What are you Baking the Week of December 18, 2022?

[Mike Nolan]

Our son and granddaughter will be here for nearly two weeks, I suspect there will be bagels in the oven in the next few days.

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[BakerAunt]

It is always nice to have more people for whom to bake!

Years ago, King Arthur had an eggnog cake recipe for an odd mold the company was selling. I took that recipe, made major changes, and perfected my eggnog cake, which now uses no butter and also has a cup of barley flour. I had a one-cup container of frozen nonfat eggnog, so on Sunday, I baked the eggnog cake using my two Nordic Ware nutcracker pans (four nutcrackers per pan). They look quite nice. We will start eating them tomorrow, since it is best to let them rest overnight.

[BakerAunt]

I made maple granola on Monday, as we are almost out. Our area is projected to be in line for major snow and cold for the end of the week and Christmas Eve and Day, so I will make sure that we have food available that does not require opening a refrigerator or freezer, just in case. We have seen a number of NIPSCO trucks heading north on our road, so it looks like the Indiana utilities are expecting possible outages.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm making semolina bread this evening, because we used the last of it at supper. With two more people in the house, we are going through bread a lot faster.

[aaronatthedoublef]

I have biscuit dough chilling in the refrigerator. I'm not sure what I'll do with it yet. I also need to make some bread. We were going to leave for VA today or tomorrow but now Violet has covid and Henry may so we're staying put again. At least we had Thanksgiving. And we may try to head down for New Year's.

I gave Violet a Duff Goldman cookie cookbook for Hanukkah so whatever cookies I was planning are on hold (unless I sneak them in). She has already read through the book twice and is deciding on what to make.

Has anyone seen a set of cookie cutters for cutting out the parts of a gingerbread house? I have some friends who have a maker space - they have tools and knowledge to help you make things. It might be cool to give some people gingerbread house kits that are slabs of pre-baked gingerbread. I'll make them if I cannot find what I want.

[BakerAunt]

Aaron: Here's a place to start:

https://www.fancyflours.com/product/Christmas-Village-Cookie-Cutter-Set/cookie-cutters-a-to-z

I also think that amid my myriad of cookie cutters I have some that are stamp for making small gingerbread houses. When I get a chance, I will check, although the upshot of our renovation projects (finally finished this month!) is that I have not found some items yet.

Williams Sonoma, back when they were also catering to serious bakers, once had a cast iron set for making a gingerbread house, but it does not have one on the current website. However, they may still exist somewhere out there.

[navlys]

I had lard leftover from my stollen recipe. I saw that recipe for Biscochitos in the paper and I was going to try it until I discovered the supermarket did not have anise seeds. Somehow I found a recipe for polvorones using lard and almonds. The flour and almonds were toasted in oven. The cookies were baked at 300 degrees. The recipe called for the cookies to be baked for 15min. They took a good 40 minutes. None of the reviews mentioned that the timing was off. I substituted Cointreau for brandy. My cookie taster thought they were very tasty. I then proceeded to check other recipes for these cookies. They were all over the rainbow. Lesson is: when you find a recipe you have mastered ,stick with it!

[Mike Nolan]

15 => 40 is an unusually large difference in baking time.

[BakerAunt]

Navlys--sadly, items such as anise seed or candied fruit are no longer stocked in most supermarkets.

I'm glad you were able to make the recipe you baked work.

[BakerAunt]

On Wednesday, I baked my Pumpkin Pecan Loaf recipe (6 cups) in a Nordic Ware mini-holiday loaf pan that has 8 wells. It was a perfect fit. I shortened the baking time to 25 minutes, which was just right.

[RiversideLen]

Tonight I made Noel Nut Balls from a Martha Stewart recipe.

[aaronatthedoublef]

BA - thanks for the pointer to the gingerbread cookie cutters. They're pretty neat and along the lines of what I want but a little small. But I can search for bigger ones now.

If you all were using something like this would you want plastic or metal?

Pretty cool Navlys. I wonder how often people run into the things you ran into and give up. How many people does that turn off from baking.

Attached is a picture of my biscuits. No leakage! Based on advice from you all and Solveig (the recipe creator) I used my pastry cutter and cut the butter in instead of just tossing it. This is a big recipe and even cutting it back by 60% I still have a lot of dough left over after making two dozen midsize biscuits. Even better, Violet and Kate who both "don't like biscuits" like these! I may also use some for pizza crust this weekend if I make pizza.

The bad news is Violet tested positive for COVID so one more Christmas without Nana and Gramps. We're trying to make this as special for the kids as possible and doing last minute things - like getting a tree - that we had not planned on doing.

I added a picture of Violet's elf, Daisy, who spent a couple days on our gingerbread house. She has been very mischievous this year and has been taking cookies and candy.

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[Mike Nolan]

There are several gingerbread house cutter sets out there, a search on Amazon finds multiples of several of them. (That's all too common these days, sellers create multiple vendors for the same products, with identical pictures, often at various price points.)

The largest of them that I saw makes a house that is about 9 inches tall at the peak.

[navlys]

It is certainly a bummer when you plan and bake and cook and clean and your plans go "Poof"! But that's life and on we go with a smile on our face and hope that somehow it was all for the best!

[BakerAunt]

My husband used the last of the bread for lunch on Thursday. I had anticipated it would run out, so I began a levain last night and today baked Rustic Wholegrain Sourdough Bread, using the Romertopf glazed bowl and the cloche top from the set I bought last year from Skeptik. (The bottom only fits bread loaves of about 3 cups flour; this recipe is 5-cups of grains.) I played with the recipe, which I had only baked this way once, by adding a tablespoon of flax meal and half a cup of the King Arthur 6-grains flakes. Although I deleted a half cup more of the bread flour, the dough needed another ¼ cup of water, and possibly could have used a little more. As I was shaping it, I sprayed it with water after each fold, I sprayed it before the second rise, and I sprayed it after I slashed it, put the cloche on, set it in the cold oven, then turned on the oven. I checked at 50 minutes, but it was only 190F, so I gave it another 3 minutes uncovered. I think that the second rise should have been a little longer, given the coolness of the house, but the rise in the oven was good, and it certainly looks rustic. I look forward sampling it at lunch tomorrow.

I am making my sourdough pan pizza for Thursday night's dinner. My plan is that we eat half tonight and the leftovers for Christmas Eve dinner. That, of course, depends on not having any power outages tonight or tomorrow. So far, the wind has not picked up, but it likely will later this evening.

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