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This week, I wanted to do something a little simpler than last week’s Hi Hats. So I decided to go for some cookies. The first was Alphabet Cookies, which were intended to be cut into the shapes of letters. I don’t have letter cookie cutters, so I used flowers, stars and hearts.

The recipe called for the dough to be mixed in a food processor. After the nightmare I had with the brioche, I am skeptical of mixing anything in a food processor. I decided to use my KitchenAid mixer instead. Unfortunately, when I added the flour, the dough turned into a crumbly mess:

I ended up just mooshing the dough together with my hands. I finally got it all incorporated together and rolled out:

I cut out the shapes and baked them for 12 minutes. Once they were cooled, I mixed up the icing, which was a combination of powdered sugar, milk, light corn syrup, vanilla extract and food coloring. This icing could have stood to be a little thicker, but as I was adding the milk, I lost my grip on the carton and an extra teaspoon came splashing out. I added more powdered sugar to make up for it, but I think something was lost. It still worked, though, for the most part:

I put the icing in a zip bag and snipped the corner so I could pipe the icing onto the cookies:

The icing leaked over the edges of several of the cookies, which I believe was due to it being just a little too runny. It seems to be setting up just fine now, nice and shiny. I finished each cookie off with some sprinkles:

Quite tasty! Meanwhile, I also worked on Cream Cheese Cookie Bars. These started out with chocolate and butter melted in a bowl over a pot of simmering water (I used to think that I needed a double boiler, but I’ve become a pro at the bowl-over-the-pot trick). Sugar, eggs and vanilla were mixed in next (by hand!):

Flour was mixed in next and the batter was poured into a 9″ x 13″ pan lined with parchment paper:

Next, cream cheese and sugar were beat together and chopped semisweet chocolate was added. This mixture was dropped by spoonfuls on top of the chocolate batter and swirled with a knife to create a marbled effect. This was baked for 30 minutes and came out looking like this:

This brick of cookie was transferred to a cutting board and once it was cool, I cut it into bite-sized pieces:

These bars and very interesting, because by looking at them, you think you’re getting a brownie. But they’re definitely more of a cookie texture and far less fudgy than a brownie. Still pretty good though.

Next week I’ll be making Mint Meltaway Cupcakes that I’ve already got my co-workers drooling over. They sound fun: Fudge-covered, mint-fudge sandwiched sour cream chocolate cupcakes. Mmm mmm!

Also, if anyone knows where I can buy Baker’s Ammonia (AKA Ammonium Carbonate) in Columbus, please let me know. It’s available on King Arthur Flour’s website, but I would prefer to purchase it in town.

This week I found myself playing bachelor girl while my husband Rob is a-hootin’ and a-hollerin’ in Austin, Texas for South by Southwest. This also explains why all my photos in this post were taken with my iPhone – Rob has my real camera in the Lone Star State.

I always get lonely when he’s gone and I find that having a project to do helps to alleviate some of the loneliness. So this time around, I decided to bake.

It began last night with Orange Chiffon Cupcakes with Orange Butter Icing. This was the only recipe of the three that I wasn’t thrilled with. The recipe basically consisted of two batters – one with egg yolks and the other with egg whites. The egg yolk batter turned out fine, but the egg white batter was lacking. I think the problem stemmed from using my KitchenAid stand mixer to beat the egg whites, when I should have used my hand held mixer. They didn’t quite get as fluffy as they were supposed to:

The egg white batter was folded into the egg yolk batter and baked for 35 minutes. They seemed to bake up okay:

When they were finished, I rigged up a soup can/wire rack cooling device, onto which the cupcake pan was flipped upside down:

(Yeah, that one cupcake fell out when I flipped the pan upside down.)

The cupcakes hung upside down for 45 minutes to cool, at which point they were frosted. There was no picture of these cupcakes in the cookbook, so I’m not sure exactly what the icing was supposed to look like. It turned out to be more of a glaze than an icing, but it still tasted pretty good:

Aside from not being quite fluffy enough, my problem with this recipe was that the author said it would make 12 big cupcakes. I was supposed to pour the batter into muffin pans to get a big ‘ol cupcake. I thought I was using a muffin pan, but when I compared it with my cupcake pan, they were the same size…and the recipe still only made seven cupcakes. I’m guessing the egg white batter should have been a lot fluffier and that would have increased the volume of batter. Oh well, lessons learned.

This morning I got up early to take our dog Scout in for her vet appointment, so I used the morning to get started on my second recipe – Chocolate Covered Hi Hat cupcakes. This was a fairly ambitious recipe, as the finished product was supposed to look like this:

The recipe started with a fairly simple sour cream chocolate cupcake recipe (and man are these cupcakes good), which was easy enough until I tried to remove the cupcakes from the pans:

(Yup, that’s my thumbprint in the upper right hand cupcake. Whoopsie!)

While the cupcakes cooled (during which time I had to make a grocery store run for more sugar), I started making the topping. The topping consisted of sugar, water, egg whites and cream of tartar. This was combined in a bowl and placed over a pot of simmering water and mixed with a hand held mixer for 12 minutes. Twelve minutes doesn’t sound like such a long time, until you get to about minute six. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome sets in pretty quickly:

After the 12 minutes were up, vanilla and almond extracts were mixed in, the topping was spooned into a pastry bag/freezer bag and piped onto the cupcakes:

I didn’t pipe quite as much topping onto the cupcakes as the author of the cookbook did, just because I was scared that I would mess something up. I went a little more conservative. The topped cupcakes were then refrigerated while I melted the chocolate for the coating:

Then the messy part began. I turned each cupcake upside down and dunked it in the melted chocolate. I then spooned more chocolate over the cupcakes until all the topping was covered with a layer of chocolate:

The coated cupcakes were then tucked back in the fridge for two and a half hours to firm up:

I decided to eat the mutated cupcake (like a good baker does) so I could take the pretty ones to work. I cut it in half too see if the cross section looked anything like the photo in the cookbook. Surprisingly, it did!

The cake part of this concoction is fantastic. I’m not the biggest fan of the topping. The sugar didn’t completely dissolve, so it’s slightly gritty (although not nasty or anything). I’m not sure what else I could have done to dissolve the sugar, because if mixing it for 12 minutes doesn’t do it, I’m not sure what does. Also, I’m apparently not an almond fan. I really could have done with the almond extract.

I finished up with the recipe that I originally thought was going to be the only thing I made today: Orange White Chocolate Chip Cookies. This was a pretty straightforward chocolate chip cookie dough with orange zest and white chocolate chips added:

The dough was dropped by rounded teaspoonful on a baking sheet and baked for 11 minutes. It turned out the cutest little bite-sized cookies!

Whew! This was a marathon baking experience! I just hope my co-workers enjoy all the goodies coming in tomorrow!

Things learned today: I need a wire rack with the wires going in both directions. My current rack has only horizontal wires and they sometimes leave indentations on the undersides of my baked goods. Also, I need a microplane. My box grater is a nightmare to use to zest fruit.

Depending on my mood, I may bake some Alphabet Cookies for an event at work on Friday for the Week Twelve project. But they won’t be cut in alphabet shapes!

This week I planned to bake the Chocolate Marbled Brioche Bread from Nick Malgieri’s “The Modern Baker”. The recipe seemed fairly straightforward, although I was skeptical of Malgieri’s use of a food processor to blend all the ingredients. I love my KitchenAid Mixer and would have preferred to use the dough hook. But I was willing to give Malgieri and his newfangled technology a try.

The first step was mixing milk, yeast and flour and letting it sit in a bowl for twenty minutes. It was supposed to have risen a little and gotten ‘bubbly’, but that didn’t really happen. It did seem a touch bigger, but there were no bubbles that I could see. Next, I started mixing butter and eggs in the food processor:

I added in various other things, including lemon zest and rum (!), and pulsed the mixture until it came together. The yeast mixture and some additional flour was added and pulsed. At this point, the dough seemed okay. It was elastic-y and looked like dough I’ve created in the past. The dough was kneaded a bit and then cut into three equal pieces. Two would stay plain:

And one would be mixed with a chocolate enrichment. This may be where I messed up. I melted the chocolate at the beginning of the recipe and then let it cool. Then I mixed water, baking soda and cinnamon together in a bowl and mixed it in with the cooled chocolate. I did this about ten to fifteen minutes before I needed it. When I went to fetch it, the chocolate had hardened up and looked, well, weird. So I popped in the microwave for fifteen seconds just to loosen it up. When I pulled the bowl out of the microwave, the chocolate was puffy…the baking soda had gone to work. But I mixed it back together and dumped it in the food processor with one of the dough pieces. It came out looking okay:

Next, one of the plain pieces of dough was pressed out into a square on a floured cutting board. The chocolate dough was pressed into a square on top of it, and the final plain piece was pressed on top of the chocolate, forming a sandwich of sorts:

The layered dough was then cut into three long strips, and those strips were cut into smaller pieces:

Those pieces were tossed into a bowl and sprinkled with a bit of water:

Next I was instructed to gently squeeze and press those pieces into a cohesive ball. This is where the real trouble started. Those pieces would not all press together. As soon as I got them to stick, they’d start separating. No amount of coaxing would get them to meld into each other. But I pushed them together the best I could, and then put them into a buttered loaf pan. The pan was left to rest for one to two hours, or until the dough had risen one inch over the top of the pan. Well, that never happened. After one hour, nothing. After two hours, nothing. I even moved the pan closer to a heating vent, hoping that the warmth would encourage the dough to rise. So I just went ahead and preheated the oven and threw the bread in:

The bread baked for 35 minutes. It didn’t rise in the oven either. It did turn a lovely golden brown color:

The pieces were still separated. They never joined each other. I wiggled the end of the loaf and one of the chocolate chunks fell out. It’s like each little cut piece baked separately and were only holding onto each other because of the constriction of the pan. I tried to slice the loaf and ended up with this:

Booooo. I was so upset by this one. The bread tastes pretty good, although it’s really dense and has more of a cake consistency than bread. I mean, I’ll eat some of it, but I don’t think this is one to be proud of. I can’t believe that nuking the baking soda was the linchpin to failure. If that was the case, then the plain dough should have risen and the chocolate dough shouldn’t have, as it was the only part with nuked baking soda. Maybe the yeast was bad? Although it was in a sealed envelope and less than two months old, so I don’t see how that could have been the case. Ah well. I do want to try this again sometime…I just need to wrap my mind around it.

I was feeling so bad about this bread failure that I decided to whip something else up instead. I settled on the Pear Streusel Breakfast Buns in the “More from Magnolia” cookbook by Allysa Torey. I didn’t have any pears on hand, but I did have apples, and she suggests that apples can be substituted. This started with a pretty straightforward mixing of butter and sugar, eggs, flour, salt, baking soda and vanilla. Coarsely chopped apples were folded in and then spooned into muffin cups. The streusel topping that Torey suggested contained walnuts. I didn’t have any on hand, and I don’t care for them anyway, so I found a blueberry muffin crumb topping online (flour, sugar, butter and cinnamon) and used that instead:

These baked for twenty minutes and came out perfect:

These are quite delicious and are definitely good for breakfast, as they are not terribly sweet. The apples and crumb topping provide most of the sweetness, and there is a very slight eggy taste to the buns (one whole egg and two yolks were included). Good to know that I’m not a complete failure. I just think that Brioche was out to get me.

I’ve decided that I want to buy the “Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook”, but as it is $40, I’ve decided that I must make at least one thing from every baking book I already own before I purchase any new books. So next week I’ll be turning to “The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook” and making Orange Vanilla Chip Cookies.

This week’s project had a ‘meh’ turnout. The cupcakes weren’t terrible (or inedible like the cupcakes from a few weeks ago), but they weren’t spectacular or even exactly what I was expecting.

I decided a few weeks ago that I should try to make a cupcake that imitated the taste of a Hostess Twinkie. I knew I’d need yellow sponge cake and cream filling. I went online, thinking that surely someone had posted a recipe for this, but the closest thing I could find incorporated squash into the recipe. That’s right – squash. As in the vegetable. Now, I like vegetables as much as the next person, and I won’t turn down a good carrot cake, but squash in a cupcake?! That’s crazy talk.

So I figured I’d just create my own recipe. Find a yellow sponge cake recipe, find a cream filling recipe, put b. into a. and voila – Twinkie-style cupcake.

Alas, like many dreams, this one did not pan out.

For starters, the recipe called for twelve egg yolks. Yup, just the yolks. I have since learned that most sponge cake recipes incorporate the whites into the yolks. The whites from my eggs just went into the trash.

Into this egg yolk mess was added some water and that was beaten together for a few minutes. Sugar was then added and beaten, and the rest of the dry ingredients and vanilla were folded in. I ended up with a pretty thick batter, but I was still optimistic:

I filled up the cupcake tins and popped them in the oven. The baking time was a bit of a mystery. The original recipe called for pouring the batter into a Bundt pan and baking it for 30 minutes, so I started checking it at 10 minutes. I inserted a knife into a cupcake and it came out smothered in batter. I checked again at 15 minutes. Same thing. I checked again at 20, and at that point I had to take them out. The knife was still a little dirty, but I could tell the outsides of the cupcakes were dangerously close to burning.

The cupcakes were definitely in the oven too long, but I don’t know what I could have done about it. The outsides were baking a lot faster than the insides. They ended up waaaay too dry, although not inedible. It just takes a good amount of bite pressure to get through the crunchy outside. The cupcakes tasted fine, they just were too dry and heavy.

Next came the cream filling. Mixing it up was no problem, and it tasted fine. I put it into a piping bag fitted with a larger tip and tried to push it through the tops of the cupcakes. That wasn’t happening. The pastry bag tip would not penetrate the cupcakes. So I cut a little hole in the tops of the cupcakes and tried that. I thought I was filling the cupcakes, but I was not. There was barely any cream filling inside. So I ended up just frosting the cupcakes with the filling.

In the end, my tasters said the cupcakes tasted fine. They definitely did not imitated Twinkies, and I don’t think I’ll be taking the extras into work (the recipe made only 13 cupcakes to begin with) for my co-workers. I’m not that proud of this particular project.

Stay tuned next week when I’ll be turning back to bread and attempting to make a Chocolate Marbled Brioche Loaf.