Baking Season- again!

A couple months ago I swore up and down I would be back. Although I haven't been baking I have certainly been cooking. That is all about to change because it is in fact baking season. It's hard to talk yourself into slaving away in a hot kitchen the summer. The last few weeks or so it's finally been cooling down enough that I'm dying to get my hands covered in flour.

Initial thoughts- Scones.

I'm not sure what brought those into my head but I thinking scones would be a fun thing to tackle in the kitchen and I'm already mentally concocting festive flavors. Pumpkin obviously because 'tis the season. Maybe a white chocolate, cranberry? The BF is a big white chocolate fan so I try and incorporate the flavor into as many desserts as possible. Thus far I'm enjoying the challenge. My white chocolate, almond, sea salt cupcakes were something to brag about.

Back to the scones. I've been Googling to find a decent recipe but I'm torn. I saw one that mentioned refrigerating the dough before baking as it allows the dough to rise a little better. Most others don't recommend the step however in the comments section everyone discussed how important the 30 minute cooling was to the texture. That was a King Arthur recipe found here.

I keep promising the BF I'm going to send him into work with some goodies but I've been slacking. We have a Saint Bernard puppy (Kona) who demands a lot of my time.

But I adamant this time- I have the itch. We have a wedding we're going to this weekend in PA so I unfortunately won't be able to start playing in the kitchen until Sunday. Stay tuned!

Hello old friend

It's been years. People say that all the time but it has literally been years.

I have a number of excuses ranging from laziness, to a temporary exit from the kitchen. My biggest excuse is kitchen size. After my Thanksgiving pie post I started school as a transfer at The Catholic University of America. Despite the fact that I was coming in as a junior I stayed at the dorms. Admittedly I probably could have kept baking and razzled and dazzled with my dorm kitchen skills but for those of you who haven't been to a kitchen in a girls dorm... keep it that way. It's disgusting and I simply cannot work in such filth (read in a French accent). After I finished up at school I got my first apartment and the kitchen, although cleaner, still wasn't doing it for me. I was in a whopping 400sqft studio. My oven wasn't even a standard oven size; it was more like a little tike’s kitchen appliance. The two times I did bake I over-cooked and nearly burned. In my defense I was going from an electric oven to gas. I made a couple pies for my firefighter boyfriend to take to his firehouse (food is truly the way to a man’s heart) and a pecan streusel and pumpkin cookies, again for the firehouse. The streusel, while tasted fine, was definitely overcooked making the top way too crunchy for my tastes.

Recently, move boyfriend and I moved in together so for his going away I made 2 peach pies, 2 blackberry pies, a black cherry, and the boy’s favorite, lemon meringue. I probably made too many but we did some damage.

I also recently found a really great recipe for homemade bread here. I stumbled upon the recipe on Pinterest and had to try it. I read the comments on her blog and decided I had a few of the same issues with bread rising that were mentioned. Other than that, it's super easy. This being my first attempt at homemade bread I’ll take slightly less risen dough any day. It was still delicious and made fantastic sandwich bread. I think I’m going to attempt the recipe again this weekend while my fireman is at work.

 

All that being said, I’m still in the kitchen and still baking. Now that I have some actually counter space in the new place anticipate more baking experiments to come!