Tag Archives: Desserts

Lemon Bars

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Whenever I think of the best summer desserts, lemon bars are right up there at the top of the contenders.

From the ingredients, to the method to the flavors, they’re so simple, clean and fresh. I’m kinda disappointed in myself that I haven’t gotten around to including them on the blog yet. But, better late than never.

I’ve seen lemon bar mixes in the store, but honestly you guys, making it from scratch isn’t that much more work. It really isn’t. In fact, I’m so confident that everyone can pull this off that I’m putting today’s recipe in the “You Can’t Mess this Up, No Seriously” Category.

There’s very little fuss to them at all. The crust is a basic shortbread that gets pre-baked for about half an hour until golden brown. I added the zest of a lemon to the dough just to give it extra lemon flavor.

Lemon curd is typically made over the stove and requires a little bit of extra TLC to ensure that it comes out perfectly smooth and set. I think what I love the most about this recipe is that you don’t have to give the curd that extra TLC. The oven does all the work for you on the second bake.

The shortbread crust of these bars makes for a delicious, lemon scented cookie all on its own. The crisp texture and golden brown flavor pairs great with the smooth, sharp flavor of the lemon curd on top. I didn’t see the need to add the traditional powdered sugar you often see on top of lemon bars. Trust me: these babies don’t need it.

So do me a solid, and don’t bother buying a lemon bars mix with preservatives in it that you can’t even pronounce. Make them yourself, from scratch. I repeat: these are simple. You can’t mess them up. Try them and see.

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Lemon Bars

Recipe Adapted from Food Network Magazine

Ingredients

  • 2 cups all purpose flour
  • 3/4 cup powdered/confectioner’s sugar, plus more if desired
  • pinch of salt
  • 1 cup unsalted butter, softened
  • the zest of 2 lemons, divided
  • 5 large eggs
  • 1 1/2 cups sugar
  • 1 cup lemon juice
  • 1/3 cup flour

 

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.. Line a 13 x 9 baking dish with aluminum foil and spray it with cooking spray.

In a medium size bowl, combine the 2 cups of flour with the 3/4 cup of powdered sugar, pinch of salt and the zest of 1 lemon. Stir together with a fork.

Use your fingers (or even better, a box grater) to cut the butter into the dry ingredients. Stir together with a fork or your hands until it begins to form large and slightly sticky clumps. If it’s still too dry to hold together, you can add some water or milk (only 1 tablespoon at a time) just until it does.

Spread your fingers or a spatula with cooking spray and press these clumps into the bottom of the pan, forming as level a layer of the dough as you can.. Bake for 25-30 minutes, until golden brown. Allow to cool for 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, combine the eggs with the 1 1/2 cups of white sugar, the zest of the second lemon, and the lemon juice. Whisk thoroughly until the egg yolks have broken up. Add in the flour, whisking again until all of the clumps are smoothed out.

Pour on top of the cookie crust. Place back in the oven and bake for an additional 25-30 minutes, until the lemon curd is set.

Allow to cool completely, then sprinkle the top with powdered sugar if desired before cutting into bars.

Sharing at Fiesta Friday #283, co-hosted this week by Antonia @ Zoale.com and Jhuls @ The Not So Creative Cook.

Browned Butter Spritz Cookies

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It’s been a while since I last have, so in today’s post I’m back to sing all of Browned Butter’s praises. It’s worthy of plenty.

Butter itself consists of fat, water and milk proteins. When you cook it long enough in the bottom of a heavy pan, all of the water gets cooked out of the butter and the remaining solids (the milk proteins) become browned. When they brown, it takes on a warm golden color and a warm, golden brown, almost nutty flavor.

That flavor is all of the things. It does the most godly (or ungodly, however you want to think of it) things to the tastebuds, and never fails to enhance pretty much anything you want to add it to, whether sweet or savory. From my very first go at Browned Butter I was hooked and as a result, have trying to build up the Browned Butter Collection on here.

So far, I’ve made it to Browned Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies, a Browned Butter Spice Cake, and Browned Butter Banana Bread. All were a huge success, and I highly recommend you check them out before coming back here to check out today’s recipe, which I think makes a quick, easy, and perfect addition to the club.

The process of making browned butter goes pretty quick. I’ve made this recipe twice already and what I typically will do is make myself a batch of it right before bed, pop it in the fridge overnight, then take it back out the next day when I’m ready to bake. Let it come to the room temperature that regular butter should be at for creaming, and from there things couldn’t be easier. The main tip to remember with spritz cookies is to get your baking sheets as freezing cold as possible–it will make the dough come out of the cookie press so much easier and neater.

Although I used a cookie press to make these, a cookie press certainly isn’t a necessity. So, I’ve also included alternate instructions in the recipe just in case you’d like to make them into simple circle cookies. I promise it will not affect the taste. They’re light, crisp, and full of that sweet nutty buttery flavor. It was hard for me to stop at just one and share with anyone else; I think it’ll be pretty difficult for you too.

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Browned Butter Spritz Cookies

Recipe Adapted from Land O Lakes

Ingredients

  • 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 1 large egg
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • 2 cups all purpose flour

Directions

Melt the butter over medium heat in a 2 quart saucepan. Let it cook and watch it closely until 3-5 minutes until the butter begins to foam, forms a golden brown color and browned bits form on the bottom. (It will have a sweet, nutty smell). Immediately remove it from the heat. Allow to cool for about 10 minutes, then remove to a plastic container and refrigerate overnight.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit., Place about 3 baking sheets in the freezer to chill thoroughly. Let the browned butter come to room temperature, until it is softened.

Place the browned butter, sugar, egg and vanilla extract in a bowl. Beat with a hand mixer or standing mixer fitted with the paddle until light and creamy. Add the flour in 1 cup increments, just until combined.

Refrigerate the dough for 30 minutes.

Place chilled dough into your cookie press. Press dough out onto ungreased and unlined baking sheets.

Bake for 8-10 minutes, until the cookies are lightly browned at the edges. Allow to sit on baking sheet for about 60 seconds before removing to a wire rack to cool completely.

(Alternately, for those without a cookie press: Shape dough into 1-inch balls. Place 2 inches apart onto ungreased cookie sheets. Flatten with tines of fork. 8-11 minutes, until cookies are lightly browned at the edges. Allow to sit on baking sheet for about 60 seconds before removing to a wire rack to cool completely)

Note: no one oven is the same, & different baking sheets bake cookies differently. Keeping this in mind, I will ALWAYS test bake one cookie before baking entire sheets of the whole batch, just to get a good idea of how long they should be in the oven and if I need to adjust the way I’ve cut, rolled them out, etc. I highly recommend that you do the same.)

Linking to Fiesta Friday #274, co-hosted this week by Antonia @ Zoale.com and Liz @ Spades, Spatulas & Spoons.

Iced Orange Cream Scones

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Watching Downton Abbey always makes me have this random and somewhat impractical wish to drop everything, go off the grid and open a tea room somewhere.

I didn’t use to like it at all, but I’ve gotten into drinking a lot more tea over the past few years. I’m partial to spicy ones, both for flavor and because they really help cure some of my digestive woes.

Unsurprisingly, my favorite part of running a tea room would be the menu planning. Tea rooms menus feature all kind of dainty and delicious looking treats. I have yet to tackle making cucumber or watercress sandwiches. I still haven’t checked off the Victoria Sandwich Cake from my Baking Bucket List (soon come though). There is one staple from the tea menu that I’ve made my share of: the almighty scone.

I’ve been trying to bring my scone making technique up to par with my biscuit making one, especially as the method for making them is so similar. I have a whole post dedicated to laying out the steps for what I consider to be the best biscuits I’ve ever made. I intend to do one for scones too, but in the meanwhile I wanted to share a recipe I tested along the way to getting to Scone Nirvana.

It starts with one very crucial ingredient: heavy cream. Heavy cream not only helps with the crumb of the scone, the added fat in it helps with a higher rise. I also let the scone dough rest in the fridge overnight. It gave the gluten time to rest and firm up so that when I cut them out, the edges weren’t as easily compressed as they could be if they were still soft. They baked up so beautifully that I seriously considered leaving them plain, but I decided to go along with my original idea of trying out how they would hold up to a thin layer of icing. The answer, again, was beautifully.

If my whimsical tea room idea were a reality, this would without question be going onto the menu. Although they’re technically scones, the crumb is so delicate and fluffy that they honestly reminded me of a dense cake. The icing process does admittedly require some time and attention, but it’s worth it. They’re divine, with or without a cup of tea on the side.

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Iced Orange Cream Scones

Recipe Adapted from King Arthur Flour

Ingredients

  • 2 3/4 cups all purpose flour
  • 1/3 cup sugar
  • 3/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1 tablespoon baking powder
  • 1/2 cup (8 tablespoons butter) frozen
  • 2 large eggs
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • zest of 1 orange
  • 2/3 cup heavy cream, plus more if needed

For Icing

  • 3 1/2 cups powdered sugar
  • 7 tablespoons of water, enough to make a thin glaze
  • orange zest, for garnish, optional

Directions

Combine the flour, sugar, salt and baking powder together in a bowl and stir together with a fork. Beat the eggs together with the vanilla in a small bowl with a fork and set aside.

Use the large holes on a box grater to grate the butter directly into the dry ingredients. Stir in the orange zest.

Make a well in the center. Pour in the beaten egg-vanilla mixture. Pour in the heavy cream. Use a large fork and a large rubber spatula to stir the mixture together. If it seems a little dry you may add additional heavy cream until it forms a shaggy dough.

Sprinkle a pastry mat, wooden cutting board or wax paper with flour. Turn the dough out onto the surface and pat a few times with your hands until it loosely holds together. (Don’t knead it too much or the warmth in your palms will melt the butter and cause the scones to be tough.)

Pat and roll the dough into a rectangle. Take the two opposite ends and fold them together like a business letter into thirds. Flip it upside down and pat & roll it into another rectangle, sprinkling the surface with flour if it gets too sticky. Repeat the folding process two to three more times before patting it into one final rectangle.

Wrap the rectangle in plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Place a shallow pan of water on the bottom rack of the oven.

Sprinkle your work surface with flour and unwrap the scone dough out onto it. Use a bench scraper or very sharp knife to trim the edges of the rectangle. Cut the remaining dough into squares, about 2″ each. Cut the squares into triangles. (You can also leave some as squares if you want to keep them a little bigger; the sizes here are up to you).

Remove the cut scones to a baking sheet you’ve lined with parchment paper, rather close to each other (it will help them rise higher). Place the pan of scones in the freezer for 30 minutes, uncovered.

Bake the scones for 15 to 20 minutes, or until they’re golden brown. Remove the pan from the oven, and allow the scones to cool right on the pan. When they’re cool, if you wish, you can cut each scone in half once again to make even tinier scones. Or, you can leave them as is.

For the icing: stir together the powdered sugar and enough of the water to make a glaze that is not so watery that it’s runny, but not too thick so that it won’t run down the sides of the scones.

Line another baking sheet with foil and a wire rack and set next to your bowl of icing.

Place a scone upside down into the bowl of icing. Gently lift it out, right side up and balance it on a spatula (the kind you’d use to flip pancakes) As the icing starts to run down the sides, use a fork to help spread it around evenly. Place the iced scone on the wire rack and sprinkle with orange zest.

Repeat process with the rest of the scones. Allow to sit for at least one hour, until the icing has hardened.

Sharing at this week’s Fiesta Friday #265, co-hosted this week by Laurena @ Life Diet Health and Kat @ Kat’s 9 Lives.

 

Cinnamon Stamped Cookies

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So, here’s a random but I think very useful tip for those of you who love to bake: the prettiest cookies do not have to come from cookie cutters, or cookie stamps.

At least, not most of them. I will say that certain springerle molds can make absolutely beautiful, unreal looking cookies. The problem with most springerle molds is that because they’re hand-crafted wood, they don’t run cheap.

I got into collecting cookie stamps a little while ago and although I got some pretty nice ones, the designs weren’t as elaborate as the springerle molds, which was what I really wanted. Then one day, I was surfing the web for cookie stamps, and stumbled across something different. They were called moon cakes. Mooncakes are Chinese pastries that are typically eaten during the Mid-Autumn festival. I’ve never had one and had never heard of them until then; all I knew that the designs on top of them were beautiful.

Traditional mooncakes are made with what’s called a mooncake mold. It’s a plunger like tool where the ball of filled pastry gets pressed into a shaped mold, then imprinted on top with the intricate design. After I’d done my quick Google search to learn how THAT was done, I then turned to the thought that aligned with my interest: would I be able to use the mooncake mold as a cookie stamp?

Since they were much, MUCH more cheaper than springerle molds, I decided to take a chance and ordered a set of mooncake molds to put my theory to the test. They came in a couple of days and within hours I was in the kitchen rolling out cookie dough. What do you y’all think? Was I right, or was I right?

A couple of things: first, this is a recipe that can be made with ANY cookie stamp, mold or cutter you have. The dough is a basic butter cookie that is flavored with cinnamon and vanilla but you can always switch the flavors up to what you’re inclined towards. It bakes up crisp on the outside and tender on the inside–just as a butter cookie should be. Second, if this post has inspired you to buy and test out mooncake molds for yourself, I would recommend to always use a cookie dough that has been designated as a cut-out cookie recipe. There’s no point in going to the trouble of using the mold if the recipe is one that doesn’t hold it’s shape or design after baking.

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Cinnamon Stamped Cookies

Recipe Adapted from Martha Stewart

Ingredients

  • 3 1/2 cups all purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 3 sticks (12 ounces) unsalted butter, softened
  • 1 cup white sugar
  • 2 large egg yolks
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

In the bowl of a standing mixer or using a handheld one, beat together the butter and sugar until creamy and fluffy. Add the egg yolks one at a time, mixing just until combined and yellow disappears. Add the vanilla extract.

In a small bowl combine the flour with the cinnamon and salt, stirring together with a fork. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture in 1 cup increments, mixing just until combined.

Line a sheet pan with parchment paper and lightly spray with cooking spray.

Roll dough out on a clean and floured surface to about 1/4 inch thick. Dip your cookie stamps into powdered sugar, then tap to remove excess. Press firmly into the dough. Use a slightly larger round cookie cutter to cut out shape, then transfer to cookie sheets. Repeat until you’ve used up all of the dough.*

Freeze cut out cookie dough for 10-20 minutes

Bake in the oven on the middle rack until just golden brown, about 9-12 minutes. Allow to set on sheets for about 60 seconds before removing to a wire rack to cool completely.

(Note: no one oven is the same, & different baking sheets bake cookies differently. Keeping this in mind, I will ALWAYS test bake one cookie before baking entire sheets of the whole batch, just to get a good idea of how long they should be in the oven and if I need to adjust the way I’ve cut, rolled them out, etc. I highly recommend that you do the same.)

Linking to the Fiesta Friday #258, co-hosted this week by Laurena @ Life Diet Health.

Banana Cream Cake

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So, guess what?

In last week’s post I said that rather than wait for the autumn weather to kick in before I started posting ‘autumn recipes’ and comfort food, I would just start baking & posting autumn recipes and let the weather catch up to me later.

This week, the temperature dropped around 10-15 degrees in our area.

Iiiiiiiii would like to think I had a thing or two to do with it.

(Probably not, it’s likely due to some natural–or rather unnatural, because, global warming–causes but I’m claiming the credit for it anyway.)

The weather is cooling down because it’s trying to align with my autumn baking. What can I say except, you’re welcome?

This week’s recipe happened because of a tale as old as time.

Girl goes to store. Girl buys green bananas, thinking she has plenty of time to eat them. One days passes. Bananas are still green. Two days pass. Bananas are just barely starting to yellow. Three days pass.

Bananas are ripe. Too ripe to eat. Girl is now stuck with four overripe bananas.

I guess ‘stuck’ is a little harsh. Bakers know that overripe bananas are really a blessing in disguise–they give you an excuse to put a healthy fruit into a not-as-healthy baked treat. Oftentimes, that treat is banana bread. Banana bread is great and easy, as are banana muffins. This time around though, I decided to try to go with something a bit different than what I was used to. It’s not too much more difficult than the bread or muffins, but I’ll tell you what: it IS a good deal greater.

One of the reasons that I love using bananas in cake is that they lend themselves really really well to cake batter. Why? Because the fat and moisture content in them helps keep the finished cake INCREDIBLY moist. So long as you’re using overly ripe bananas, it’s going to be quite difficult to overbake/dry that sucka out. This is a perfectly delicious banana cake all on its own. It’s then made even more delicious by a ribbon of vanilla cream cheese filling that gets poured on top of half the batter, then the other half of the batter is poured on top of that. The smells alone as it bakes are glorious. As for the taste…you can probably guess.

What can I say except…you’re welcome?

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Banana Cream Cake

Recipe Adapted from NordicWare

Ingredients

For Cake

  • 2/3 cup milk
  • 1 teaspoon lemon juice
  • 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
  • 1 1/2 cups white granulated sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • 1 1/4 cups mashed ripened banana
  • 2 cups all purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt

For Cream Filling

  • 8 ounces cream cheese, softened
  • 1 egg
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

For Icing

  • 2 cups powdered sugar
  • Milk, to thin

Directions

Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease and flour a 12 cup Bundt or tube pan and set aside. In a measuring cup or small bowl, pour the milk, vanilla extract and lemon juice together and set aside. In a medium sized bowl, combine the flour with the baking soda and salt. Stir together with a fork and set aside.

In the bowl of a standing mixer (or using a handheld one) use the paddle attachment to cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing just until the yellow disappears. Use a spatula to scrape down the sides of the bowl as you go to ensure even mixing.

Add the mashed bananas, stirring just until combined. With mixer on low speed, gradually beat dry ingredients and milk mixture alternately into batter. (Start and end with the flour mixture) Beat for 1 minute. Remove batter to a bowl.

Beat the cream cheese in the standing mixer bowl until it’s smooth. Add the egg and vanilla, stirring just until combined.

Pour half the batter into the tube pan. Use a teaspoon to spoon the cream cheese filling evenly around the center of the cake batter. Carefully spoon remaining cake batter over filling, covering completely.

Bake for 45-50 minutes or until top is brown and springs back lightly when touched. Remove from oven and cool in pan for 10 minutes before inverting onto cake plate.

For the icing, combine the powdered sugar with enough milk until it forms a smooth but still somewhat thick icing. Use a fork to drizzle over the cake. Allow to sit for about 30 minutes, until hardened.

Linking up to Fiesta Friday #247, co-hosted this week by Antonia @ Zoale.com and Laurena @ Life Diet Health.

Honey Cardamom Cut Out Cookies

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I’ve been making a lot of cookies lately. The reasons are varied, but as that’s just where things have been at in the kitchen, y’all can expect a few of the next posts in the coming weeks to be cookie-themed. Personally I think it’s impossible for there to be too many cookie-anything, but that’s just my opinion. And while you’re here, I might as well give another one:

Cut out cookies are the best kind.

What ARE cut outs?

Cut out cookies are cookies that are baked with the intention of holding a particular shape. Mostly, they tend to fall on the sugar cookie flavored spectrum. This is different than say, a drop cookie (like chocolate chip cookies), where the dough is dropped from an ice cream scoop or teaspoon. Most cut out cookie doughs are sturdy and durable in order to be able to withhold being rolled out by a rolling pin and pressed out by cookie cutters.Drop cookies are undoubtedly less laborious than cut outs, as you don’t have to bother with cutting out the shapes. Because sugar cookies tend to be my favorite, I still prefer cut outs. Provided you have a tasty flavored dough, I feel that they are worth the extra effort.

I’ve said it dozens of times before and I’ll keep saying it for anyone who may be reading this post and thinking that cut outs are too hard to attempt: it really does come down to how you treat the dough. Cut out cookie dough (heck, MOST cookie dough) requires very specific treatment in order to get the pretty, magazine quality aesthetics that you want. I’ve baked hundreds (maybe even thousands at this point) of cookies at this point in my baking adventures and I’ve been truly mortified to find that too many of the recipes out there omit what I believe is the most important step in cookie baking:

Chilling the dough.

I just don’t understand it. SO many cut out cookie recipes I’ve seen instruct you to bake the cookies just minutes after putting the dough together.

This is just…not good advice.

In the first place, the fat (butter) in the dough should be thoroughly creamed and softened by the time that you’re finished mixing it. This is what makes the dough sticky. Room temp, sticky cookie dough WILL produce cookies that spread, and spread a lot. This completely defeats the purpose of cut out cookies–the more that they spread, the more that the shapes you spent all that time cutting out will be warped by the heat of the oven. Even drop cookie dough that is baked when too warm will produce cookies that are flat as pancakes instead of puffy, craggy cookies that at least resemble domes. Ask me how I know.

Cookie dough should be VERY cold when it hits the oven. Not warm and sticky. Not cool. COLD. The colder it is, the easier it will be to cut out, and the better your shapes will hold up.Therefore, In almost every single one of the cookie recipes I share, I will tell you to refrigerate the finished cookie dough for at least one hour (but preferably overnight) in order to give the butter in the dough plenty of time to firm up. Additionally, whenever I make cut outs, I take it a step further and chill the cookies for a few minutes after I’ve cut them out. Excessive? Maybe. But I’d prefer to let the results speak for themselves.

I made these primarily because they were a departure from the usual vanilla sugar cut out cookie that I make and I was curious as to how they would turn out. They’re sweetened with both white sugar and honey, and spiced with cardamom and ground ginger. After cutting them out, I also sprinkled the tops with cinnamon sugar to give them a bit of texture. You don’t necessarily need to cut out the middles if you don’t have a tiny cutter, or if you just don’t want to. Just please give your dough the proper amount of chilling time in the fridge so that the shapes you cut them in will hold up.

These aren’t overly sweet, and the spices do most of the work flavor-wise. I also found that they also improve in flavor the longer that they have to sit, so they may taste even better on the second or third day after you make them then they do on the first. Just place a slice of bread in the container you store them in, and they’ll be sure to stay soft (that’s a tip from my bag of tricks that works for any baked cookie, actually).

Sharing at Fiesta Friday #222, co-hosted this week by Antonia @ Zoale.com.

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Honey Cardamom Cut Out Cookies

Recipe Adapted from Bake from Scratch

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Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup butter (1 stick), softened
  • 1/2 cup white sugar
  • 1 large egg yolk
  • 2 tablespoons honey
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoons ground cardamom
  • 1 teaspoon ground ginger
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
  • Cinnamon sugar, for sprinkling

Directions

In a medium bowl combine the  flour with the cardamom, ginger, salt and baking soda with a fork. Set aside.

In the bowl of a standing mixer with the paddle attachment (or using a handheld one) cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

Add the egg yolk, honey and vanilla and combine until just combined. Add the flour mixture in batches, mixing until just combined.

Scrape the dough out and onto a piece of plastic wrap. Shape into a disc, wrap tightly and refrigerate overnight.

Preheat oven to 350°F. Line two sheet pans with parchment paper. Divide the dough into quarters, keeping the other 3 in the fridge while you roll out the one.

Sprinkle a clean work surface (like a pastry mat, wax paper or a cutting board) with powdered sugar or flour. Roll out the quarter of dough to your desired thickness (I wouldn’t go thinner than 1/4 inch) Cut into whatever desired shapes you like. I used a 2- to 2 ½-inch round cookie cutter, cut the dough into rounds and placed on parchment-lined baking sheets, spacing them 1 inch apart. I then used a ¾- to 1-inch round cookie cutter, and cut out the centers from half of the cookies. Reroll and cut the scraps as necessary. Also don’t throw away the centers, as they make delicious mini cookie bites.

Place the sheet pans in the freezer for around 10 minutes. Sprinkle the tops with the cinnamon sugar, and bake for 8-10 minutes.  Let cool on pans for 3 minutes. Remove from pans, and let cool completely on wire racks.

Teddy Bear Cinnamon Crisps

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I’m running a little short on time, so this post (like this recipe) is going to be short, simple and sweet.

I really like Teddy Grahams. They’re small little graham flavored crackers made by Nabisco and they’re really quite scrumptious. When I was growing up, they came in a few different flavors: Chocolate, Chocolatey Chip, Honey and Cinnamon. (From what I understand, there are more now, but I’m not too interested in them.) My favorite were the Cinnamon and the Chocolatey Chip. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is that the Chocolatey Chip ones are immensely popular and as such, can be found just about anywhere.

The bad news is that, for whatever reason, the Cinnamon ones are not. At least not in this area. I can’t find them anywhere. I happen to like the Cinnamon ones a tad bit better than I do the Chocolatey Chip, so this is…inconvenient.

But y’know, whatever. It’s a temporary setback and I do like myself a good baking challenge.

If you’ve been following the blog over the past year, then you’ll know that I’ve been experimenting with making my own crackers at home with pretty good results. I love the simple process of it almost as much as I love all the different flavor options there are available. On the way home from the grocery store on yet another recent failed attempt to find Cinnamon Teddy Grahams, I thought that maybe I should just stop looking elsewhere for them and start looking in my own kitchen.

This recipe really couldn’t be easier to put together. There’s a trio of spices of cinnamon, mace and cloves that gives it plenty of warm, toasty flavor. Brown sugar rather than white gives the crackers a richer taste. It all comes together within minutes, but does require a rest in the fridge to give the dough a chance to rest, which you definitely want because cracker dough needs to be rolled out VERY thing in order to ensure that the finished product has the right crispness. They were originally plain on the tops, but I decided to give them another layer of texture by sprinkling cinnamon sugar on them just before baking.

In the first place, they smell like warm, sugary spice & everything nice. I wish I could get the scent captured in a candle or something–it’s much better than the vanilla candles you see in stores that are so cloying and overpowering that they just end up triggering your gag reflex. They bake up a nice golden brown with a pleasant, crispy snap while the spices also give them a flavor that does remind me of the Cinnamon Teddy Grahams.

I said I was in a hurry and I am. You guys remember why? Yep yep yep. Black Panther is now released in theaters in the U.S. and I’m on my way to see it now. I’m so excited I can hardly stand it, but my wait is offically over, so it’s ttfn.

(Linking this up to Fiesta Friday #211, co-hosted this week by Lily @ Little Sweet Baker and Alisa @ Livin’ Well.

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Teddy Bear Cinnamon Crisps

Recipe Adapted from Serious Eats

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Ingredients

For Cookies

  • 3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon kosher salt
  • 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground mace
  • 1-2 dashes ground cloves
  • 1 cup (2 sticks, 8 ounces) unsalted butter, softened
  • 1/2 cup light or dark brown sugar
  • 3/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

For Topping

  • 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
  • 1/4 cup white granulated sugar

 

 

Directions

In a small bowl combine the flour with the salt and spices with a fork.

In a large bowl or the bowl of a standing mixer, cream together the butter and both sugars until light and fluffy. Add the egg and the vanilla, using a rubber spatula to scrape down the sides of the bowl to ensure even mixing.

Sift in the flour mixture to the butter mixture (not all at once, in about 3 batches) until just combined.

Shape the dough into a disk, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least one hour or overnight.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Place a sheet of parchment paper on a sheet pan and lightly spray with cooking spray.

 In a small bowl combine the ingredients for the topping and set aside. Sprinkle a work surface like a wooden cutting board, a pastry mat or wax paper with flour. Cut the dough into quarters. Keep the quarters you’re not using in the fridge while you work. Use a floured rolling pin to roll out each piece of dough very thin (about 1/8th inch). Use a cookie cutter of your choice (I used a teddy bear one) or a pizza wheel, bench scraper or knife to cut dough into shapes. Arrange the cookies on the baking sheet (you will probably need more than one). When you’ve finished, refrigerate the cookies on the sheet pan for about 15 minutes.

Lightly spray the cookies with cooking spray, then sprinkle the cinnamon sugar on top. Bake in the oven until golden brown, about 10-12 minutes. Allow to cool on baking sheet for about 1 minute before removing to wire racks to cool completely.

(Note: no one oven is the same, & different baking sheets bake cookies differently. Keeping this in mind, I will ALWAYS test bake one cookie before baking entire sheets of the whole batch, just to get a good idea of how long they should be in the oven and if I need to adjust the way I’ve cut, rolled them out, etc. I highly recommend that you do the same.)

Red Velvet Marble Bundt Cake

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Filed under Desserts

I am so very, very, very excited. I’m practically bursting at the seams. As I’m writing this post right now, I’m beaming from ear to ear.

Go ahead and ask me what’s put me in such a good mood. Go on. Ask. I will answer your question with a question:

Do y’all know what is coming next week? Do you KNOW?

It’s probably the best thing to happen all year. I know it’s a just single day, but oh what a day it is going to be. It’s not even here yet, but I still know there will be much joy and excitement to spread all around. It’s also a day where a ton of money is going to be spent and made.

Any guesses yet? Yep. You’re absolutely right.

Marvel’s “Black Panther” movie is being released in the United States on February 16th. Let me say that again. Marvel’s “Black Panther” movie is being released in the United States on February 16th.

Y’all. Excited isn’t even the word.  Ever since news dropped that this movie was being made over a year ago, I’ve been so ready to see it. The cast alone is a winner: Forest Whittaker (who is my favorite actor, by the way. I’d watch him perform on an empty stage in a paper bag, riveted), Angela Bassett, Chadwick Boseman, Lupita Nyong’o, Michael B Jordan. I’ve waited patiently (and sometimes not so patiently), keeping up with the updates, watching the trailers repeatedly, ogling over the posters–and now, we’re finally here right before I get to see it.

We pre-bought our tickets, so I will be right there at the theater next Friday afternoon, front and center. I know it’s going to be fantastic. Any of y’all here in the States going to see it on Friday or later that weekend? You as pumped to see it as I am? So far as I’m concerned, it’s the most important thing that’s going to be happening next week.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Valentine’s Day is next week too. And since I did go to the trouble to make this cake, I guess we can talk about it for a few minutes.

I’ve made it a habit to bake something Red-velvet flavored for Valentine’s Day on the blog for a few years now and I figured that I may as well keep with the tradition this year. In a way I was kinda excited about making the cake because it would let me test out a new ingredient I’d recently bought and been itching to try out: the LorAnn Red Velvet Bakery Emulsion. LorAnn Oils is a company that has a pretty big collection of baking flavorings and extracts. I’ve heard nothing but good things about them and my first purchase was the Red Velvet emulsion, which is supposed to mimic red velvet flavor.

I was curious as to what specifically a ‘red velvet’ flavor emulsion would taste like. My guess was that it would just be a rich chocolate, but the flavor of it is more complex than that. There’s definitely chocolate in the first taste you get, but in the aftertaste you could almost swear there’s a tang in there that could pass for cream cheese. I have no idea how the LorAnn food scientists who cooked this stuff up managed to do that, but my hat’s off to em. I put the emulsion to good use in this cake by flavoring about a third of the vanilla batter with it, then layering it in the pan. There was no need to use a knife to marble/swirl the batters–the swirl design took care of itself while baking. I then went ahead and topped it with a plain white icing paired with an icing I flavored with more of the red velvet emulsion. Turned out pretty, didn’t it?

Happy weekend/Fiesta Friday#210, (co-hosted by Laurena @ Life Diet Health and Jhuls @ The Not So Creative Cook)/Valentine’s Day y’all. More importantly, just one more week til Black Panther!

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Red Velvet Marble Bundt Cake

Recipe Adapted from MyRecipes.com

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Ingredients

For Cake

  • 1 cup unsalted butter (2 sticks), softened
  • 1/2 cup butter flavored shortening
  • 2 1/2 cups white sugar
  • 6 large eggs
  • 3 cups all purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 3/4 cup milk
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1 tablespoon cocoa powder
  • 1 tablespoon LorAnn Red Velvet Bakery Emulsion (or red food coloring)

For Icing

  • 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar, divided
  • Milk
  • Light corn syrup
  • LorAnn Red Velvet Bakery Emulsion (or red food coloring)

Directions

Preheat oven to 325°F. Grease and flour a 16 cup bundt pan. (You can also grease/flour two loaf pans but it will shorten your baking time).

In the bowl of a standing mixer (or using a handheld mixer) cream the butter and shortening together until light and fluffy. Gradually add in the sugar. Beat in the eggs one at a time.

In a separate medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt. In a glass measuring bowl combine the milk with the vanilla extract.

Add the flour mixture and the milk mixture alternatively to the batter, starting and ending with the flour mixture. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with the spatula to ensure even mixing.

Remove 2 1/2 cups of batter to a small bowl. Add the cocoa powder and the red velvet emulsion to the 2 1/2 ups of batter, stirring with a fork until smooth.

Drop two cups of the batter into the pan, using a spatula to spread out. Use a tablespoon measure to dollop 2-3 scoops of the red velvet batter on top. Repeat around entire pan, covering bottom completely. Continue layering batters in pan as directed until all batter is used.  (You don’t need to swirl it with a knife, it will marble on its own as it bakes).

Lift the pan up and allow it to tap down on the counter (this will help prevent air bubbles.) Place the cake pan on a sheet pan, then bake on the middle rack of the oven for 65-70 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean and inner cake temp reaches 195-200°F. Allow to cool inside the pan for about 30 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack and allow to cool completely.

Pour 3/4 cup of powdered sugar into one small bowl, and 3/4 of powdered sugar into another. Drizzle in light corn syrup and milk into one bowl, and corn syrup and the red velvet emulsion in the other, little by little (about 1 tablespoon at a time) until you have two thick icings. Alternate between drizzling the two icings on top of the cake. Allow to sit for about 30-40 minutes to harden before serving.

Melting Moments Cookies

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Filed under Cookies

Melting Moments1

Do any of y’all who follow this blog own a cookie press? How do you like it? If you do, what is the brand and where did you get it?

(As an aside for non-bakers, cookie presses are a device where cookie dough is inserted into a tube and manually pressed through a metal stencil plate. The stencils vary, but mostly cookie presses are used to make crisp butter cookies at Christmas time.) You can find them in places like Marshall’s, Home Goods, Bed Bath & Beyond, Williams Sonoma and (of course) online, and most are pretty inexpensive…which brings me to another point.

Here’s the thing about me and cookie presses….we don’t work together.

You know what? No. Let me rephrase that; I’M not the one with the problem. The presses are. THEY’RE the ones who don’t work. It’s THEM, I swear. You know why? Because I’ve bought two different cookie presses, and ended up discarding them both when neither one produced the goods. They either wouldn’t press out the dough completely in the shape of the design, or wouldn’t press it out at all. And believe me, I fiddled around with both and everything else I could think of to try and get them to work: the dough consistency, different plates, different sheet pans, chilling the sheet pans first. All useless.

I just could not get those presses to work.

So if any of you have a cookie press that you ARE able to use with no problems, do tell me which one you have. I’d also really appreciate any tips or advice in how you specifically get the most out of it. The thought of there being a kitchen gadget out there that I couldn’t get to work irks the daylights out of me. I’ve got to figure it out. So tell me what works for y’all and I might consider buying one more and hoping that the third time will be the charm for me and cookie presses.

In the meanwhile, there’s this post–which happens to be relevant to this conversation as it stemmed from my hit and miss history with the gadget.

Amazon sends me notifications when huge discounts are given for things on my wishlist. For a while I’d had a Wilton decorating tip set saved on my list, as I wanted to step my decorating game up for things like layer cakes and cupcakes. One day Amazon sent me a notification that they were having a flash sale and that for the next hour or so, it would be more than 50% off.

You can guess what happened.

So, Aside from having more decorating tips than this novice baker knows what to do with, I’ve also now got an alternative to the cookie press for churning out pretty cookies. And y’all: aren’t these pretty?

Despite their frilly appearance, these are butter cookies and as such, the ingredients themselves are extremely simple. There isn’t much more to these than butter, sugar, vanilla and cornstarch. The milk is there in order to make the dough loose enough to be piped through the dessert tip, as I found that on it’s own it was a bit too stiff to be piped. I opted for a coil shape as #1, I found it visually appealing when combined with a fluted tip and #2, It was the easiest shape I could manage. (I’m going to work on my cookie piping skills though, promise).

These honestly remind me of the blue tin butter cookies. They’re light, crisp and full of vanilla, buttery flavor. And yes: the confectioner’s sugar and cornstarch does make them practically melt in your mouth. I honestly wouldn’t change a thing about them.

Sharing these cookies at this week’s Fiesta Friday #208.

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Melting Moments Cookies

Recipe Courtesy of The Recipe Encyclopedia: The Complete Illustrated Guide to Cooking

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Ingredients

  • 3/4 cup unsalted butter
  • 1/2 cup powdered/confectioner’s sugar
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste
  • 1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
  • 1/2 cup cornstarch
  • 2-3 tablespoons milk, optional

 

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

In a large bowl or the bowl of a standing mixer, cream together the butter and the sugar until light and fluffy.

In a small bowl combine the flour with the cornstarch with a fork.

Add the vanilla to the butter mixture. Sift in the flour mixture to the butter mixture (not all at once, in about 3 batches) until just combined.

Line a sheet pan with parchment paper and lightly spray with cooking spray.

Spoon the dough into a pastry bag or cookie press and pipe it into desired shapes that are about 1/2-1 inches in diameter. Once finished, refrigerate the sheet pan for about 30 minutes.

Bake in the oven on the middle rack until just golden brown, about 10-12 minutes.

(Note: no one oven is the same, & different baking sheets bake cookies differently. Keeping this in mind, I will ALWAYS test bake one cookie before baking entire sheets of the whole batch, just to get a good idea of how long they should be in the oven and if I need to adjust the way I’ve cut, rolled them out, etc. I highly recommend that you do the same.)

Pillowcase Cookies

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Filed under Cookies

Happy New Year everyone. I hope 2018 is off to a good start for all of you, and that you’re feeling at least a little optimistic for the year.

Okay, so…I try to stick to a pattern in my posting schedule so that I’m not posting more sweet than savory or vice versa–variety being the spice of life and all. The 12 Days of Christmas series is usually enough of a sugar rush/overload for me where I need a break from making & eating sweets and for a while stick to savory and relatively healthy recipes on the blog.

Having said that, you all should know that I did intend to hold off on posting any sweets or baked goods for at least a few weeks, but well…here we are. Thing is, I’ve had this post sitting in my Drafts folder since August and I just couldn’t put off sharing it any longer.

You guys need to see (and make) these. You REALLY do.

If you know anything about my food preferences, you know that sugar cookies are in my Top 3 of favorite desserts. A good sugar cookie–one that is so good it doesn’t even need any embellishments from icing or glaze– just can’t be beat.

Some people like their sugar cookies crisp. Some like them chewy. Some like a combination of the two. Some like them to have a vanilla flavor. Others prefer almond.

I make my stance on this highly contested, divisive issue, loud and clear: I love and must have my sugar cookies thick and soft. I don’t mind almond extract in the dough, but the vanilla needs to be the star flavor for me.

The sugar cookies that I’ve posted on the blog thus far have met all of the above criteria. The first (and also, the most popular post on the blog to date) were these cut-outs. I’ve also shared two vanilla sugar cookies that are good for cookie stamps and molds, here and here.

As delicious as all of these recipes are, they do fall short in one area.

Although they’re all thick and soft, they’re still missing what I think of as the ‘cloud’ factor; where the texture of the cookie is SO light and soft that when you’re biting into it, you feel like you’re biting into a fluffy cloud of pure heaven. I’ve tried a lot of sugar cookie recipes that claim they deliver these goods, only to be disappointed because they just didn’t.

Guys. This recipe de-LIVERS.

I had my doubts before I made these just because the method is unlike any method I’ve ever done when putting together cookie dough. Rather than being creamed or melted, the butter actually gets cut into the dry ingredients just like it is when making biscuits and scones.  The eggs get beaten together with the vanilla and a little milk, then folded into the butter-flour mixture. I have no idea why this is. I have no idea how it works together with the rest of the ingredients. All I know is that it works. It works so well.

As a Southern recipe, this one supposedly gets its name from when the cookies would be given out to journeymen to store in their pillowcases by their families as they traveled around doing work. I’d certainly be a happy camper (or journeyman) if I had a pillowcase full of these to eat.

My favorite thing about the cookies is their texture. It’s just perfect. They rise with a perfect dome and have that thick, soft, fluffy center that practically melts in your mouth. And, no: they absolutely don’t need any help from icing or glaze. These are delicious enough to eat all on their own. This is THE sugar cookie of my dreams, the one I’ve been searching for–which is why I just had to share it with all of you now.

Linking this up to Fiesta Friday #205, co-hosted this week by Mollie @ The Frugal Hausfrau and Petra @ Food Eat Love.

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Pillowcase Cookies

Recipe Adapted from LouisianaCookin.com

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Ingredients

  • 2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
  • 1 cup white sugar, plus more for sprinkling
  • 2 1/2 teaspoons baking power
  • 1/2 cup (1 stick) cold unsalted butter
  • 1 large egg plus 1 egg yolk
  • 2 tablespoons milk, plus more as needed
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

 

Directions

In a large bowl, combine the flour, 1 cup of sugar and baking powder and stir together with a fork.

Use the large holes on a box grater to grate the butter directly into the dry ingredients. (If you don’t have a box grater that’s okay. Just cut the butter into small cubes and stir them evenly into the dry ingredients with a fork.)

Stir the butter into the dry ingredients until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Use a rubber spatula to make a well in the center of the bowl. In a small bowl, whisk together the eggs, milk and vanilla extract with a fork, then pour into the well you made in the dry ingredients. Flour the rubber spatula and mix together, stirring until the liquid has been absorbed and it forms a slightly sticky dough. (You may need to add additional milk, 1 tablespoon at a time to make it all stick together; that’s fine.)

Generously sprinkle a clean work surface (like a pastry mat, a cutting board or wax paper you tape to your countertop) with flour. Dump the dough out onto the surface and knead together with your hands just until it forms a large ball. It will get messy, but that’s okay; just keep sprinkling with either flour or powdered sugar until it’s relatively easy to pick up in one mass.)

Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at LEAST one hour.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Line two sheet pans with parchment paper or aluminum foil and spray with cooking spray, set aside. Using a floured rolling pin, roll the dough cookie dough out to about 1/4 inch thick, then use a 3 inch cookie cutter to cut out circles. Place the cut cookies on the sheet pans. Either refrigerate for about 45 minutes, or freeze for about 20 minutes.

Sprinkle the tops of the cookies with sugar, then bake in the oven for 12 minutes until golden brown on the bottom & slightly puffy on the tops. Allow to cool on the sheet pan for 1 minute, then remove to wire racks to allow to cool completely.

(Note: no one oven is the same, & different baking sheets bake cookies differently. Keeping this in mind, I will ALWAYS test bake one cookie before baking entire sheets of the whole batch, just to get a good idea of how long they should be in the oven and if I need to adjust the way I’ve cut, rolled them out, etc. I highly recommend that you do the same.)