Christmas Baking

This year's Christmas baking was very successful, if I dare say so myself. Every year I aim to try out a few new recipes - it's my thing. I like trying out new things, and since I don't have that much time during the year, the holiday season seems like a good time to finally do it. Besides, home-made cookies and candy make for great Christmas gifts.

I always enjoy home-made gifts so much. It's both the gift itself and the fact that the person took time out of their daily schedule and routine to make it that makes it twice as precious as a normal gift, in my opinion. I have so little free time that I always appreciate when someone just as busy has made something for me.

But back to this year's baking - the recipes I tried out turned out to be amazing - coffee crinkles and Oreo truffles with black and white chocolate. They were sooo tasty, I almost kept them for myself instead of giving them as gifts to my team at work.

The coffee crinkles were soft and chocolaty and coffee-tasting and completely amazing - they are easily a contestant for the title of my favorite cookies ever. The recipe is from A Baker's House.

The Oreo truffles were also quite nice and creamy, and I used some nice cooking chocolate for dipping, which totally made a difference. My advice is to use good quality chocolate for such things whenever you can. The recipe is from here: Cooking Classy.

All in all - a good holiday baking haul and an excellent selection for this year's Christmas gifts.

Soft Pumpkin Cookies and Goodbye Vacation

Like I said in my slice-and-bake cookies post, I have decided to let loose during the holidays and indulge in making and eating some homemade sweets. This year I made a ton of tikvenik (pumpkin pastry with cinnamon and walnuts) for our Christmas and New Year celebrations, but I ended up with a piece of leftover pumpkin that I didn't use. I was wondering what to do with it (it was not enough for my favorite baked pumpkin soup) when I came across a recipe for soft pumpkin cookies on Food for the soul. It just so happens that I do usually like my cookies soft, even chocolate chip cookies, so I though I'd give the recipe a go. I changed the filling a little bit, though: instead of cream+sugar+butter+curds+mascarpone, I did a simpler cream+a little bit of powdered sugar filling, and for the marmalade filling, I used my homemade quince marmalade without much added butter. I liked the recipe, and the cookies turned out very delicious indeed. I will enjoy them on my last day of freedom before the work week and the work year officially starts :)

The Sweet Side of the Holidays

The holidays are usually my time to take a stab at new recipes, especially if they involve baking and sweets. I have given myself a free pass from my healthy diet for the month of December, so cookies were definitely on my agenda. I even had the grand plan of making big batches of cookies as Christmas treats, but between reunions with friends, collage making, and cooking for dinners and parties, I never found the time. Which is why these are not Christmas cookies, but New Year's Eve cookies :)

I seem to have a habit of trying out recipes from Smitten Kitchen around Christmas (two years ago it was the clementine cake, for example), and this year was no exception. The challenge was making slice-and-bake cookies, and I dare say that they turned out pretty good. I haven't been the best at making cookies in the past; I seem to be so afraid of having them be raw that I end up overbaking them and having to eat a batch of close to "break your teeth" hard cookies. Not this time. I have learned my lesson. I left them in the oven for just the right amount of time, and I took them out even when they still looked a bit soft to me, but it was the correct thing to do. They turned out just right.

I modified the recipe a little bit by making the cranberry version of the cookie with coconut, and I also made a chocolate cookie with mini chocolate chips and walnuts, which turned out very tasty. There is a fancy hotel close to my office where we usually have work events, and they always serve cookies like these at coffee breaks. Now I can make my own coffee break at home. Since I don't drink coffee, it will be more of a tea break. With cookies.

Happy holidays, everyone!

I Can Bake My Pie and Eat It Too

I have been drooling over this recipe for apple pie since I saw the photo in the article These Pies Are Anything but Humble, and since I have a few days off work around the holidays, I thought I'd finally give it a try. Well, what do you know? My first ever pie was a big success! Wo hooo!

They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but I totally wanted to try the recipe for Lafayette's Caramel-Apple Pie Élevée because of its incredibly tasty-looking photo. Cookbook editors take note: this is why you should have great photos in cookbooks, not just the text of the recipes...we women like to be inspired, and I find that I browse food blogs whose owners dabble in photography more and more often because they usually have food for the body and for the eyes:)

I changed the recipe a tiny bit because I am not a huge fan of caramel; I like it fine, just not well enough to have a whole pie that tastes like caramel. Instead, I substituted the caramel sauce the recipe calls for with muscovado sugar syrup (just heat up the sugar with a bit of water, and voila). Muscovado sugar has this wonderful rich molasses flavor, so I thought it would be a great way to make the apple pie recipe my own - and I wasn't wrong. The apple filling turned out great.

It seemed a bit daunting to make pie crust from scratch for the first time, though, especially since growing up here in Bulgaria I had never seen anyone I know make their own pie, and I had only ever had pie in a chain of sweet shops and coffee houses called Pchela and in the US, of course. First of all, the recipe said that I should use a stand mixer with a paddle attachment, and I was like....oooookkaaay...please tell me who here owns anything like that...It is funny actually, but if you ask a Bulgarian who is not a chef or cooking enthusiast whether they have even heard of KitchenAid, he/she would most likely say "A KitchenWhatNow?" Yeah, maybe it is because kitchens here are mostly tiny (why architects keep designing apartments with teensy kitchens is beyond me) most people don't seem to have stand mixers, and I am no exception.

But never you mind, I thought, I can do this with my hand mixer. I am tough like that. Or not. I had my four cups of flour, the sugar, and the butter cubes in a big bowl, and I had the genius idea to use my hand mixer with the regular whisks to mix the ingredients into what the recipe said should be a texture that "resembles sand." So I start the mixer, and what do you know, flour is blown around in my face and nothing seems to be mixing. Of course - there isn't any liquid in there to make the mix settle, and the recipe wants me to add mere spoonfuls of water and three egg yolks only after I achieve the elusive sandy texture.

So then I decide that I can transfer everything in a bigger bowl, but that doesn't solve the problem either, and neither does putting aluminum foil over half of the bowl, so that the flour doesn't fly. Finally, I gave up and did it by hand with a whisk, feeling a bit like an idiot and consoling myself that Julia Child didn't use a stand mixer with a paddle attachment either when she started cooking. Oh well. Still, the do-it-by-hand method was actually quite successful, and I did manage to make the dough, refrigerate it, roll it, refrigerate it again and so on. I feel like quite the "sand texture" expert at this point.

The second obstacle to my day of pie making was actually the fact that, silly me, I forgot that I didn't really own a pie dish of any kind. I have several rectangular pans and some muffin cups, and since I love muffins and tiramisu is my favorite cake, those work well for me. However, I have yet to see a rectangular pie, and while I was pondering whether I would become the first woman out there to try that novel idea, I remembered that I bought a springform cake pan last year when I was making a tangerine cake. Problem solved.



This pie sure did take a while, in part because it was my first adventure into pie-land, but the final product was well worth it. It came out just as I had wanted but not dared hope: with golden crust, beautiful sugary lattice on top, and a sweet, spicy and slightly tangy apple filling that melts in your mouth. Delicious. I do love my American treats.

So check out the recipe for yourself, as well as some other pie recipes that also look great to me: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303985504579206182830054334