First it was donuts, then cupcakes, now cookies. There are at least a half-dozen stores in Lincoln that specialize in cookies, one of them specializes in delivering warm cookies. We recently went to a charity fundraiser where they delivered warm cookies for dessert, they were great!
Several of the cupcake places have closed. We still have a number of donut shops, though I'm almost tempted not to count Dunkin among them these days, heaven knows where those donuts are made!
Will bread ever have a bakery renaissance?
I've always wondered what would happen if you substituted some of the flour in the pan grease with cocoa powder.
I use butter and cocoa powder for the Texas Chocolate Sheet Cake, but cake-in-the-pan/crazy cake doesn't use any grease in the pan.
We wound up having some of the chili a bit later than we had originally planned. The BBGA had an online event this evening that we participated in, a honey tasting organized by the National Honey Board with five different varieties of honey. It was very interesting and there were several of the honeys that I had never tasted: avocado and tupelo. I'd had orange blossom honey, buckwheat honey is fairly easy to find around here, and I have sampled alfalfa honey in the past.
We had chili and cinnamon rolls.
We had tomato soup and fried cheese sandwiches, a nice tummy warmer on a cold day, plus some salad from the Aerogarden.
We had leftovers here.
Spaghetti tonight.
I have two loaves of semolina bread in the oven this evening.
We had cheese tortellini with diced tomatoes.
I just sliced up the last of the semolina bread, time to make more tomorrow.
I made about a quart of Thousand Island dressing on Thursday, we finished it last night. (I did send some of it home with a friend, who really loves Thousand Island dressing, but can't eat most of it because it often has olives or olive oil, which she is allergic to.)
The Salanova hydroponic crisp curly pelletized lettuce seed I got from Johnny's has been great, I've already gotten a second picking from the first three I picked last week and I should be able to pick more tomorrow. It looks like a frisee but it is sweet like a romaine.
I got a big container of vegetable beef soup out of the freezer for dinner tonight.
Watched Nebraska pull off the upset against Iowa in football, now I'm watching the Nebraska women's volleyball team struggle against Wisconsin, a team they've lost 9 straight matches
to, including the national championship match last December.
Lunch was leftover salad, supper was leftover turkey, stuffing and beans, followed by a piece of chocolate cream pie.
The chocolate cream pie, made with chocolate pate sucree and topped with meringue.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Busy day in the kitchen here, with dinner planned for 5:30, but I've got my schedule posted and there are plenty of rest breaks in it, so I don't totally wear out. Right now we're watching the Macy's parade.
I've got the chocolate pie filled and cooling, I'll make meringue once it is a bit cooler. (I'd prefer a Swiss or Italian meringue, but my wife prefers French meringue, even though it has a tendency to weep.)
I tried something a bit different when I was blind baking the pie. I cut a 12" circle of parchment, then made slits around a third of the way in all around so that when I put it in the pie pan the slits folded over each other, which avoids having parchment wrinkles. Seemed to work fairly well. I also chilled the dough after putting it in the pan, that's supposed to reduce shrinkage some.
I read an interesting article online about various ways to blind bake a pie, their preferred way was to use aluminum foil then fill it with granulated sugar and cook it at a lower temperature for an hour. It is supposed to reduce shrinkage and also results in making a batch of toasted sugar. I didn't do that because I don't have a lot of recipes that use toasted sugar, though some might benefit from it even if they don't call for it. (I'd also have to find a place to store it!)
Simple fare ahead of Thanksgiving here: macaroni and cheese. I added ground beef to mine, Diane added some ham and havarti cheese to hers.
