Baking by the Lake

I went home last weekend, and so spent at least half of my Fourth of July weekend on Lake Huron.  That meant swimming and sailing and trying very hard not to get a sunburn (I succeeded! But I got a dozen mosquito bites instead).

Since Phil is allergic to cats, and my dad's house is full of cats, we stayed at my grandparents' house.  I love their house, it's beautiful, and my Grandma Carol is probably the best cook I know.  She's very good about feeding many people for every meal, and now that my grandfather has to avoid gluten she has expanded her repertoire to include more interesting foods (which tend to be the same kinds of foods I eat but no one else in my family has ever heard of).  I would be willing to blame my propensity for kitchen adventures almost entirely on her influence.  She was very happy to facilitate my out-of-town baking, and thus the following blondies were made (in her convection oven.  I am so jealous).

104. Raspberry Almond Blondies
I have been looking forward to these for a long time.  Raspberries are, by far, my favorite fruit, and they've finally become a little bit less expensive.  This recipe was particularly ideal for this past weekend as the only extra ingredients (i.e. things you wouldn't find in most pantries) were the berries, which were strewn on top of the batter, and the sliced almonds, which were both mixed into and scattered on top of the batter.
Although the raspberries made me very happy, I'm not sure that I was entirely impressed with this recipe.  It seemed like the almonds weren't a very good fit with the raspberries, and there wasn't significant flavor aside from those same berries.  I think I probably would have liked these with a little bit of white chocolate mixed in to make the blondie batter a little more rich.  I suspect that might give a nicer contrast, rather than just an excuse to eat raspberries (which I will do with no excuse at all).

traveling made these cookies possible!

Last weekend I took a very quick trip home to buy a car and see my best friend graduate from the University of Michigan.  While in Ann Arbor, I stopped by Trader Joe's, and saw that they sell dried pears, an ingredient required for one of my cookie recipes that I have been unable to find locally.  Needless to say, I purchased some and proceeded to make the following blondies.

95. Pear, Pistachio, and Ginger Blondies
Here is an example of a baked good that improves with (some) age, as well as a flavor pairing that is old news on internet recipes (I'd like to try this one), but is brand new to me.

These start with a usual dough base - butter, brown sugar, flour, eggs, baking powder, and so on - which is given flavor by the addition of dried pears, candied ginger, and chopped pistachios.  The result immediately after baking was a little dry, but the next day the pear and ginger flavors mingled, and the pistachio taste mellowed out a little to create something delicious, and probably a little less guilt-inducing than some other blondies (full of butter, toffee, chocolate, and so on) I've baked.

I wish I had the appropriate vocabulary to describe the taste of the ginger-pear pairing, but despite my deficiency, I'll try: on their own, pear has a very light taste, and ginger tends to be overwhelming.  Somehow, when both are put together, they enhance the other's taste, so that the sweet pears get a kind of spicy taste, but the ginger is also calmed down a bit.  I think perhaps the best adjective I've got for this is 'crisp.'  Yes, I'll go with calling it a crisp flavor.  The pistachios in the blondies add some salt... and pistachio taste, of which I've never been particularly fond.

Overall, these don't taste as heavy or rich as many other things I've baked, and so they make a good standalone snack.  If I get another chance to grab dried pears (or if I take a friend up on his offer to dry some for me), these may show up again soon.

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In other news, as of yesterday I am finished with required classes forever.  Now I just need to buckle down and do some good research, so that in 4 ± ?? years I can get my PhD.

epic backlog - recovery!

After I finished with my Qual, it was time for work. And homework. And catching up with all the people I'd been neglecting. I took the next several weeks to make tasty cookies, but I didn't really get around to posting. Nothing was too exciting about life, so I'll just talk briefly about the cookies.

(Marked as a best cookie) (63) To be brief about these first cookies will be difficult, because they were very delicious! I had carrots left over from making a carrot cake, so I used them to make carrot cake cookies. The cookies are a basic recipe, with carrot, raisins, and oats, as well as cinnamon and nutmeg. The filling is a standard cream cheese frosting. The cookies turned out nice and soft, and paired with the frosting kind of tasted like the Little Debbie oatmeal pies that I used to eat as a kid... except that these are a lot healthier, and the filling has no weird unidentified hydrogenated death oils. Honestly, I think this is the tastiest recipe yet. Hooray!


These next cookies were chosen so that I wouldn't get totally stuck in a pattern of cookies with filling, and so that I could get them done a bit quickly - I spent all day Saturday being involved in a wedding (congratulations Josh and Janine!!). Although, actually, these are blondies. Here, a basic blondie batter (you know, brown sugar, flour, eggs, butter) is mixed with (and covered with) chocolate chips, coconut, walnuts, and dried cranberries, then put in cupcake tins. Unfortunately, some of the stuff on top was a little loose, and fell off when people were eating them. The blondies were pretty good, but if I make them again I'll definitely be putting more cranberries in them. (64)

The week after I went on a baking spree (this is the same week I made those cake balls) and made what my cookbook calls Sarah Bernhardt cookies (65). According to Wikipedia, which is the source of all credible knowledge, Sarah Bernhardt was an exceptionally famous French stage actress in the late 19th century. My cookbook claims that this name is due to the many layers of these cookies resembling the layers of characters Bernhardt played. Or something like that. I don't know about these things, but I do know that I really like these cookies: these are almond macaroons (which kind of taste like marzipan) with a dollop of chocolate mousse on top of them. The whole ensemble is coated in semi-sweet chocolate mixed with just a little bit of vegetable shortening. Since they were covered in chocolate, I had to work hard to get people to eat them, but once they tried them, they were impressed. I like to describe their taste as very high class, and considering the cost of the almond paste in the macaroons and the amount of time taken in preparation, I think the description is fairly accurate. Maybe I'll make these again sometime for something fancy.

Distractions

Well, the semester ended, I passed all my classes, and ran home for a week. After that I crashed in Ann Arbor for a couple days, during which I spent fun times with several of my close friends from undergraduate times, and wowed them with my cooking and baking skills. It helped that I made Truffle Brownies (47), which are now my favorite kind of brownies ever. Yes, these even top Grandma Carol's buttermilk brownies (although I may have to make those sometime again just to check).

These brownies have a lot involved: the base starts with sugar and eggs whipped together for several minutes, with melted unsweetened chocolate and butter added in, followed by the usual blend of flour, baking powder, and salt. Whipping stuff at the beginning makes the brownies pretty light, and the chocolate is nice and dark, which is how it ought to be. After the brownie part is baked and cooled, it is topped with a ganache made from heavy whipping cream and semisweet chocolate. All in all, the experience is one of chocolate decadence, which means tasty tasty bliss. And how is it that I can talk about something I made 3 recipes ago with such detail? It might have something to do with me making it again more recently for a friend's party.

Soon after that baking endeavor, I returned to my own home and started work in the new lab (well, it's new for me). That week basically consisted of me working on a simple optics problem, which actually meant learning how to use Matlab... until I realized that I needed to be using Mathematica. Basically, these are both computational programs, but the first is for numerical stuff (i.e. processing data) and the second is for symbolic stuff (that is, solving equations with variables). I'm actually still not done with that I need to do, but it's a lot of work to learn how to make Mathematica do what I want it to do. I'll get it eventually, though, and then I'm sure I'll be glad to have worked on it.

After concluding a week spent almost exclusively working on the computer, I decided it was time to make cookies that were a little more involved than usual. And so I made what my cookbook calls Alfajores de Dulce de Leche (48). Essentially, these are shortbread cookies (well, less sugar and more flour) sandwiching a layer of dulce de leche. If I had really wanted to work hard, I would have made my own dulce de leche by boiling sweetened condensed milk forever (that is, like 5 hours), but it's summer and I don't like to add more heat to my apartment than is necessary. These were tasty cookies, although a bit rich, and the center layer had to be put on just before eating them, so I kind of didn't like that I couldn't present them already prepared.

Another week passed, with more work (finally some lab work too, hooray) and an audition snuck in on Friday night. As if I don't have enough to do what with preparing for the Qual, learning what I need to do in the lab, and trying to maintain some semblance of a social life, I am now singing in the ensemble for CUTC's Annie Get Your Gun. If you're not familiar with the show, here's my synopsis: this is a musical about a woman who's a champion sharpshooter, and she's in love with a guy who can't handle the idea of a woman being better than him. Throw in some other standard Musical Theater types - a young couple's forbidden love and a bunch of chorus numbers - and you've got this show. Although I'm sure I make it sound bad, I actually think it's pretty cute and I'm really excited to be involved ^.^

That weekend I got some of my favorite ingredients (toffee and butterscotch, mostly) to make butterscotch cashew blondies (49), which turned out to be exceptional. I ended up bringing these to a potluck lunch party for a friend, and everyone enjoyed them. Since these are blondies, they're pretty dense, and the three flavors mentioned above blend fantastically.


Okay, I'm off to lunch with friends, I didn't skip last Saturday's cookies, I just don't have them ready to post yet. Expect another rambling entry soon.

..that's where we wanna go, to get away from it all

Greetings from South Florida! It's finally Spring Break, and I have left the cold and blustery Midwest weather for a more comfortable climate this week.

Traveling to get here was fun, but the kind of fun that is like going to the dentist: I flew out of Bloomington, IL, which has a very tiny airport with free (!) parking, but I got there way too early, and I had to change flights in Dallas, which was rather out of the way, and eventually I made it to the MIA.

While in Dallas, I saw a few iPod vending machines. These didn't just have headphones or Shuffles, but there were iPod Touches in there (so, like, items costing $300+). Who drops that much money on an impulse like that? I spent less money to fly than it is to casually purchase such an item. Here, I'll show you:

It's nice to be able to come back and visit here: Miami is sort of like a home to me, but sort of not (although I did live here for some 8 years). I like seeing familiar things, and I'm glad to have been able to visit with a couple friends. Unfortunately, most of my good friends from high school have gone elsewhere, for undergrad or graduate studies, or just for not living here anymore. As for the question of where I'm from, I'm still not sure. I'll work on that one later.

Another funny thing that reminds me of old times is that I went shopping with my grandma, and the sales lady who helped us couldn't believe 1)that I'm as old as 23 and 2)that Grandma is actually my grandma and not my mother. Of course, when I was younger, my height made people think I was older, but the grandma thing has been recurring for a while now.

I think that is all I have to say about Miami for now, maybe I'll post more later (but most probably not)

The real purpose of this post is to give two cookie updates. I got so caught up in teaching and finishing homework last week that I didn't find the time to post after baking.

The peanut butter and chocolate things I had made were so disappointing that two Saturdays ago I decided to go with something safe, and made pecan biscotti (37). These were incredibly easy to mix, especially since they called for vegetable oil instead of butter. However, as with all biscotti, they took a while to bake: I think I mentioned this before, but I had to shape the dough into a flat log, bake for about half an hour, cut the cookies into their appropriate shape, and then bake them for another fifteen minutes.

These cookies were much more popular with my friends - in fact, the three dozen or so I made were gone by the end of Monday (i.e. the day I brought them in).


(marked as a best cookie) This previous weekend the break forced me to choose a recipe with a smaller yield: most of my friends left town very early Saturday morning, so I did my baking Friday night, dropped about half of the batch off with people who were going to go camping in Tennessee, and ended up bringing the rest with me to Miami to share. Perhaps I should mention that I made brown butter toffee blondies (38). Brown butter is made simply by cooking butter over medium heat until it turns brown. This changes the flavor and texture a bit, and the slightly nutty taste goes fantastically with the toffee and walnuts. Honestly, I thought these were really delicious, and I think I'll have to make them again to share, perhaps this summer (I'm also happy to share the recipe). The picture doesn't do them justice - I think I undercooked the blondies a little, which left them nice and a little bit squishy on the inside, meaning they stayed moist and were just how they should be.

Yes, I'll definitely be making these again.

A late 'Merry Christmas', and then I'm off to Chicago

Well, this is yet another week away from the cornfield. I worry a little about the plants I've left behind, but two of the three are cacti, and the third is ivy, so hopefully they'll all be alive when I return.

Although I've been unable to water my plants on a weekly basis, I have been able to do plenty of baking and cooking, repeating the potato cheese bread I made over Thanksgiving and whipping up plenty of cookies for my family. After all, this week the calories don't count. Or, at least, that's what I tell myself as I promise to start swimming laps with my friends in January.

And, in keeping with tradition, I made my own project cookies, or, at least, something from the book. So in addition to all the other junk food we already had, we now have gingerbread white chocolate blondies (26). These are basically like chocolate chip cookie bars, but with all the gingerbread spices: ground ginger, cloves, cinnamon... and, of course, lots of molasses. Oh, right, and white chocolate instead of semi-sweet. Tasty.

I shared a bunch of these with my family, and I'll be taking the rest with me to Chicago tomorrow to share with my friends.

So why am I going to Chicago tomorrow? The reason is simple: I'm going to attend this conference. It's a conference for Christian Graduate students, which is very exciting to me because when I went to Urbana (a conference in St. Louis) as an undergrad, I felt left out from the focus because of my academic aspirations. After all, working in a lab or teaching Physics isn't an obvious way to do God's work. But it still is what I'm called to do right now.

I am excited, but I'm also a little concerned. Graduate students tend to be too smart for their own good, and so I worry that people will be too concerned with facts and searching out knowledge instead of wisdom. We'll have to see, though. I think that I should definitely pray instead of wasting my energy worrying.


We'll have cookies again next week, on or slightly before schedule, depending on when I decide to do my next leg of travel.

In the meanwhile, safe travels to all and I hope you're having great vacations!

I want data, not drama!

I am now two days behind on my normal posting schedule... oops? Although this is no excuse, it's been a busy time now that I actually am in the middle of the cornfield which led to this blog's name.

Moving last Monday was a real adventure: we had a late start getting out of my house, and so by the time we got down here the landlord's office was past its closing time! Fortunately I called ahead and someone stayed so I could get my keys (apparently this is something they usually won't do, so I am extra thankful that it worked out). My dad and brother helped me move my things into my new apartment Monday night, and Tuesday morning we went to complete my furniture collection. Between Craigslist and the Habitat for Humanity Restore, my loft is fully furnished.

After a little shopping for bakeware (because some person ruined my cookie sheets last summer), I was ready for my Saturday baking, as usual. This week I made Cream Cheese Blondies (6). My choice of recipe was dictated, like last week's, by necessity: the recipe calls for the usual flour, sugar, eggs, etc., plus a brick of cream cheese. This batch turned out a little tall, but pretty good. I really enjoy the cream cheese taste, although I think that I prefer the taste and texture of some of my earlier cookies.

This week finds me in the midst of TA training, making new Physics friends (they're really cool people, I swear), and watching more Olympics. That means that for now, all is well.

We'll have to see how things go come next Monday, when classes start.