Fruitcake season!

Hello, everyone.  It is, indeed, fruitcake season. Or it would be, except the stores have no candied peel for sale. Sigh. I have a lemon tree and an orange tree. 

Peels cleaned and sliced for candying

After candying. These are lemon peels. Tomorrow I will candy orange peels. 

The $64 question is: can I make an edible fruitcake patch without any candied citron?

We found the candied cherries and pineapple in the grocery store. Unfortunately there were absolutely no candied peel packages. Thus the preparation of candied lemon peel, and soon, candied orange peel. I don't have a tree that produces citron. I have decided to do my best with what is on hand.

It's a sad thing when you think you maybe need to set an arrival alert with HEB grocery so you can make the traditional Christmas goodies. Really.

Trying a new recipe

Hello,  everyone. It's cold outside, so it's a good day to do sewing and baking.

Well, it's determined to put it in sideways. I think y'all can see reasonably well. The recipe is from Cherry Republic's web site, Sharon's Cherry Scones. I didn't like the way her recipe says to shape them, and it looks a lot like a buttermilk biscuit recipe, so I patted and gently rolled the dough to 1/2" thick and used my 2" biscuit cutter. With this system, I got 28 round Cherry flavored biscuits. 

I sampled one with some cream cheese and it was good. Also very tender!

This one looks like a winner, and it helps to use up some of the dried sour cherries that are in the pantry. 

Cloud Bread

Hello, everyone.  I know that cloud bread was last year's fad, or maybe a couple of years ago, but I only tried it this year. Today, wanting something to spread taramosalata on, I got out the printout of a recipe and made some...with an extra egg because I thought I had contaminated the first egg white with yolk. Some cooking things just aren't worth taking chances on. I put the maybe contaminated white into the yolks cup and separated three more. The batter was a little less stiff when it was time to fold it into the whipped egg whites.  This may produce a less dry result than the original recipe...I am kind of hoping for that. 

Top view after baking for 35 minutes.

Side view. In the background is the Air Bake cookie sheet I supported the pan with.

After a while I flipped the little rounds over onto the baking rack so the bottoms would not become mushy from steam inside the pan.

I like the cloud breads, even though with no wheat flour there is no gluten with its chewy texture. They do need to be used with soft spreads as the lack of gluten does make them crumble if the sandwich filling is the least bit tough.

Garlic Potato Rolls

Hello, everyone.

The other day I made a batch of Garlic Potato Rolls. (It's cute how capitalizing it makes it seem important, isn't it?) This started with the Potato Bread recipe in the old Beard on Bread book, a volume that we've had for years and years. The book is probably out of print by now.

His potato bread recipe included egg (used), mashed potato (used), sugar (not used), milk (used), butter (used) and the usual flour, yeast, salt, water things.

The only really difference this time was the potato was leftover garlic mash from an instant potato packet that had been prepared, and of course the skipping of the sugar. With all that potato, milk, and flour there really is no need at all for sugar to feed the yeast. It proofs nicely in the wrist-temperature water in the measuring cup or bowl without any accelerant.

Oh, and instead of making a pair of loaves the dough was formed into 24 medium-large rolls. They were baked in a muffin pan on a pizza stone at 400F for about 19 minutes.

The dozen that was baked right away.

The other rolls were frozen on a cookie sheet, covered with plastic wrap, until firm, then put into a zipper-closure bag to await their future glory.

It's so nice to have rolls almost ready to bake in the freezer.

Post-Thanksgiving Biscuits

Hello, everyone.
We had a big mound of very buttery sweet potato mash on T-day and there was a little left over. Perfect! Perfect as an ingredient in another recipe.

The last three of this morning's Sweet Potato Biscuits. (Hey, if I talk about recipes I have to capitalize every word, right? 😉)

This started from the standard biscuit recipe with 2 cups of flour. As the sweet potato mash was very buttery, I cut back just a smidge from the half-stick of butter. Also, as the butter I use is salted, I use less salt. The extra weight of the cup or so of sweet potato meant increasing the baking powder by about a half tablespoon. I cut up the butter into the flour in the Kitchen Aid mixer, added the salt and baking powder, and let the beater blade cut it all in together until the visible fat bits were little smashed things in the rest of it. Added the still-cold sweet potato and turned the beater on again, gently. When it all looked the same, I added about 3/4 cup of milk to get a medium soft dough.

(Started preheating the oven to 375F at the start.)

Put some flour down to prevent sticking and patted and rolled until the dough was about 1/3 to 1/2 inch thick. Cut out 3 inch biscuits and lined them up on the cookie sheet--ungreased--about 1 inch apart. The yield came out to about 11.5 biscuits...one little one and the rest pretty disks. Put a little milk on top and cooked in the preheated oven for about 16 minutes.

They came out really well!

A bread experiment

Hello everyone.

We've been trying new ideas lately. We had deviled eggs for lunch yesterday instead of sandwiches. Today an experiment with bread dough.

This is a Cheese and pine nut ring rising. (Not a sweet roll)
The plan is for the cheese shreds and pine nuts to make friends with the bread dough and be yummy after baking. At worst, it becomes an awkward, spread out sort of rolls ring. Which isn't bad. At best, a winner.
So here goes!

Fruitcake

Hello, everyone.

A couple of weeks back, we made the annual batch of fruitcakes.

Yum.

As y'all can see, we ran short of racks for cooling.

This recipe appeared in the McAllen Monitor some 30 years ago, as part of a piece on champagne. I make it with a still white wine instead, not much liking champagne, since it calls for 1 cup (250 ml) of the stuff and there's still the rest of the bottle that needs to be drunk or otherwise used up.

We did give some away and ship some out. GS1 is said to love his first fruitcake. The remainder keeps reaching its sugary hands out to me and whispering "eat me...eat me...you know you want to!"

Tomorrow we begin the new year. May you all have un prospero aňo y felicidad. (Sorry about the strange looking enye, the symbol insert button has many things but seems to omit this common element in Spanish spelling.)

One of the (many) grapefruit cake recipes out there

Hello, everyone.

My sweetie has been trying to use up grapefruit a lot this year.

He's made a batch of grapefruit wine. (Seen here in secondary fermentation, under the carboy jacket with beer bottles on it. After this he clarified it and let it set in the big jug some more, and then he bottled some and racked the rest...ran out of containers.)

Grapefruit wine in the back, a beer kit in the front. White bucket in background on floor contains sanitizing solution for cleaning hoses, testing equipment, and whatnot.

 Then he made a grapefruit cake recipe he found on the internet. It was a fairly basic white-ish cake. Used whole eggs, and had some zest and juice in it.

The grapefruit cake--which wanted to slide apart. Thus the toothpicks temporarily in the cake top!

Then he was supposed to pour a boiled-down juice glaze over all and make a frosting with confectioners sugar and juice and butter. (?) The icing wasn't that great at first, but the grapefuit flavor came out more over time. I told him he should try making the French pound cake (quatre quarts) with zest either instead of vanilla or in addition to it, and then pour the fruit glaze over that and call it a day. It might be really good.

Besitos de naranja

Hello, everyone.

It's spring Bake Sale time again (also known as Fish Fry Season) and so I was fooling around with ideas for the bake sale.

I thought about Miracle Whip cake--but it is somewhat difficult to manage when it's a carry-in item. (Gooey cake, as it's always pretty moist for me, and the favored topping is whipped cream. Which also is kind of iffy for transport in my car.)

I thought about oatmeal cookies--but I did that last week, and wanted to do something different.

In this mood, I was walking through my local WalMart and saw the Easter baking display. Eureka! Various colors of "velvet cake" mixes! (Sorry, the mix with a pink layer and a yellow layer isn't online.) I bought the box with both pink and yellow inside--two packets--and made a marble velvet cake with it. It needed something, though. I knew there would be cream cheese frosting on top--almost can't lose with that--but I though we'd need more "stuff" for the table.

My eye fell on a container of 6 egg whites in the fridge. Aha. Kisses! But I didn't want to repeat the experiment of using the spring colored chocolate chips. Too many people thought the yellow ones looked like corn. So I ground up some pecans. And pulled the bag of unsweetened coconut out of the pantry.

In the end it looked like this:

Spring marble velvet cake and Besitas de naranja

Besitas with the flavoring: Licor de Naranja

I used: 8 egg whites, about 7/8 cup of white sugar, about a quarter teaspoon--scant--of cream of tartar to help the meringue, 2 1/2 tablespoons of the orange liqueur, half a cup of finely chopped pecans, probably 2/3 cup of unsweetened coconut. Whipped the egg whites and cream of tartar until foamy with the whisk blade in my Kitchenaid, added the sugar in portions, except the last 1/4 cup, put in 2 1/2 tablespoons of the orange liquor, added the last bit of sugar slowly while whipping, and when the eggs were mostly-stiff and still a bit glossy, folded in the nuts and coconut.
Dropped by big spoonfuls onto silicone-covered baking sheets and baked at about 300F for 35 minutes or so. Turned off the oven for a few minutes while frosting the cooled cake. Then took out the cookies to cool.

These were actually surprisingly chewy in the end, with a good, light flavor. We sold them as garnishes to the cake pieces and the ones that were extra and didn't go to the bake sale were a hit with DH.