The New Love of My Life

Sorry, Nate, but there's someone new in my life.

My pearl metallic KitchenAid Professional 600 series 6-quart stand mixer. I've wanted one for years (and I've always kicked myself for not registering for one as a wedding present), but have more recently become somewhat obsessed with the idea of getting one. I mean, I cook and bake quite a bit, so it only makes sense, right? Luckily, my birthday is coming up and this particular mixer -- the one I was considering anyway -- came up on sale at Amazon for a really good price, so I just had to get myself an early birthday present. And my mother-in-law -- who is an avid baker and cook herself, and undestands the importance of having a stand mixer -- sent along some "mixer money" (thanks, Julie!).

The thing is really pretty big, and it took quite a bit of kitchen rearranging to figure out where to keep it after we learned it wouldn't fit underneath the cabinets. But I think we figured it out, and it has a prominent spot in the kitchen.

Because Nate was the recipient of a random text from me mid-day last week saying "I bought a KitchenAid mixer. Hope that's OK!" I told him the first thing I would make would be for him. After settling on cookies rather than beer bread, I turned to the Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe in the instruction and recipe booklet that came with the mixer. I followed the recipe very closely (see p. 43) because I wanted to be sure I used the mixer just as the recipe intended. But I subbed in 1 of the cups of flour with whole wheat flour, added some mixed chopped nuts (walnuts, almonds and pecans, probably 1/4 cup) and didn't measure the chips I threw in, but rather used up the three partial bags (milk chocolate, semi-sweet chocolate and butterscotch) I had in the pantry.

Rather than using a teaspoonful of dough, I used closely to a tablespoon, so I ended up baking my cookies for closer to 15 minutes. The cookies were fantastic -- they had a bit of a crunch on the outside, but were still soft on the inside. The butterscotch offered a nice burst of flavor.

It was a great first experience using the mixer, and I can't wait to use it again ... and again ... and again!

Saying Happy Birthday with Yogurt

(Unfortunately, I didn't take any photos when I was making these cupcakes, so you'll just have to imagine them!) (Also, I wrote this post about two weeks ago ...) I try to take in a birthday treat to work every year (last year I made Mexican hot chocolate cupcakes), mostly because I like cooking and baking. This year, it kind of snuck up on me and it doesn't help that my mind is mentally, already, in Mexico (we leave for vacation on my actual birthday, March 30). That said, I started thinking today that I should take something to work tomorrow. I put out a call on Twitter to see if anyone had any suggestions. Rachel (aka @Magrick) gave me a good idea: she remembered back to our conversation yesterday at Paul and Lori's soup night about us needing to use up all our yogurt before leaving for the week. I did some Googling, and came across this recipe for "Wonderful Yogurt Cake." I knew I didn't want to make an entire cake (plus, I don't have a bundt pan (Gasp! I know ... ), so luckily I came across one of the comments left below the recipe about making cupcakes instead. I was pretty intrigued by the thought of using yogurt in baking, PLUS I was super excited to use some of the yogurt up, so I don't end up having it for breakfast, lunch and dinner tomorrow. Anyhoo, you can follow along with the actual recipe. Otherwise, here is what I ended up doing. I've never really experimented with baking, so this was kind of fun! Wonderful Yogurt Cupcakes makes 12

• 1/2 cup butter, softened


• 1 cup sugar (I mixed brown and white sugar)


• 1 teas. vanilla extract


• about 1/8 teas. almond extract


• 1/2 cup plain nonfat yogurt


• 1/2 cup vanilla nonfat yogurt


• 2 cups AP flour


• 1 egg


• 1 teas. baking soda


• 1/2 teas. baking powder


• jam (I used a three-berry jam)


• powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray muffin/cupcake tins with nonstick spray.

In a bowl, cream butter, sugar and extracts. Beat in egg until smooth. In another bowl, mix flour, baking soda and baking powder. Stir into the sugar mixture, alternating with yogurt.

Scoop half the mixture into the muffin tins. Using a 1/2 teaspoon, drop a dollop of jam on top of each bit of batter. Put the rest of the mixture on top of each cupcake.

Bake for 350 for 30 minutes or until tooth pick comes out clean. Using a shaker or sifter, sprinkle powdered sugar on top.

Nate and I split one after dinner tonight (I didn't want to take something horrible into work!). They're really quite good--they're not dry at all and the jam gives it a nice kick. They aren't too sweet either, which I really like. I'm sure they'd be good with frosting, but they're just as good with just the powdered sugar.

Christmas Cookies

Each Christmas, I'm in charge of the family Christmas cookies. I don't make a ton of them, but enough to keep some to snack on and then take to my parents' house for our dessert Christmas Day.

For as long as I can remember, my family has made two familiar favorites: gingerbread (or, more specifically, German molasses) and spritz. So, of course, that's what I made this year.

The spritz recipe I use comes from the 1967 Electric Company Cookbook. It's an oldie but goodie.

Here's the recipe:

Spritz

-1 cup butter

-1/2 cup sugar plus 1 tbs. sugar

-1 egg

-3/4 teas. salt

-1 teas. vanilla

-1/2 teas almond extract

-2.5 cups shifted AP flour

Cream butter; add sugar. Blend in egg, salt, extracts and flour; knead dough in hands until soft and pliable. Press dough through cookie press onto ungreased cookie sheets.

Bake at 400 degrees for about 8 minutes. Makes about 6 dozen, depending on size.

For the gingerbread, I used this recipe. Until this year, I've always used a family recipe for German molasses, but I just couldn't seem to find it this year. this recipe is pretty similar, so I thought it would be fine.

I don't know if I did something wrong, or if the recipe is that different, but I had a helluva time with these cookies. For one (and this was my fault, but still), I let the dough ripen for only 1 day, rather than 2. But the dough was softer and stickier than it usually is, so I had to add A LOT of flour as I was rolling out the dough.

Some of the cutout shapes look rather funky. But, everything tastes OK, although the cookies a little crispier than usual.

After everything was cutout and baked, I frosted and decorated the cookies (notice the New Glaurs Moon Man!).

I used my old-standby recipe I have in my heat for frosting: about 1 tbs. butter, melted, mixed with a few dashes of milk, a small drop of vanilla extract and enough sugared powder to make it the right consistency.

On Christmas Day, we'll be having the cookies with Brandy Alexanders. Can't wait!

Sweet Potato Cookies?! Oh Yes!

I know, I know--I say it all the time: I love this type of food, I love that type of food. But I really do love sweet potatoes. We actually just had sweet potato fries with dinner tonight! So when I stumbled across an opportunity to make cookies using sweet potatoes, I jumped on it.

Perusing Twitter last week, I found a tweet from Allens Veggies about a recipe using their sweet potatoes in a cookie recipe. So over the weekend I made them. The recipe is so simple (here it is) and uses only four ingredients: a box of cake mix (I used spice cake), 2 eggs, 1/3 cup chopped pecans and sweet potatoes. I decided to not use canned sweet potato, and instead used two whole sweet potatoes that totaled about 1.25 pounds before cooking.

For the sweet potatoes, I peeled them, wrapped them in plastic wrap and microwaved them on the potato setting for about 8 minutes, or until tender. I mashed them and let them cool, and then followed the recipe to combine ingredients.

I decided to make them tablespoon-sized rather than teaspoon-sized, mostly because it was easiest to use the tablespoon-sized ice-cream scoop thing I have.

I ended up baking the cookies for about 15, rather than 10, minutes since they didn't quite seem done.

After they cooled, I drizzled on homemade icing, made the way my mom showed me many, many years ago:

-Melt about 1 tbs. butter in microwave.

-In a bowl, combine butter, a few drops of vanilla, some powered sugar and some milk to the consistency you want. I wanted to be able to drizzle the icing, so it was a bit soupy.

The cookies are fantastic. The spice cake taste is really nice, and you'd really have no idea you're eating, essentially, vegetable cookies. Yum!

More Rhubarb

We keep getting more and more rhubarb in our CSA box. It's OK, though, because up until just a few weeks ago, I had never really cooked with rhubarb, so it's been fun finding different recipes.


I made some rhubarb-cinnamon muffins a few weeks ago. And today I made two loaves of Rhubarb Nut Bread. I still have some rhubarb left over ... and buttermilk, too!


Here is the recipe. I used a bit more rhubarb than it calls for. Also, for the 2.5 cups of flour, I used one cup of whole wheat flour and 1.5 cups of all-purpose flour. And, there is supposed to be a butter-sugar topping on the bread, which I decided not to add. I really don't think it's necessary.



It's pretty tasty!

Sunday Baking

My husband took it upon himself to bake some treats for himself (and for me, too) Sunday afternoon. Works for me!

We got a bread machine for a wedding present (almost four years ago ...) and, sadly, we don't use it as much as we should.

So we (really, Nate did all of the bread making) made cinnamon raisin bread to have for breakfast over the next week or so. (If you have a bread machine and want the recipe, let me know).

Nate eats a granola bar every day at work, and although the ones he eats are relatively healthy, he thought he'd try making them from scratch. We found this Alton Brown Granola Bar recipe that he used for the bars. We mostly followed the recipe exactly, except we also added some mini chocolate chips and flax seed and for the dried fruit, we used apples (how good are dried apples?!).

They turned out pretty good, but as we were talking today, we said next time we made them we'd add the wheat germ and flax seed later and not roast them with the oats (it ended up tasting a little burnt).