biscuits

Starboy loves biscuits!

Mommy does, too! These didn't last long!

Valentine Cookies

We get a head start on Valentine's Day each year, since several valentines need to be mailed back east. 

 This year's Valentine was a tiny care package of brown sugar shortbread cookies and lime meltaways.

The lime meltaways were from Martha Stewart's Cookies. They taste just like the key lime coolers I used to have in Florida when I lived there.

She recommended shaping the dough into two logs to chill. I made mine into two long Toblerone-shaped pyramids, then used a chopstick to create a very deep groove along one side. Slices of this grooved pyramid produced...

 ...heart-shaped cookies!

 ....which I overbaked.

I also made some old standby brown sugar shortbread cookies. It's a pretty standard recipe I got from a friend almost 20 years ago, but I'll list it below. Super easy. 

My cookie stamp is star-shaped, so I used brand new rubber stamps, with hearts or "love" on them, to press the cookies. I was disappointed to decide that heart-shaped cookies proved too time consuming. If you have any ideas of a quick way to make these into hearts, please comment below.

Starboy was busy playing, so his help with the cookies was minimal, but he did help me package them in valentine tins (Michael's, $1.50) to send to my best friend The Optimist, and some family.

He also put himself in charge of tasting them. He liked the shortbread more than the meltaways, and he liked the shortbread batter best of all!

Brown Sugar Shortbread cookies

Preheat oven to 350.

1 cup butter, softened to room temp (2 sticks)

¾ cup brown sugar

2 ½ cups unsifted flour (if you use presifted flour, you’ll need more butter)

granulated sugar for rolling

Thoroughly blend butter and brown sugar. Stir in unsifted flour. Roll into one-inch balls, roll in granulated sugar and place 2” apart on ungreased sheet. Press each ball with a cookie stamp or the bottom of a glass.

If the balls are too big, the cookies will be dry and flaky on the edges, and rather heavy and moist in the center.

Bake 10-12 mins at 350, until just starting to brown at the edges. Cool on a wire rack.

Homemade Cheez-Its

Techman and I both have a weakness for Cheez-Its, but I try not to buy them because they are utter junk. And I will eat half the box on the way home.


But Smitten Kitchen has a dandy recipe for homemade fish crackers that taste just like Cheez-Its—only better. Just flour, cheese, butter, and a little seasoning. The only real work is in the shape-cutting.

For New Year's, I made cheddar stars. As the appetizer for cheese fondue. And ice cream for dessert.

It was a dairy good sendoff to 2012 in our little bungalow. Right up Starboy's alley.

 

The recipe filled two jelly roll baking sheets. I re-rolled the dough twice, and it didn't seem to get too overworked.

 That's a lot of 1" stars. Until you start eating them. Then it's not so many.

 

At some point I got tired of cutting out stars, and baked the large scraps and a bunch of rectangles.

They toast up purty.

These won't last on the counter for long, and would make a great gift. They do seem a bit soggy on the second day, but a few minutes in a warm oven should crisp them right up.

Christmas Countdown - Dec 4

With inspiration from Here Come the Girls and The Crafty Crow, I'm trying to offer Starboy some seasonal fun to (dangerously) build up excitement for the big family day. I've done next to no planning on this, so I'm scrambling for books as well as activities. Ideally, I'd like the book and activity to match, with a big reveal at some point during the day through some sort of crafty homemade advent / countdown calendars. I'm not sure I'll get to that this year.

Today's book:

Little Snow Bear

by Hazel Lincoln

A cute story about a bear looking for the sun during winter at the North Pole. We read this one at school.

It would have been perfect to do a matching sun activity, but I went for the snow instead, and we made snowflake cookies.

I probably haven't made traditional Christmas cookies in about, oh, 20 or 30 years. How hard could it be? Great fun with the kiddos. Hah.

Mini apple star pies FAIL

I know what you're thinking: What do you mean, "fail?" Those things look pretty good.

Well, hopefully you like crust. And crumbs.

I saw these mini star pies in an Usborne kids' cookbook at a friend's house. With pies-on-the-brain, I thought, hey, those are cute! Let's try it. We have plenty of apples left from our orchard trip, and a box of ready-to-go crust.

Ugh. Do not recommend.

mmmmm...NOW it's Fall

Remember that trip to pick apples in Oak Glen? I decided to convert my grandmother's pie recipe into tasty apple hand pies. It was an experiment; I kind of winged it but they are delicious.

Starboy noticed, "It sparkles!" So we call them Sparkle Pies. This aligns with our new rhythm of listening to the fabulous Sparkle Stories that we download each week and listen to on the way to school.

The big cheat was using pre-prepared crust, though that made it a quick project.

SPARKLING APPLE HAND PIES (Sparkle Pies)

First, thaw—for about an hour—one package of prepared pie crust dough, the kind you have to unfold (not the kind that comes in a foil pie pan). I used Trader Joe's frozen crust, which has a delightful flakiness that tastes probably as good as homemade, unless you're some sort of über-baker.

Preheat the oven to 425˚. Make sure you have plenty of cold milk on hand to accompany the pies.

In a large bowl, mix together:

about four pie apples, peeled and chopped smallish
juice of 1/2 lemon (keeps apples bright)
3/4 c. granulated sugar
1 teas. cinnamon
1/2 teas. ground cloves
1-2 Tbsp. flour—I used whole wheat
1/2 tsp salt or less (optional)
1/4 cup or less raisins or cranberries (very optional)


Set aside about a tablespoon of granulated sugar (or turbinado if you have it) for topping the pies just before baking. Also find some butter that you'll need for the pie filling.

Then prepare the egg wash:
1 egg, beaten with
2 teaspoons milk (or so)
find your pastry brush

Then:
Unfold the pie crust doughs. Set one aside. Cut the dough into four or eight sections, like a pizza. Your box of dough should make 8-17 hand pies, depending on how big you want them. I made four large ones from one half, and nine small ones from the other.

Take one of the sections and make it into a ball. On a floured surface, with a bit of flour on top of the ball, roll it out to about 1/8" thick or a little thicker. You will get about a 5" circle, or a ~7" circle for the larger ones.

Stuff the pies by placing filling on one half of the circle, leaving at least 3/8" from the edge so you can seal the pie. Dot with two very small lumps of butter. If you forget the butter don't worry, you'll live.

Fold the "blank" half of the crust on top of the filling to form a semi-circle, and press the seams together with a fork. Make three small slits in the pie for steam to escape.

Since thin crust will burn, I often trim the edges off before baking. I found that all of these trimmed edges added up to crust for one more pie!

Place the pie on a foil-covered baking sheet. (Sometimes the pie filling leaks out and burns; foil is easier to clean up. A silicone baking sheet likely would work as well, or maybe parchment.)

Repeat until the dough runs out.

Use a pastry brush to paint the egg wash all over the pies. Shake granulated or turbinado sugar all over them to give them sparkle. Now is a good time to check that you've made the steam slits.

Bake for 18-20 minutes at 425˚. After they cool for a few minutes, gently move them to a cooling rack with a flipper or spatula. Note the bottoms are delicate.

These taste best immediately after baking, with a glass of cold milk. Like: You'll hear angels singing. If you re-heat the pies, it can be good to heat them upside-down so the bottoms can toast a little more.

Fairy Party—What I forgot

Mmmmmm....breakfast.....

So remember that long quiche night I wrote about, prepping for the party in advance? Luckily I'd left those four quiches in the freezer, since the party had to be pushed back. And I specially moved them to the fridge two days before the party to make sure they were thawed in advance.

Where I left them, until halfway through the party, when most people had gone home, their children shaking from carb overload and lack of protein. Along with the two new ones I'd made because I was worried I wouldn't have enough.

Awesome. Quiche, anyone?

Speaking of serving stuff late, I ran out of time to frost the cake(s) before people arrived. I kept thinking I should ask someone to help me out, but I kept forgetting. It was hot. There were flies. People seemed to be enjoying themselves.

Finally my mother-in-law arrived, and she is a trained cake froster. Really. She's taken classes in how to make perfect flowers and everything. I'm sure there's a more appropriate title, but she's basically a super genius of cakes. She got us set up. And arranged for Starboy to have a lot of spoons to lick.

This recipe from Bon Appetit was delicious, but the layers slid apart as fast as the highway on Portuguese Bend during the cutting. The hot weather didn't help.

I'd made two cakes to make sure there was enough for everyone, but since I set it out so late, lots of people had gone home already. So we didn't even cut into the second cake.

 The next day, at a normal temperature, the cake behaved normally. And it was delicious for breakfast.

Working ahead

Starboy's fairy party is coming up, and I've been trying to do as much as I can in advance so I'm not running around crazy the day before the party, and feeling frantic. I want to be able to enjoy the party, so keeping things calm is the goal. 

One thing I do to make baking simpler is I will make a "mix" from my recipe, so that on baking day I just have to dump and stir. I get stupid when I'm distracted and busy, and do things like: double the whole cookie recipe except for the flour (that was a soupy one).

So I measure all the dry ingredients, and check them off of the recipe as I go, so nothing is forgotten or accidentally doubled. Sometimes I have several containers if there are a few steps in the recipe. These muffin recipes are easy quickbreads, so it's one jar per recipe.

I label the mix clearly, so that ingredients don't risk wandering into the wrong recipe, and so if I decide not to make the recipe after all, I have an idea of what it is next week. This time I just taped the recipe to the jar.

Another advantage to doing this in advance is that if you discover you are out of something, you still have time to restock before it's a last minute crisis.

Quiche

I thought I'd make a few quiches for our upcoming party. I have access to an oven with a working thermostat (revelation!) and I can pop these in the freezer until the day before party time.

They are cheese, broccoli, onion and red pepper quiches. With store-bought crust. Which turned out mushy, unfortunately. But a funny thing happened.....

In my effort to double the recipe to come up with four quiches—some for dinner this week and some for guests—I ended up with...well...eight. It turns out that I got all the stuff to double a recipe that makes two quiches, and...I didn't really realize it until I was up to my neck in it.

At that moment, I muttered some sort of curse word.

And Techman said: "Is this another Corn Chowder Incident?" I buried my head in my hands, and laughed nervously.

Many years ago now, I set out to make Barefoot Contessa's delicious corn chowder. I doubled the recipe to make sure we had enough for the freezer, for later. As long as you're going to the trouble to cook, might as well get mileage out of your time, right? It wasn't until I needed to dig up a third spaghetti pot that I started to clue in that we were going to have a lot of corn chowder.

Techman came home from work to find nearly every surface covered with soup, soup pots, spoons, and related rubble. I didn't understand how I had so much, compared to the last time I'd made it. Confused, he said something innocent, like, well how much was the original recipe supposed to make?

Well, I dunno, I said stubbornly, it's soup. Probably it's for six or eight.

I looked at the book.

"Serves 10-12."

Times two.

Damned caterers. What family needs twelve servings of soup?

That was something like 2005. I don't think we've had corn chowder since. We're both kind of maxed on it. But I don't fall for that trick in her books any more.

Just in my own recipes. Eight quiches requires a lot of eggs.

So, it was a late couple of nights and the freezer is full. My aunt is getting some quiche as well, as thanks for letting us stay at her place for so long. And, um, because our freezer is full.

Construction Cake

Grandma loves to create theme cakes. 

I can't find the site where I originally saw a construction site cake like this, but it turns out if you Google "construction cake" you'll get hundreds of great ideas. The cone candles are from Amazon, and I think the truck set was, too.

The cake actually was one large brownie on the bottom layer (two mixes), and a layer cake for the top two layers (one mix). The frosting was brownie frosting, a little stiff. But super tasty.

Starboy named every machine. I probably couldn't do it with cue cards.

Starboy LOVED this cake. He wouldn't let go of the trucks—he actually didn't finish his cake and ice cream, so he could play with the trucks.

Birthday dinners

Initially, I'd planned our August party as double birthday celebration, to save me from further party planning.  But then the project was delayed. 

So two more family dinners it was. For Starboy's birthday: Cheesy enchiladas with spinach (before topping and baking).

Ravioli salad with gorgonzola, apples, sun dried tomatoes, poppy seeds and lettuce (assemble yourself)

 And baby bear pancakes!

 Sweet potato puree, cranberries, spinach and raisins as eyes and noses.

With cinnamon, yogurt, and maple syrup (by request). Then of course Starboy wouldn't eat them because the spinach was highly suspect. "I don't like that green stuff."

Luckily Community Worker Grandma saved the day with a fantastic Construction Job Site Cake. Come back tomorrow to see detailed photos!

For Techman's birthday, we had the ravioli salad and homemade molasses clove cookies, with a candle holder from his childhood. It's made out of plastic clay, something I hope that Très Juliee is able to do with her beautiful fondant creations.

Techman loved the ceramic tile handprint that Starboy made for him.

It ended up being more planning than I'd bargained for, but it was nice to have intimate birthday celebrations with family to mark the dates. I'm still looking forward to our party with friends and family!