Tag: baking

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The BEST soft gingerbread cookies!

This is my first blog post of 2018. The first of, what I hope, will be many. One of my resolutions was to post more frequently on here and to build a bigger following. Yesterday I bought myself a new mug for my blogging days (which are now scheduled on my calendar), and we all know the power of a new mug!

The holiday season is over now, and it’s back to regular life. I got all of the Christmas decorations put away and sent to storage earlier in the week, Rex is back to work, and today is Maddie’s last day of Christmas break before school starts again on Monday, so she has some friends coming over this afternoon to celebrate and I am trying to get back into a regular house keeping schedule again. Thankfully I was lucky enough to get a Roomba for Christmas so my vacuuming is all taken care of!

Our house is for sale so I’m also trying to get things sent to storage so the house is less cluttered. I am just itching to get moved and get started on the renos at the new house. We’re going to try to do as much as we can with as little money as we can and I will be documenting the whole process so that will be exciting and will make for easy writing, I’m sure, as it’s what I’m passionate about the most!

Life should be very different for us in the new house. We will have lots of acreage and I am hoping to get enough animals to make us self sufficient. That’s my 10 year goal. To use our land to be as self sufficient as possible. I have these grand dreams of being a homesteader so we’ll see what the reality turns out like!

Fingers crossed everything goes according to plan (I should know better than that by now!) the next Christmas will be spent at the River House. I am so excited about moving, so excited about renovating, but mostly, I am so excited about the first Christmas spent there. With any luck there will be multiple trees, many 1000 lights, and many many memories made.

My obvious love of Christmas means that I love anything holiday related. And to me, nothing says Holidays like gingerbread. I love the smell of gingerbread, I love the way the spices dance on your tongue, I love that they are so fun to decorate and personalize. But I’ve never been a big fan of the hard brittle gingerbread cookies.

You know the ones.

The ones they make gingerbread houses out of. The ones that are so hard that being left out in the open air for 30 days doesn’t affect their texture at all. The ones that I’m sure are responsible for many fractured teeth at this time of year. They still have that same spicy sweet taste, but I just can’t stand a crunchy cookie. I like my cookies soft and chewy.

So when I stumbled across this recipe for soft chewy gingerbread cookies that held their shape I was instantly in love.

We decorated a plate of cookies for Maddie’s teacher Mr. Gray! Teachers love sugar!

 

I followed the recipe so I won’t bore you with those details. I will however let you in on a little tip…..when you pour the molasses into your mixer, make sure it’s not running and the paddle is lifted. Voice of experience over here! I just left it running when I poured the molasses in and it got wrapped around the paddle attachment and ended up being a GIANT mess to clean up!

 

Also I needed to add most of an extra egg as my batter was really crumbly and didn’t hold together. I didn’t realize how crumbly it was until after it was rested in the fridge but I added the egg right before I rolled it out and they worked out just fine!

 

This recipe makes LOTS of cookies but they freeze really well. If you’re going to freeze them, freeze them plain, with no icing as the icing tends to crack and fall off when frozen. I just took cookies out of the freezer as we needed them, let them thaw for a couple of hours then iced them and they were good to go!

Well, I need to get my butt to the gym, I haven’t missed a workout all year I’m not about to start now 😉

I hope you all had a fabulous holiday season with your families!

And I’ll talk to you again.

Real soon! XOXOX

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My love/hate relationship with macarons

I LOVE macarons! Delicate, sweet, available in any imaginable flavour, and without a doubt, the most beautiful treat in the history of existence!

I have a huge sweet tooth and generally like anything that even resembles sugar. I’m not much of a baker though. I’ve always been the type of person that marches to the beat of my own drum. Not much for rules. Always challenging the norm. You know the type.

The people closest to me (sorry Rex) have their hands full with me some days. If there is a difficult way to do the simplest task, that’s the way I’ll do it.

Every time.

Which is why I don’t bake. You can’t just wing it. You have to measure everything out in precise proportions. And that’s just not what I’m about.

But I am also the type of individual that thrives on a challenge. So about a year ago, I decided it was time to embark on the ultimate challenge – making macarons.

Now I’ve read lots and lots of blog posts about making these delectable little beauties and all of them said that they weren’t for the faint of heart. And I just took that as a personal challenge. “Challenge accepted” has been my personal mantra since I first heard those words from Barney Stinson’s mouth. (And if you need to ask me who Barney Stinson is, we can no longer be friends……just kidding….well, sort of….)

My first attempt at making macarons was actually pretty successful. I even went as far as to grind whole almonds into almond flour first. I no longer do this. I just purchase already ground almond flour, cause I’m lazy like that. I made some berry flavored ones, and then I made some chocolate orange ones. Both were delicious. BUT. My kitchen looked suspiciously like an atomic bomb went off. I swear I used every bowl in my kitchen, and I have A LOT of bowls. I’m getting it down to a fine art now, so it’s only about 50% of the items in my kitchen that need to be washed between batches.

Now, I’m neck deep in this wedding planning and prepping things and I got the bright idea to have macarons. Another one of my personality flaws – once I get something in my head, there’s no going back. If that means I don’t sleep for a week, well, that’s just too damn bad. If it’s in my head, it’s happening. No matter what it takes. See what a peach I am to live with?

Did y’all know I was getting married? Well, I am. SOON! June 3rd to be exact. That’s why I haven’t been posting for a while, I’ve been crafting and planning up a storm. When we get back from our honeymoon you guys are going to be so sick of me. I have so many projects to post about that I made for the wedding, but I was waiting to post them until I got some beautiful professional pictures at the wedding. You just wait, it’s going to be legen-wait for it-dary. See what I started?!

Alright, alright, enough of that, back to the task at hand.

Pretty good for a non-baker, huh? I’m also pretty happy with my photography skills (I know I have a LONG way to go, but I’ve come a long way already!)

Today, I tried 3 different recipes. The first batch I made were the lemon ones found HERE. They turned out so well I will definitely be adding this recipe to my repeat list. They are cute little yellow bundles of sugar. I filled them with lemon curd instead of the lemon buttercream in the recipe but other than that I followed it to the letter. See, I can do it when I want to.

Next I made THESE vanilla bean macarons. I was so excited to make these, I love real vanilla beans but they’re so expensive I only use them for special occasions. It doesn’t get much more special than your wedding day so it seemed an appropriate time to break these bad boys out. And then they were a total flop. I’m talking all-melded-together-to-form-one-macaron. And then they fell. Everything about them was a fail. I’m sure it’s not a problem with the recipe, I’m sure it was entirely user error but I’m struggling to find the will to try this one again. Maybe I’ll just add vanilla beans to a recipe I know I can handle.

The last batch I made today was just a basic French macaron recipe (found HERE). I made this twice, once for the berry ones (that I filled with Orchard Berry jam) and once for the salted caramel ones (that I filled with Dulce Le Leche and a sprinkle of sea salt). Both batches worked out well, although the berry ones I had incorrectly read the recipe and used 2 egg whites instead of 3. I noticed after I had mixed them with the dry ingredients and it was a dry mix. I whipped up another egg white and added it and thought I would see what happened. They turned out but they are EXTREMELY fragile. As in, I broke every single one putting them together. But I’m using them anyway. Don’t judge me!

I still have planned to make some cookies and cream ones  (recipe HERE) this evening after the oven is finished with our dinner (stuffed peppers, and they smell amazing!) so I’ll let you know how it goes!

I’ve read a few posts about storing macarons and several people have had good success with freezing them after they are filled so i’m giving it a shot. Because I had to make them more than a week in advance (my schedule is pretty hectic for the next 10 days as you can imagine!) I am opting to freeze them. I am hoping that when I take them out of the freezer in 10 days they are just as beautiful as they are today.

And if they’re not.

Nobody needs to know they existed.

You won’t tell anyone, right?

All in all, I think it was a pretty successful day in the kitchen! I’m pleased with my happy little box of beautiful, dainty confections.

Challenge accepted!