What are You Baking the Week of March 4, 2018?

[Mike Nolan]

Today I made 48 small cream puff shells, about 1 3/4 inches in diameter. I haven't filled them with anything yet, this was mostly just to practice piping choux paste. I'm probably going to throw most of them in the freezer.

[Joan Simpson]

I made another batch of cinnamon rolls with raisins and added a potato that I boiled and mashed up and topped them with a cream cheese icing.They turned out well and I took them to our aunts home next door.

[Mike Nolan]

We stuck a bunch of the mini-cinnamon rolls that I made two weeks ago in the freezer. My wife says if you pop them in the microwave for a few seconds, they're just fine.

[chocomouse]

Yesterday I made the Crusty Loaves from KAF. I've made them several times previously and they are very good. However, I'd recently seen a baking site where the blogger added chopped green olives before rolling up the dough, and thought this would be tasty. I had some Gruyere-Cheddar from Trader Joe's in the freezer, a perfect match with olives. I cut the salt to less than a 1/2 teaspoon, due to the saltiness of the olives and cheddar. They rose much higher than my earlier batches, I would assume due to the lower amount of salt.

Today I made the Sour Cream Coffee Cake, a Goodness mix from KAF. If you're not familiar with those mixes, KAF donates to a foodbank for every mix sold, and the price of a mix is only 3.99, compared to their more typical 6.95 mixes. I love this particular mix, and there are days when I just don't want to stand at the counter measuring out ingredients. I don't care for the Lemon Bars or the Cheesecake - I can make those so much better from scratch. The cinnamon muffins are good. I also made two loaves of buttermilk oatmeal whole wheat bread.

[BakerAunt]

Tonight I baked the KAF recipe for Fresh Apple-Cinnamon Scones. I've baked it once before, and they were excellent--but only when fresh out of the oven. The apple tended to make them soggy after they had cooled, and even re-heating them did not equal the original flavor. My experiment tonight is to use chopped dried apple from Bob's Red Mill. I used 1/2 cup and rehydrated them with 2 Tbs. water in a dish covered with saran in the microwave. I then let them sit for a couple of hours. I'm hoping that tomorrow morning, when I've "sprung forward," and would not want to be baking, that these will be good at room temperature.

Although the recipe claims you can freeze them and then pull them out to bake as needed, I've never had any luck with that technique. Instead, the butter melted all over the place, and I had a mess to clean up. So, either I bake them in the morning--not going to happen with springing forward--or I bake them the night before.

My other changes to the recipe is that I used 2 cups KAF flour, then mostly a 3/4 cup of barley flour that I wanted to use up, with whole wheat pastry flour filling it the rest of the way. I reduced the salt from 3/4 to 1/2 tsp.; I also deleted the 1 tsp. of vanilla extract because I want the apple (recipe includes 1/2 cup applesauce as well) and the butter to take center stage. I sprinkled them with the KAF sparkling white sugar but not with cinnamon.

As the recipe specifies, I froze them for 30 minutes before putting them into a hot oven. Because the refrigerator is a side-by-side, I cut the parchment paper diagonally, then put each round on a small baking sheet that would fit into that space. I moved them back to the large baking sheet before putting them in the oven.

I'll add a note to this post tomorrow about how my experiment works. They do smell lovely.

Additional Note: These are delicious and the texture is scone perfect. I will definitely be baking these, with my changes, as one of my regular scone recipes.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by BakerAunt.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by BakerAunt.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by BakerAunt.

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