the oven. Maybe upping the flour some would help them hold their shape too.

[Mike Nolan]

Recipes for gingerbread cookies and recipes for gingerbread houses are different, the former are designed to be edible, the latter are designed to be sturdy, for construction.

[Author]

Posts