It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas....Cookies that is.

Blog-checking lines: Holiday season is the time for sharing and Peta of Peta Eats is sharing a dozen cookies, some classics and some of her own, from all over the world with us.

Christmas cookies!

 



I was so excited when I saw this month's baking challenge, as I love to make Christmas cookies for people. It is a fond memory for me to have where my mom and I and my sister would all spend hours making various Christmas cookies for friends and family. The ones that we always make every year would be sugar cookies with a butter cream frosting, and Spritz cookies. I have a very distinct memory of the flavor of the Spritz cookies and well as bad as it is, butter is nice, but margarine is the only way to go. Now my mom's sugar cookies make a ton, and the dough is so tasty. For this challenge I was excited to look at all the different types of cookies. I had big plans, I planned to complete three different types of cookies, Mexican Chocolate with Caramel filling, Layer Christmas Cookies, and then finally some Rosemary Lemon Thumbprint cookies; I completed the first two and am still planing on the Thumbprints just not this week.

The first the Layer Christmas cookies are cookies that I have looked at for years and thought I really should try to make those one day so I was thrilled when I saw that one of the suggested cookie recipes included Layer cookies, I however used a recipe from Epicurious.com. I read and re-read the recipe to make sure I understood it, and to my surprise I did not. I prepared the cookies wrong, but they came out correctly. The Epicurious recipe that I used said to add the sugar to the egg whites a 1/4 cup at a time; later in the recipe when you are using the almond paste it says to add the remained of the 3/4 cups of sugar. There is a possibility the cookies would have had a bit more loft had I mixed the sugar correctly but they are still amazing! The flavor is phenomenal. I have shared them with family, friends and co-workers. I love it when I get to take cookies in to work as they all enjoy the treats.

 Egg whites, pre-whip. 

 

 Egg whites, post whip.

Cookie batter for the layer cookies.

Red layer after baking, it is hard to tell, but these are pretty thin layers.

The layers once they have the apricot jam has been added.

 



Yes it took 13 cans to ensure a level pressure on the cookie layers.

Layers after the chocolate had been done. Really beautiful cookies!

The Mexican Chocolate cookies came out the the 100 Best Cookies from Better Homes and Gardens. They have cinnamon in them as well as cayenne pepper; spice like Mexican hot chocolate. These cookies are incredible as the recipe suggests that you use high quality dutch processed hot chocolate; which I did. The cookies had an amazing chocolate smell and were incredibly rich. These cookies are icebox cookies that you chill and cut; they were not difficult at all to make. Once baked and cool it was time to fill with the caramel filling, I used the dulce de leche which is VERY sticky, but very worth it. The cookies tasted fantastic and were the perfect amount of sweet, chocolate, and spice.

 

Cocoa, butter, and sugar.

 



 

Cookie dough once the flour has been added.

 



The dough was split into two piles to be rolled into a log and chilled.

Cookies cooked.

This is a local brand of Cajeta, dulce de leche, or caramel; it is very very sticky!

Cookies after cooling, don't they look great!

Only one casualty of the entire batch, fortunately it was the perfect size to just sandwich it's self.

Spooning the cajeta.

Spreading the cajeta.

You will notice the caramel is all over the place on the cookies, and the layers started to slide quickly.

I generally don't care for chocolate when it comes to cookies, cakes, or desserts however these were all great. I have had the chance to share them like I said with my family. Additionally my mom and I had gone to the military post here where they live, and when we were in the commissary we saw some of the layer cookies, my mom and I both thought mine looked so nice in comparison to the ones at the commissary. The joys of being able to make a quality product! The final photos.

Nothing better then holiday cookies with the ones you love.

Layer cookies with some hot chocolate.

Layer, Mexican Chocolate and hot cocoa.

Thanks mom for letting me take your photo while giving the cookie a taste.

 

 

I cannot wait to make these all again, I would not make them in bulk though as both sets require a bit of time for setting up and chilling. I will have to post a note about the rosemary lemon ones once all done. Hope everyone else enjoyed the cookie baking as much as I did. 

French Pastry my favorite...

First off, I am sorry to my friends at the Daring Kitchen as I am posting this very late. But posting none the less.

Blog-checking lines:Our October 2012 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Suz of Serenely Full. Suz challenged us to not only tackle buttery and flaky puff pastry, but then take it step further and create a sinfully delicious Mille Feuille dessert with it!

I have said it before and I shall say it again, pastry, primarily French Pastry are my favorite. And this months challenge was for just that Mille Feuille, or to those of us here in America often referred to as Napoleon. I am not entirely certain how they obtained that alternate name; and frankly if I were not already late I might take the time to look it up, for now my short and sweet post will have to do. What I can tell you about my efforts are the following...

My husband loved them, and has asked when might I make them again.
I took them to work and got many ooohs' and awes' from the folks who got to sample them there. Then the last final appearance was at a friends birthday dinner, where I made paella and served these along side birthday cup cakes. I got a second marriage proposal. Aw to be happily married and to have others almost begging. I don't have many photos of the process as my phone and camera were acting up, but I was able to get a few almost completed photos. I will have you know I did make my own puff pastry, and it is just a touch easier then the croissants I have made before. I know I will be doing these again in the very near future, I have family coming to visit soon and I would like to have these for when they get here. Anyway here is a photo to show the success. I had every intention of cooking a second batch before I realized the end of the month was here.

I know there should be more, but I just did not get them. They were delicious.

 

I will be excited to see what the next daring bakers challenge has in store for us. I may try and add an additional blog up regarding these when it comes time to make them again. Thanks for looking, if you want to try your hand at these please follow the link to the Daring Kitchen. 

Brazil is where its at!

Blog-checking lines: Rachel Dana was our October 2012 Daring Cooks' Challenge hostess! Rachel brought Brazil into our lives by challenging us to make Feijoada and Farofa along with some other yummy side dishes traditionally served with Feijoada, which is a delicious black bean and pork stew.

So this months (September 17- October 15) challenge was a complete Brazilian meal of Feijoada and Farofa, along with sides that were, I will just tell you now, out of this world! The Feijoada is a rich and hearty bean stew with many pork ingredients added to it, the Farofa is a grain dish that just really adds a wonderful texture to everything that we had with the dinner. A little more on that later.

So those who know Ashley know that he was raised all over, having been born in New Orleans and then growing up in Venezuela, England, and Norway it goes without saying that his appetite is pretty adventurous. The one thing that was a given for them, I was told in our dating early on, was that when they would return to New Orleans for holidays red beans a rice was a common dish served. One would naturally assume then that Ashley is fond of bean and rice combinations, alas he is not, so I was worried when this challenge came up. I fretted a bit and wondered would my sweet husband who is willing to try just about anything I make need to call upon our McDonald's pact when it came to dinner.. What is a McDonald's pact you ask, well when we have a meal that is not really edible by choice or kitchen catastrophe you can call upon the McDonald's pact for rescue dinner. I will wait at this point to tell you if he had to do that or not...

Now about the dishes, we were to make the Feijoada, the Farofa, some collard greens, a Vinagrete, and some rice. Sounds like a lot and frankly I was thinking I would be in the kitchen most of the day. Our hostess Rachel though she had a wonderfully planned write up to help along, which you can find here. So I started with the Feijoada, soaking the beans in a quick soak method. I put them in a pot brought the water to a boil and let them sit on the stove for a little over an hour. I looked several places that recommended not pouring out the water that they had soaked in, so I did not. Then it was on to the meats, I used, bacon, sausage, pork for carnitas, and some Smithfield smoked pork chops. The recipe called for many meats that I could not find that were salted or smoked, so I had to do some improv. I have several other meats in the photo that I thought I might use, some salt pork, and additional spicy sausage, but frankly after I had cut up all that I listed I felt like for the two of us, that was PLENTY of meat. Once the meat was cut on to the browning chore we went, which I did while the beans were completing their first simmer. I browned and browned until really I could brown no more, but this assisted in sealing the meats just as Rachel had suggested so they maintained their wonderful colors inside.

After the beans I started on the Vinagrete which I initially thought would be a dressing type accompaniment that would go with the greens. It was roughly chopped tomatoes, onions, and bell peppers along with fresh herbs and vinegar and oil. I think this was by far my most favorite easy addition and I plan on using this over and over again when I have a rich meal to assist in balance of flavor.

I made the collard greens and the Farofa last. Now the collards are pretty self explanatory for anyone who has prepared greens. You must rinse them well, and I do the rinse in cold water in the sink to let the dirt and grit sink to the bottom, I could have cheated and used pre cut, pre washed collards but I wanted to stick with the plan of fresh and prepared in my kitchen! The Farofa though OMG was that a wonderful addition. All crumbly and toasty with the flavors of onion, butter, bacon, and egg. I did not have the yucca flour that the dish is regularly made from so I used some of the corn flour/Masa that I had, this is also a suggested substitute from Rachel. It was PERFECT! There is nothing much more I can say about that other then really really perfect. I would make the entire dinner again just to have the Farofa and the Vinagrete!

On a side note, the original recipe calls for this wonderful garlic onion paste that you make and use in the beans, the greens, and you can add it to your rice. Now Rachel I think may be become a little overzealous in the writing up of her recipes and she informed us daring cooks that we would be adding 4 BULBS of garlic to the onion paste. While reading the recipe I thought okay, we love garlic in this house but that is a lot of garlic; thinking Brazilians were going to give Italians a run for their money in the use of the most garlic in one dish. While at the store I picked up what I felt were three huge bulbs, and ended up deciding on using only 2.5 bulbs of garlic in my paste. On later discovery through the closed forums of Daring Bakers, Rachel shared that this was an error on her part, and that the intent was to use only 4 CLOVES of garlic. On a personal note, we loved the amount of garlicky goodness that was present in the dishes and I really don't think I would change it the next time I made this dish. Just be aware if you plan to attempt this menu that if you go my route you will have a lot of garlic, if you go the way it is intended just 4 cloves..

No on to the photos.

The meats pre chop.

My garlic and onions, see how big those garlic bulbs are.

Some of my meats after the chop.

Here are my greens all ready to go.

This is my garlic past, which I had so much left over it is in the fridge where I have used it in other dishes.

You can see the browning on the (from left to right) bacon, smoked chops, and sausage.

This is the pork for carnitas which is browning nicely.

Closer browning photo.

This is the Vinagrete, don't the vegies look so yummy in there!

This is a photo of the complete meal, it looks so yummy! 

On the left is the farofa, on the right the greens, in the back the vinagrete.

so the beans in the bowl are about half of what was in the pot.

here is a close up of the plate, sorry for the blur. Yes mom my foods are touching, now go show daddy!

 

For those wondering I am kinda a freak about my foods touching, but it was the way it's suppose to be with this meal.

This final photo is to just show how pretty the meat remained on the inside thanks to the browning.

 

 

Now to the final thoughts. The meal was fantastic and I can not wait to do it again! Did Ashley go to McDonald's, NO he loved it. I think it was such an assortment of things that it was near impossible to not love it. Also I learned that the left overs are pretty good to take to work the next night! Anyway this was a fun challenge and I am eager to see what the next one will have us do. I could have looked this morning since I am posting late, but I wanted to get this post up before taking a look. I hope you all will give some or all of this a try. Thanks for reading! 

 

 

 



Empanada Gallega Feast or Failure?

Okay so for starters I LOVE empanadas, the Cuban kind that I have had in the past, pastelitos. Flaky deliciously filled; so I was very excited about this months Daring Bakers challenge...
 
Blog checkin lines: Patri of the blog, Asi Son Los Cosas, was our September 2012 Daring Bakers’ hostess and she decided to tempt us with one of her family’s favorite recipes for Empanadas! We were given two dough recipes to choose from and encouraged to fill our Empanadas as creatively as we wished!

Now I gave this a single try so that means that I realize that I could have had a different experience had I tried a second time, but I did not. I was actually more worried about running out of time this month. We were suppose to be going to New Orleans this week, that fell through with recent storm. In addition to possible traveling work has been incredibly stressful this month and so my sleep has been highly necessary.

I wanted to try some of the more exotic fillings that Patri had suggested on the challenge but I stuck with a less exotic one of ham and cheese, now I did stick with Spanish cheese and used Manchego because I LOVE it. Anyway you can find Patri's recipes here, who knows maybe one day very soon I will try the salt cod or tuna version.

So the dough was a beautiful dough, which I used my Kitchen Aid mixer and dough hook to make. I really think that had I worked the dough with my hand I would have actually had a softer dough. For me I felt like the dough was somewhat tough and it was very crisp when it was baked. I do not know if that is how it is suppose to be or not. I would have preferred a more delicate dough.

So the night we had the empanada gallega I made a wonderful salad to go along with the empanada, Ashley had two pieces of empanada because his hunger was not satisfied from the first piece. I making this again though with some modifications, in addition to trying one of the other fillings, if I do a ham and cheese version again I will add a lot more ham and a lot more cheese, possibly something not as fancy as Manchego. Here are some photos.

 As you can see it looks like it baked well, however the filling is a bit thin.

 

 

While the experiment was fun and it tasted okay I feel like I failed the experiment in the fact that I was not thrilled with the results. I guess that is what part of this process is, success and failure, learning things I would do differently. I know I at least enjoyed the time in my kitchen, hope you will enjoy yours a bit more. Thanks for reading! 

A Little Tango on the tongue!

Blog-checking lines: Our Daring Cooks’ September 2012 hostess was Inma of la Galletika. Inma brought us a taste of Spain and challenged us to make our very own delicious Paella!

OH my, anyone who knows me knows that I love to experience cultures through their foods! I will host entire dinners around a menu complete from one country at a time, so this months challenge fell right into my love of this kind of travel. This month we were challenged to try our hand at Paella. I have made paella only one other time, and that was with a big group for a dinner party, so this time the challenge I added into the dish was to make it small enough so Ashley and I would not be eating Paella for the rest of our lives. I was fortunate enough to find a recipe that I wanted to use that would allow for such a thing. I will add that our hostess offered a suggested menu that was smaller in portion as well. I however went the route of finding one on Foodnetwork.com that was presented by Tyler Florence, Paella with Seafood, Chicken, and Chorizo. Now there were suggestions from our hostess to not use onion because her family reports that it "agglutinate(s) the rice." I had to look this term up to ensure that I knew what it meant, I had suspicions because I had thought I had heard the term before, but was not certain, the term means essentially that the the onion could cause the rice to stick together. Regardless of what the term meant, it seemed something to try, leaving the onion out, though I do love some cooked onion. So the modifications to the paella I made included leaving the onion out, I did not use jumbo shrimp because they are far too expensive, and the little neck clams were not used. I was so excited to use clams, and I was going to have Ashley try them I think maybe for the first time, however I got to the grocery and the clams in my store looked terrible, the young woman behind the counter suggested that I use frozen precooked clams, UM NO WAY! So we were clam less as well. To go along with our paella I made a Spanish olive tapanade from Epicurious that I have made many times before, and LOVE, with toasted baguette to go along with it. Because the dish begged for a salad with a citrus feel I made a grapefruit and avocado salad to go along with everything else. It was all so good, and I had grand plans to cook more paella however the days got away from me and well exhaustion won out. Here though are the photos of my paella experience.

The chorizo and the chicken, a very blurry photo. 

 

This is the rice browning with the tomatoes and the fat from the chorizo.

 

 

 

The liquid added after the rice has browned a bit.

 

No for the meats and shell fish to be added to the pan.

 

 

 

The final outcome was amazing!

 

I could almost lick the screen it all looks so wonderful. I have to share too that my sister was the one who gifted me with both the paella pan for Christmas last year as well as the saffron. What a wonderful gift she gave me, and now I know that I can make paella a regular dish. I will be trying this again very soon, maybe even rabbit the next time, now if I can just find a good place to get rabbit around here. Enjoy your kitchen a bit more! 



Did you know swans mate for life? How about pastry swans...

Blog-checking lines: Kat of The Bobwhites was our August 2012 Daring Baker hostess who inspired us to have fun in creating pate a choux shapes, filled with crème patisserie or Chantilly cream. We were encouraged to create swans or any shape we wanted and to go crazy with filling flavors allowing our creativity to go wild!


Pate a choux is actually one of my very favorite pastry dough to work with. I have used it a few times before and enjoy it. I remember too when I was a kid my mother would make these pastry puffs that were filled with a pineapple cream of some kind; she made them for special sorority meetings and I frankly cannot remember if she made them for anything else. Why did I not ask for those for a birthday one year! Fortunately for me, she made us all wonderful family cook books several years ago, and in there is that recipe, which frankly I should have used for the filling in this month's challenge but for the fact that the husband does not like pineapple. 

This months challenge was pate a choux, specifically a choux shape, with an encouragement to try our hands a swans. I wanted to give the swans a try as for me I have always admired the window of pastry shops in Paris with their assortment of beautiful pastry both shaped and molded. So I gave it a shot. I was very nervous at first as many people in the Daring Bakers Group had reported struggles with their pate a choux. The other issue that I am very aware of is my need for perfection when in the kitchen; I was terribly afraid that I would not make swans that were pretty. After much hemming and hawing over which recipe to use, what filling to make I settled on using the Daring Baker's suggested recipe which I later learned is very similar to the recipe that Jacques Pepin uses for his Paris-Brest. The issue that I had with the Daring Baker's recipe was that there were no times, so I had to "wing" it. My heads baked for about 12 minutes, and my bodies baked for about 45 at the suggested 375. I should share with you as well that I have plans in the near future for my mother's pastries as well as the Paris-Brest from Jacques Pepin; I had a mini Paris-Brest the last time were were in Paris. Regardless here is my attempt at pastry swans. 

These are the bodies and the heads before filling. I did use a pastry bag and two different sized tips for piping. 

These photos were my for the photo shoot shots. They are filled with a chocolate pastry cream. More to come on that. 

This last photo is how I served them that night for dessert with friends after a wonderful dinner out. 

So the question remains, "Do pastry swans mate for life?" Only if you plan on eating two at one sitting, and well shamefully we did. I stuffed mine with a chocolate pastry cream because that is Ashley's favorite. I used the recipe from the book Encyclopedia of Classic French pastries by Susan Whatley. I have used this book many times, there is an earlier post about my croissants on my blog, and I love this book. I was not so happy with the pastry cream, but then I believe that may be my fault. The cream was too runny, which I attribute to my not cooking it long enough. I tried to remedy that by folding in some whipped cream when our guests were here for dessert. I specifically asked for statements from my guests about their impressions on the swans and there were many mmm, and yumms, and delicious; next time I must remember to write down direct quotes. I also took one to a friend at work who celebrated his birthday this past week and he enjoyed it, though I was surprised that the re-crisping made them too crisp, I won't do that again. 

What can you do with pate a choux that I did not do. It can be used for desserts as well as for savory dishes. One of the women in the group filled hers with a tuna mousse I believe, and made it into a crab, it is beyond cute, go to the link on crab to see her post! I think though my absolute favorite is shared by my sister, who may kill me for putting this final photo up. While in Paris we had a little bakery across the street from our hotel, and they had all kinds of pastry, regularly at night we would pick up a few eclair and enjoy them as we were winding down. She had two several times at night. 

She loved them, and ate both in that sitting. They were amazing. You can see the glee in her eyes as she devours them. Now if I could only figure out how to reproduce the pastry cream that was used in those eclair!!! I hope you try your hand at the pate a choux if you have never done so. Hope you enjoy your kitchen a bit more, I know I am enjoying mine