This past weekend was the Community Festival, otherwise known as Comfest. It’s an annual music/art/food event that takes place on the last weekend of June in Goodale Park. Every year, my husband, Rob, and Joel Treadway of Cringe.com team up to run the Comfest Band Merch Booth, a centralized location where bands who are playing the festival can drop off their merchandise and have it be sold. All proceeds go directly back to the band.

It takes more than a few volunteers to keep the booth running smoothly (and to give Rob, Joel and I a break to catch bands or get food). So this year I decided I would bake goodies for the openers, who get the nasty task of hauling everything from the shelter house where it is stored and making it look presentable in the tent.

Sadly, I did not take any photos of my food preparation, as it was happening at roughly 8 a.m. and I am not fully awake at that time of day. But here are the photos of the finished products:

Friday – Blueberry muffins

Made with fresh blueberries.

Saturday – Pear Coffee Cake muffins.

The original recipe in Martha’s book for these was Plum Coffee Cake muffins. She mentions that you can substitue any fresh berry for the plum, so I thought I’d make cranberry muffins. But when I got to the grocery store, I couldn’t find a fresh cranberry to save my life. I did see some nice looking pears though. So I got those. These seemed to be the favorite of everyone the whole weekend (a select few people got to sample all three baked goods over the weekend).

Sunday – Lemon Ginger Scones


I started this one Sunday morning and then got to the part of the recipe where it mentions you should freeze the scones once they’re formed for ‘at least two hours or overnight’. Seeing as how it was 9 a.m. and we needed to be out the door at 10:15 a.m., that wasn’t going to happen. I froze them for thirty minutes instead and it seemed to work out just fine. These were really good, although I would recommend a tall glass of milk or a hot coffee to go with them.

This weekend I’m doing another cupcake decorating event for kids at my work, so I’ll be baking Red Velvet Cupcakes and Vanilla Cupcakes. It’s a Fourth of July theme, so I thought the Red Velvet would be a nice touch. I may end up baking something else as well, if we get invited to any BBQs or parties.

You know how sometimes you start a project, and a fourth of the way through it, you find yourself thinking, “There’s no way this is going to work?”

That’s how these scones started out.

When I mixed the dry and wet ingredients, the dough was super sticky. The recipe instructed me to turn the dough out onto a ‘lightly floured’ counter and ‘lightly flour’ the dough enough that it wouldn’t stick.

I apparently have no concept of what ‘lightly flour’ looks like, because when I used a ‘light’ amount of flour, the dough stuck like crazy. So I floured it more. And more. And more. By the time I got these things in the oven, I discovered that ‘lightly flour’ actually means ‘use more flour to dust the counter than you actually put in the recipe’.

I finally got a ball of dough together that looked like this:

From there, I had to roll the dough out into a sqaure, then fold the square on itself, and then put it in the freezer for five minutes. This was the point where I thought it wasn’t going to happen. I couldn’t unstick the flour from the counter without tearing it apart. So I did the best I could and stuck the blob in the freezer.

After five minutes, I took it out and rolled it into another square, at which point I studded it with the blueberries:

(Side note: I’m not the biggest fan of raw blueberries. I tend to only eat them in muffins and pancakes. I didn’t realize they’re not blue on the inside! I was so disappointed.)

Once the blueberries were down, I rolled it up jelly-roll style (with some more sticking and more flouring). Once it got rolled up, I smooshed it down and started cutting:

Once they were cut into scone-like triangles, I put them on the baking sheet with My Precious, the Silpat:

A little baking and voila!:

Close up:

So I guess the lesson is to have faith in your abilities. If you’ve proven yourself good at something, take a chance and try something a little different in that field. It might start out a little rough, but if you rely on your past knowledge, it’ll usually turn out all right.

The only problem I had with these scones is that they created a TON of dishes:

Next week is the season premiere of “Lost” and Rob and I are having some friends over. I plan to bake some Cinnamon Swirl Bread that will be easy to grab blindly off a plate while our eyes are glued to the television screen.