bagels!

My friend and I decided to have a bagel cooking day. We teamed up to make a batch of homemade bagels. They were DELICIOUS. For sure something I'd make again. The particular recipe we used was from Vegan Dad, but I think if I make them again, I'll pick one that takes you from start to finish in one day and see if they work just as well. I'm less likely to do something that you have to do over two days. Anyway, they were dense, chewy, and absolutely delicious. In my opinion the best two were the plain one and the one I topped with smoked sea salt. I like a salt bagel and the smoked salt was truly fantastic.

here are pictures:

regular salt bagel is in the top right corner, the smoked salt bagel is in the bottom left corner. The others are two sesame seed and two plain.

here's a glamor shot closeup of one of the plain ones. It sort of feels silly to take pictures like this of bagels, but it seems to be what you do.

Cake!

I've still got old projects from Christmas to post, and even some new ones for this christmas started. I'd wanted to do the Knitting Olympics, and I did, but I totally did not finish. It certainly didn't help that I was TOO SICK TO KNIT for an incredibly long FOUR days. It hurt to be upright. It hurt to try and hold my hands aloft, it hurt to try and lean over to read a chart and painstakingly try to follow it (especially with a pattern that has no repeats). So, in short, the Squirrel mittens are not finished.

I did manage to decorate a pretty darn cool cake for a friend's baby shower, so I'll share that instead.

Her nursery decorations are for the most part either from or inspired by the lilac sparrow collection from Dwell Studio. So, because of that I thought it would be fun to do cakes inspired by the same.

First, I was going to bake the cake myself, but since I was sick (see above) the week before, I didn't have time. Whole Foods to the rescue as they were very cooperative in making some "custom" cakes for me that were free of any decoration at all. Their berry chantilly cake is to die for, and when I picked it up, this is exactly what I'd ordered:

The sparrow pattern is basically some birds sitting on brown tree branches with purple, pink, and brown flowers and leaves. I started by coloring some marzipan brown and adding it to the cake like branches:

Then I added the leaves and the flowers and a simple border along the bottom edge:

and a small marzipan bird:

here is the finished cake along with the inspiration pattern. I was pleased as punch with the results:

Vanilla Pound Cake

Made another recipe from my King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking cookbook. I must say, another winner. It was amazing. Check out that batter, delicious!

This time up was the Vanilla Pound cake. Subbed out 1/4 cup of the regular sugar with the tangerine sugar I'd made earlier. I dressed the cake up a bit with some stabilized whipped cream and fresh berries. My loaf pans are wider than standard, so the cake came out a little wider and flatter than usual, but I solved the problem by layering them atop each other with more berries and cream in the middle.

I don't know that much about baking and flour types and how they affect everything (which is part of why I'm doing all this baking), but the book said that the whole grain pastry flour was what made the texture on this so perfect. It was great, nice and dense, just like a pound cake should be. And delicious too. I'm sure the 8oz of sour cream didn't hurt anything either. :)

Baked Goods

One of my projects I've taken on this year is to do a lot more baking. I really want to improve my skill. Because everyone has to start somewhere, I received a copy of the King Arthur Flour book Whole Grain Baking as a gift and I'm slowly working my way through as many of the recipes as I can. So far I'm up to about 10 recipes and they've all been great.

My biggest success so far has been the shortbread (Scottish Shortbread p. 332), where the main grain is oatmeal ground in a food processor. I made one major change to the recipe though... I used sugar that I'd mixed with tangerine zest in the food processor (instructions here). The results were fantastic! The book suggests using orange to accentuate whole grain flavor in other recipes, so it came to mind as a natural fit and a great way to use all the extra sugar mix I had leftover from making other holiday gifts. I love the big boxes of tangerines you can only find during the holidays and this is a great way to use them.

The delicious shortbread got packed up and labeled with a label I created in good old MS Word and went to the neighbors for New Years.

Ok... so only about 2/3rds of it went to the neighbors. Shortbread is a hubby favorite. This recepie definitly gets a stellar review from us!