Daring Baker's Challenge: Lemon Cream Cheese Quick Bread

Oh hey, how are you blog?

This semester has been crazy - I'm working tons of hours and I still have class and Journal to attend to, so it's been wild! But, it's starting to relax a little, so that's good! I decided to do this month's Daring Bakers' Challenge, because I've embarrassingly missed the last two. Last month, in all fairness, was biscuits - I have baked way more than my fair share of those!

The Daring Bakers’ February 2012 host was – Lis! Lisa stepped in last minute and challenged us to create a quick bread we could call our own. She supplied us with a base recipe and shared some recipes she loves from various websites and encouraged us to build upon them and create new flavor profiles.

I decided to make a lemon bread that is reminiscent of a bread we used to get at my job in Ann Arbor. Everyday that we had interviews, we would get breakfast pastries catered in for the corporate recruiters. There were always croissants, which had been baked the day before and consequently tasted pretty sad - we used to joke that they must be fat free! My favorite thing was a lemon poppy seed bread with a strip of cream cheese filling through the middle. This bread is like that, though I must admit, the bread at work was better!

Lemon Cream Cheese Bread (Adapted from Land O Lakes) - Makes 2 Loaves

• 2 c sugar 
• 1 c unsalted butter (softened)
• 4 eggs
• 1c milk
• 6 TBSP lemon juice
• 3 1/2 C flour
• 2 tsp baking powder 
• 1/2 tsp salt 
• 8 oz cream cheese (softened)
• 6 TBSP powdered sugar
• 1 egg 

1. Preheat oven to 350. 
2. Cream together butter and sugar. Add eggs, one at a time, and beat until smooth. 
3.  Add in the milk and lemon juice and mix until combined.
4. Mix in flour, salt, and baking powder. Mix together until well-combined. 
5. For the filling, cream together the cream cheese, powdered sugar, and egg until smooth.
6. Pour one quarter of the batter into the bottom of two greased loaf pans. Pour half or the filling into each loaf pan. Pour the rest of the batter over the tops of each loaf.
7. Bake for 50 minutes to an hour. Let rest for at least then minutes, and then turn out of the pan to cool. 

Thanksgiving Deliciousness

I had a lovely Thanksgiving at home with my family and Matt. Lots of shopping, not nearly enough studying, and way too much dessert. I brought four desserts to the event, including the Sans Rival cake I posted below. My favorite was the cheesecake. My mom was a big fan of the cranberry pie and her boyfriend kept getting up in the middle of the night to eat the pear pie. Here's the photos I snapped, while everyone was still full of breakfast.

Our Best Bites' Pumpkin Gingersnap Cheesecake 

 

 Pioneer Woman's Nantucket Cranberry Pie

 

Our Best Bites' Creamy Pear Pie

Daring Baker's Challenge: Sans Rival Cake

I made this delicious cake for Thanksgiving. I wasn't planning to bake it, but then my step-mom asked me to bring something chocolate to Thanksgiving, so that was that.

Catherine of Munchie Musings was our November Daring Bakers’ host and she challenged us to make a traditional Filipino dessert – the delicious Sans Rival cake! And for those of us who wanted to try an additional Filipino dessert, Catherine also gave us a bonus recipe for Bibingka which comes from her friend Jun of Jun-blog. The Bibingka cake was a little to crazy for my family, so the sans rival cake was a much better match.

This cake takes 10 eggs! The cake layers are meringue with ground cashews and cocoa folded in. The frosting is made from half of the left-over egg yolks and is an extremely rich French buttercream. It was my first time making butter cream in this way and it was difficult but ultimately worth the effort.

I don't know if I'll make this again, just because it was so labor intensive. But, it was a fun thing to bring for the holidays and everyone enjoyed it.

Red Velvet White Chocolate Chip Cake Mix Cookies

 I promised to bring treats to my Tax Procedure course this week during our pre-Thanksgiving movie week. I made cupcakes, but they aren't very cute, so I felt the need to make something else. I was watching my friend's son, so I decided to make something easy that he would be able to participate in. He's only two, so he wasn't much help, but he did really like the color. He was also totally entranced with the oven window and watching them bake. So cute!

 Red Velvet White Chocolate Chip Cake Mix Cookies

Ingredients

• Red Velvet Cake Mix
• 2 Eggs
• 1/3 C Oil
• 1 C White Chocolate Chips 

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350. 
2. Beat eggs and oil together in a mixing bowl.
3. Add cake mix and stir with a wooden spoon until fully combined and uniform. 
4. Stir in the white chocolate chips. 
5. Measure out tablespoons of dough. Bake cookies for 9-11 minutes. Allow to rest 2-3 minutes before removing to a cooling rack.

Craft Divergence: Easy DIY Necktie Obi Belt

I saw a belt like this on Pinterest ages ago and kept intending to make it. I love neckties and I love wide belts, so this was a must! This belt is so stupidly easy to make, I'm kind of embarrassed to even give the instructions.

You start with two neckties that are as close as possible to the same width and their widest. It would be best to test this out before buying them to make sure they line up. I prefer silk ties for all of my necktie crafting - if all ties cost the same amount at the thrift store, why not go for the nicer fabric?! Anyway, I glued the large ends together using fabric glue. To tie the belt, put it on front to back, wrap the ends around your front, and then tie in a knot.

Grandma Betz’s Sugar Twist Christmas Cookies

When I was a little girl, my grandmother used to send all of the adults in the family a tin of cookies for Christmas. The ones I remember most were the ones she sent to my dad, these sugar twists. My grandma died back in 2002 after a long fight with emphysema. In 2007, I asked my grandfather to send me a couple of my grandma's cookie recipes. He sent me this one, but at that point, I wasn't a good enough baker to execute these cookies. I remember sitting in M's kitchen in Grinnell and rolling out the dough, but in the end, they ended up being too dense and they didn't have any layers.

 This is in black and white because...uh, it's like a memory.

In the intervening years, I lost the recipe he sent me - I'm guessing it has to do with the approximately eight times I've had to move since then. I was scouring the internet trying to find the recipe, and I thought this looked close. I decided to make them, but I also added my own touches. I've also written instructions that are a little more clear than the original.

 Sugar Twists

Ingredients

• 2 1/4 tsp Yeast
• 1/4 C Water (between 105 and 115 degrees Farenheit)
• 1 C Unsalted Butter (cold)
• 3 3/4 C Flour
• 1 1/2 tsp Salt
• 2 Eggs
• 1/2 C Sour Cream
• 1 tsp Vanilla Extract
• 1 1/2 C Granulated Sugar
• 2 tsp Vanilla Extract
• 1 1/2 tsp Lemon Bakery Emulsion

Instructions

1. Stir yeast into warm water and allow to sit while you mix up the rest of the ingredients.
2. Combine flour and salt. Dice butter and work into the flour mixture. 
3. Add in the eggs, sour cream, 1 tsp of vanilla, and yeast mixture. Mix until well combined and dough forms. 
4.  Mix the granulated sugar, 2 tsp of vanilla, and lemon emulsion together until the sugar appears uniform.
5. Refrigerate the dough for at least two hours.
6. Preheat oven to 375. 
7. After refrigeration, spread 1/2 C of vanilla on a cutting board and roll out 1/2 of the dough. Place the remaining dough back in the refrigerator until you are ready to roll it out. 
8. After the dough is rolled out into a large rectangle approximately 1/2" thick, place 1 TBSP of the vanilla sugar along the middle third of the dough. Fold the left and right thirds over one another. Then fold the dough into thirds again so that it is square. Roll out the dough back into the large rectangle. Spread another 1 TBSP of sugar down the middle section and refold back into a square. Roll back out. Add more sugar as needed throughout the rolling out process.
9. Cut the dough into strips and twirl them into desired shape. The middle cookie in the picture above was folded in half and then twisted. The other cookies were just twisted. 
10. Repeat with remaining dough.
11. Baked on a lined baking sheet for 15-10 minutes until golden brown.

 

My grandma really loved coffee, but it's Coke Zero in this cup! 

Craft Divergence: DIY Ruffle Wreath

I've been in a really crafty mood lately, which is good, because Christmas is coming! I have yet to sort through my all of my craft supplies since my move back in August, so it's been kind of an adventure. I can't find a lot of things, but I'm rediscovering materials I forgot about! The fabric I used for this is from back when I lived in Ann Arbor, and I'm pretty sure it's from the Scrap Box.

This wreath probably cost me under $5. This is in part because the wreath is made from a pipe insulator. I picked up this idea off of Pinterest which linked to The Penny Parlor. THIS IDEA CHANGED MY LIFE. Lots of wreaths are in my future, I think. All you do is tape the ends together - I used packing tape, because I forgot to buy duct tape.

 

The wreath was made using this tutorial at Kelly Hicks Design, though I packed my ruffles more tightly together for a more robust look. Love it! This is probably going to be a Christmas present, but I do rather like it, so who know?!

Coming Out Day Rainbow Mini Bundt Cakes

October 12th was National Coming Out Day. The Journal was having a bake sale and I wanted to have an item that acknowledged the day. I baked these mini rainbow Bundt cakes, which aren't anything special in terms of taste (they're just made from white cake mix), but they're adorable!

Daring Baker's Challenge: Povitica

The Daring Baker’s October 2011 challenge was Povitica, hosted by Jenni of The Gingered Whisk. Povitica is a traditional Eastern European Dessert Bread that is as lovely to look at as it is to eat!

The Daring Baker's Challenge will be a new monthly feature on my blog! This is my first month participating, and every month there will be a new challenge that I will post on the 27th of the month.

This bread is insanely complicated and I now understand why the Croatian grandma I saw in a YouTube video said she made them loaves in batches of twelve. I only made one loaf, which had a traditional walnut filling, and it was quite labor intensive. It is a yeast dough, which I tend to struggle with, but it actually came together quite easily. I had a harder time rolling the dough out thinly enough to get enough beautiful layers inside. The recipe suggested you roll the dough out on a bed sheet, which I did. Felt kind of weird, but it was quite effective.

This bread was really addictive and delicious. I thought, oh, this bead is just okay, but then I couldn't leave it alone. I am now trying to come up with some filling variations. I'd like to incorporate apple butter into my next one, as I have a fresh batch a friend made for me!

Actual Cupcake Battery

Earlier today, my friend Nate shared this story with me on Facebook: Cupcake Batterer Charged with Domestic Violence.
I assure you, there is no actual assault or battery in my life and I have never assaulted anyone with a baked good, despite the name of my blog. 

Journal of Gender, Race & Justice Fall Bake Sale

My Journal is having a bake sale this week. Here are the items I've completed for the sale:

 Cheddar Apple Muffins

 Triple Peanut Butter Cereal Bars (Made with Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch, Peanut Butter, and Reese's Pieces)

 Seasonal Chocolate Covered Pretzels

Apple Toffee Blondies with Brown Sugar Frosting

Recipes forthcoming! Could take me a bit though, as life is really crazy right now! Mostly good crazy, but crazy nonetheless!

Mint Chocolate Macarons

I made some more macarons. In my defense, Matt is visiting and he didn't get to try any of the other batches I made. The macarons themselves are mint and they have a chocolate ganache filling. 

French Crullers with Orange Blossom Honey Glaze

So...these happened today.

They're from that Doughnuts book I showed you on Friday. They're really good.

French crullers are made from pate a choux, which is the cooked French dough that is the basis of creme puffs as well as many other pastries. I've never made it before, so that was it's own party. Then you pipe the dough onto parchment paper and fry the donuts one-by-one.

The glaze is really what made this. I have some orange blossom honey, and Alton Brown taught me that the type of flower gives the honey a subtle flavor of that flower, so the orange blossom honey tastes a little bit orange-y.

I am in a sugar coma right now. And I have to go to two meetings and finish my homework.

I'll add the recipe later...

Lavender Orange Macarons with Lemon Curd Filling

So, I might be addicted to making macarons. I also might have a problem with doing nothing but stare at them while they're baking and pray that they come out. When the first cookie sheet of these gave the slightest indication that they were getting feet, I felt like dancing. My macarons are working, my macarons are working!

Anyway.

These macarons have ground culinary lavender in them as well as some orange extract. Matt showed up with both of these items from an awesome market he went to in Atlanta while he was helping his brother move back in August. I have a pint of lavender and it cost just over two dollars. Now I just need to think of more lavender things to bake.

Lavender Macarons
If you can actually pipe uniformly, this should make about 15 total macarons (30 shells)

• 3/4 C Almond Flour
• 1 C Powdered Sugar
• 2 Large Egg Whites
• 1/8 tsp Cream of Tartar
• 1/4 C Granulated Sugar 
• 1 TBSP Culinary Lavender
• 1/2 tsp Orange Extract
• 1/2 tsp Almond Extract

I'm still not going to include the directions for making the macarons because I'm so not confident in my strategy yet. But, for this recipe, I pureed the lavender in my food processor along with the almonds and powdered sugar. 

Lemon/Citrus Curd

•  3 TBSP Lemon Juice
• 3 TBSP Granulated Sugar
• 2 TBSP Butter
• 1 Large Egg
• 1/2 tsp Orange Extract 

1. Put all the ingredients into a saucepan and cook over medium. Stir consistently with a whisk. Try to encourage the butter to melt - you can expedite this by cutting up the butter before putting it in the saucepan. 
2. Cook until it the mixture starts to thicken and as you bring your whisk across the bottom of the saucepan lines in the curd remain visible. 
3. Place in a container in the refrigerator and cover the surface with plastic wrap.

New Stuff at My House!

The yellow metal container is a vintage West End cake carrier. I thought maybe it was a reproduction because of the modern-looking "cake" decal, but it's not! Now I need to think of some more excuses to bake cakes.

The books is a book I had to have about doughnuts. I've made two kinds in the last two weeks - the pumpkin ones I shared with you and some chocolate ones that didn't really float my boat. I can't wait to try out some of these recipes!

My First Macarons

Today I feel like a real baker. While I've definitely grown in my baking ability over the last three years, I still consider myself mostly a person who just follows the recipes and achieves results. These macarons are the first thing I've ever baked that required technique - lots of technique - and that actually came out.

Back in 2007, the Christmas before I graduated from high school, I asked my grandfather to send me a couple of my grandmother's recipes. I had this grand idea that I was going to make everyone's favorite cookies of hers and send them out. When she was alive, everyone always got a tin of their favorite cookies at Christmas. I did manage to bake a few of them, but in the wake of finals I didn't manage to send them. my mom discovered two or three tins of cookies somewhere during winter break and we all devoured them without ever putting them in the mail.

Anyway, one of my grandmother's cookies was a vanilla creation that required making a dough that I now know to be very similar to croissant dough. My cookies ended up being more like shortbread, with none of the wonderful flakiness I remembered. Technique fail.

Since then, I have baked a great amount more and definitely have a better grasp on how ingredients work together and such. I still haven't reattempted those particular cookies (have you seen the price of butter these days?!), but maybe it will happen this year.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I have never actually had a macaron before. I've only seen them in real life one time in Des Moines. I had wanted to bake french macarons for a couple of years, but knew they were out of my league from all the blog posts I've seen on them.  I didn't have a food processor and didn't know where to find almond flour near me. Since I snatched up the food processor late this past summer, I've had macarons on the brain.

Today seemed like a good day because it's finally cooled off here and I had nothing else I wanted to be doing - plenty to procrastinate on though, that's for sure. I've read a number of tutorials online about how to make macarons, but I couldn't find most of them today. I ended up trying to remember as much as I could from the past and following this tutorial. Yes, I microwaved my egg whites (in fact, I went a little long and a little bit cooked - eep!). No, I didn't use any food coloring. Yes, my powdered sugar had cornstarch in it. Yes, I used slivered almonds.


Basic Macarons

• 3/4 C Almond Flour
• 1 C Powdered Sugar
• 2 Large Egg Whites
• 1/8 tsp Cream of Tartar
• 1/4 C Granulated Sugar
• 1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract

In terms of technique, I'm really not good enough yet to give it, so check one of the awesome tutorial's that's out there. I will say that I found the hardest part to be piping the macarons out and only a handful of mine were appropriately sized and matchable to another half.

I filled these babies with some South Carolina peach jam that Matt brought me back from his vacation. Yum!

Welcome Fall: Orange Pumpkin Donuts, Oktoberfest, and Football

Today was the first University of Iowa football game of the season. I live very close to the stadium (though less close than I did for the past two years) so of course the tailgaters woke me up.

For me, football season means fall. It's fall now, damn it. I don't care that Iowa City felt like a tropical rainforest as recently as Thursday. It is fall and I am going to make pumpkin things.

Matt and I went to the store once the game had gotten going and Iowa was basically assured a win and I got what I was missing in order to make my very favorite pumpkin donuts. This recipe is one of the most popular on my blog and they are absolutely delicious. Important tip: get a candy thermometer that goes up to 400 degrees so you can make sure your oil stays at the correct temperature of 375.

I coated half of these donuts in cinnamon sugar and half of them in orange glaze. I can't decide which one I like better. Both are delicious. 

Matt was also very excited when we were at the store because Sam Adams Oktoberfest was available. Fall! Fall things!

Also, we are puppysitting for my mom this week. Puppy makes it difficult to take photos because she wants to eat everything. But she is so frickin' cute.

Also, this weekend is another Saturday Show Off.



Go check out what other people created on this gorgeous faux fall day!

My New Buffet/Bar: A Law Student's Journey Saturday Show-Off

This Saturday, Kitty over at A Law Student's Journey suggested a Saturday Show-Off where you show off a recent project. This buffet was a Craiglist find. I sought it out because of my need to have a place to store my approximately 18 million snack sets and to put M's immense bar while he's staying here. Full disclosure - M has been collecting the items in this bar since he turned 21. He loves to have anything and everything on hand, just in case somebody wants it.

I stripped the buffet with some serious paint stripper, sanded it down, primed it, and spray painted it this sage green. I also changed the hardware out, as it looked very dated before. I'm not sure I love it, but for what I need it for, it works quite well.

Awesome Thrift Store Find!

 

As I've discussed before, I've recently become obsessed with vintage Pyrex. One of my favorite flea markets for Pyrex is on the other side of town from where I live. On my way home, I've driven past a very sketchy thrift store a couple of times. Last night, I was getting ready to meet my mom and was running a bit ahead of schedule, so I decided to stop. This thrift store is really, really sketchy. The ceiling was leaking and I think the place doubles as a Bingo hall? Anyway, I found this beauty, but it didn't have a tag on it. It turns out it was just $4.99! I wasn't sure it would work, because there was no place to test it out. I figured that a $5 donation to charity would be fine either way, but it does work! It's missing all the attachments except the main blade, but I don't mind. I am so excited to finally have a food processor to try out all the recipes I've sadly had to pass on because I didn't have one.

A Note About My Grandmother

This night, sixty years ago, was the last time my grandmother ever saw her abusive husband outside of a courtroom. On this night, according to what various family members and news stories have told me, my grandmother's husband was beating her with his .38 caliber gun when her brother Chuck tried to intervene. All three of them lived  in  a small trailer in rural Iowa together, along with my aunt Bertie who was just an infant at the time. My grandmother was just nineteen years old and was far away from her home in northern Iowa and her brother was only twenty-four. On that night, in what was later characterized as a family argument, my grandmother's husband shot and killed her brother with that .38 caliber revolver, right there in their trailer.

There was a trial and the jury acquitted my grandmother's husband. She never saw him  again. The news reports say that my grandmother planned to continue on with the divorce proceedings she  initiated before the murder. My grandmother said in the new  reports at the time that "it wasn't right to let [her husband] go."

Interestingly, my grandmother has never once discussed this incident with me. It's not because it's a secret, thought until I started digging, I knew knew her first husband's name or even the name of her  brother who died. My grandmother first told my  mother this story when shes started dating my father in  1975. My younger brother knows far more details than everyone else in my nuclear family. I have a lot of questions, now that I'm older and know more about the criminal justice system and domestic violence. I probably won't ask right now, though. It doesn't seem right to make her think about these painful memories given how the last year has gone.

Fifty-nine years ago, my grandmother married my grandfather. They had five more children, including my father and my grandfather adopted my aunt Bertie as well. This spring, my grandfather fell and hurt himself severely. Since then, his medical condition has been declining and he has been moved into a nursing home. My grandmother remains in her independent living apartment. For the first time in fifty-nine years, she spends her days without my grandfather. My grandmother can no longer drive due to her glaucoma, so she relies on others to take her to see my grandfather and to bring her the necessities. She spends many of her days alone in her apartment.

I've been hanging out with my grandmother a lot this summer because I know she's lonely and we have a good time together. When I was a child, these grandparents took care of me every day until I went to kindergarten. They watched me grow up and turn into the woman  I am. My grandmother is also the best baker in the  family and her recipes are a major source of inspiration.

What I didn't realize about my grandmother until my recent revelations about her life is what a bad ass she really is. She was practically a child herself when she tried to leave her abusive husband with their child in 1951. She went back home after her husband was acquitted of murder and found a new love for herself and her daughter. Besides that, she had six children with no anesthesia! My grandmother is a fighter who always had a sense of what is right and what she wanted. Even now, that remains true as she stubbornly stays in her apartment and maintains an unwavering hope that my grandfather will improve and be able to return to their home together. There are countless other examples of her deciding something and then making it so.

I love you, Grandma. You remind me that the most important things are worth the struggle. As they say, keep loving, keep fighting. You're awesome.