Ivy Arts

I bought a can of almond paste at Christmas time but I never got a chance to make the cookies I had planned. I made these tasty treats the other day. I followed a few of the reviewers suggestions to decrease the butter and use the entire can of almond paste (what’s a few more tablespoons?). They have an almost shortbread quality, especially at the bottom and the outside pieces and a rich, buttery almond chewy cookie texture on top.

I’m a big fan of the online recipe sites that have user reviews. My cookbooks are pretty dusty at this point. It’s nice to know in advance if your sauce might need thickening or the cook time should be shorter. I use Allrecipes for my everyday dishes. Since I like to cook from scratch when possible, my criticism of this site is that I wish I could sort out dishes that use processed ingredients. I’m pretty sure that if I wanted to dump a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup on some chicken breasts, I don’t need a recipe. When I need something fancier for a dinner party or holiday dish, I use Epicurious. These recipes come mostly from Gourmet and Bon Appétit magazines.

As much as I utilize the reviews (I rarely make a dish without at least 4 stars), I never review them myself. Mostly everything has been said before. My favorite are the reviewers who are critical of a dish when they have substituted nearly every important ingredient. My feeling is that you should pretty much keep your two cents to yourself in this case. I read a particularly entertaining one where someone did not have prosciutto so they substituted prostitutes. Bad spelling or just a really bad cook?

A delicious snack. Mmmm. Muffins. Lately, I have been favoring recipes with chocolate chips (like this one) because I tell myself that the boys will be more likely to eat them. But the truth is that I like them too. Sshhh, don’t tell.

Lots of Easter preparation on Saturday. A morning jaunt to the farm where we picked up our Vermont maple sugar smoked ham for Easter dinner. The boys had a great time chasing chickens. This picture looks like the small boy is being chased but make no mistake, he was the dominant chaser. Poor chickens.

The afternoon was egg coloring time. My husband boiled the goose eggs for 10-15 minutes. We’ll know in a couple of days if that’s how long it takes to hard boil a goose egg.

The small boy kept trying to sip the egg coloring from the spoons. All that vinegar… blech. I had to restrain my perfectionist artistic tendencies and just let the boys color as they wanted to. Here are their beautiful eggs.

Lots of baking for me. These rolls were made in addition to the Oatmeal Sourdough rolls so that there was a vegan option at the table.

And last but not least… Easter sugar cookies. I wasn’t on top of my game and didn’t find Easter shaped cookie cutters so we just grabbed a glass out of the cupboard and went with the no-frills round cookie. As suggested by some reviewers, I added a bit more vanilla and some lemon zest as well as using half granulated and half powdered sugar. They’re really, really good. (Even better than Alton Brown’s. Sshhhh, pretend I didn’t say that. Sorry Alton, I still love you.) The boys did the decorating on these too.

Happy Easter!

No, it’s not my wedding anniversary, that was here. It’s not my blog-iversary, that’s not until July.

My sourdough starter is a year old! I take this as a point of personal triumph. (It’s good that little things make me happy). After all, I’ve heard the horror stories of the black sludge that overcomes many starters. It’s certainly lasted a lot longer than my original attempt when I lived in the motherland of sourdough – the SF Bay area.

We’ve enjoyed the standby sourdough loaf for sandwiches, soup bowls and spinach dip bowls (yum); the whole wheat sourdough, and the sourdough oatmeal bread. I actually bought the giant 25 lb. bag of King Arthur flour on my last Costco run. I guess that means I’m into the bread baking for the long haul.

I made two loaves of this yummy Honey Wheat Bread two days ago and this is all that’s left. It’s amazingly soft in texture, like sandwich bread when you were a kid, but still whole wheat (actually it’s King Arthur White Whole Wheat flour). I love win-win situations. I think it has to do with using evaporated milk in the recipe. The loaf below is Cheddar Cheese Potato Bread and also uses evaporated milk. It has the same texture, perhaps the potato has something to do with it also. (The recipe for the cheese bread is from an ancient Bon Appétit article that I have copied and saved. If anyone wants it, let me know.) I’ve made bread with scalded milk before but it’s not quite the same.

Notice there are no ornaments on the bottom two feet of the tree. Every time the small boy took one off, it got put up just a little higher. Can you see the little white cat under the tree?

Below is another example of “more” by my little cookie helpers. The cookie count now is 23 dozen and though I clearly don’t need any more, I still have one more recipe to try that uses almond paste, mmmm. Congratulations to cookie challenge winners, Frances of HomemadeOriginals (who wrote a nice blog post about it, thanks) and Jodi of FromMuddyWater (who I hope receives them in Canada before the new year).

I’m talking about Christmas cookies (the ones above are Lemon Pecan Slices). So far I’ve used 8 sticks of butter, have baked 15 dozen cookies and have another double batch of gingerbread dough in the fridge ready to bake. And I still don’t have enough. More is better. Almost always. But definitely true of cookies.

(Note: The big boy helped me decorate and clearly he understands more is better.)

I’ve tried a few oatmeal breads lately as a change from the wheat/white that I’ve been making. One was a Buttermilk Oat bread with oat flour and oat bran and then I found an Oatmeal Sourdough roll recipe that I made in a loaf with my sourdough starter. (I was happy to find another recipe to use the starter with. I’ve been feeling slave to the sourdough lately but I refuse to let it die. This one was excellent and not as heavy and chewy as traditional sourdough.)

Anyway, lovely, delicious taste for both of them. Texture turns to crumb after a day. The culprit, I’ve found, is lack of gluten in oat flour but I’m surprised that neither recipe mentions it. In defense of the sourdough recipe, I did substitute a bit of oat flour for the all-purpose. I’m wondering if using bread flour (which has more gluten than all-purpose) will work or if I need to add wheat gluten. Ahh, the beauty of baking is that most mistakes are edible. I will continue experimenting.

(Recipe follows in comment section)

We visited my folks this weekend and I made Sweet Biscuits with my dad. They’re a simple sweet white roll topped with sugar from his mother’s recipe. We both love them and have decided, though they are delicious in and of themselves, we love them so much more because of their tradition. My grandmother was of Swedish descent and used to make them on holidays. Her recipe was vague and it took a few tries for the next generations to get it down. In fact, my aunt, my uncle and my cousin all have slight variations. Some still use shortening (though the original recipe called for “spry”) and some use butter. Some top the roll with plain sugar. My dad prefers to add some cinnamon, my aunt goes for cardamom in true Scandinavian fashion. My dad has tried over the years to make them but he’s a dough novice and suffers beginner’s fear of yeast. (Oh, how I remember those days.) He’s also a very logical guy and doesn’t appreciate the vague measurements of flour and ambiguous descriptions of how dough should look and feel. We even got him a Kitchen Aid mixer last Christmas, hoping it would help with kneading. (I think this past weekend was the first time it was used actually.)

Anyway, I got to show him first hand some how-to’s of bread making and the result was a light, fluffy, sweet delight to eat warm slathered with butter. Yum.

I don’t like to get ahead of myself, after all, Thanksgiving is barely over but I find that I’m already thinking about what kind of cookies to make for Christmas. I usually make 4-6 different kinds to give to family and friends. Last year I skipped cookies and made Earl Grey truffles and Irish Cream fudge because I was short of time.

I have a few parameters that my Christmas treats must adhere to.

1.) Must be able to make ahead. I start about a week or so before and make a batch a night and freeze.

2.) Must be portable and durable for gift giving. Nothing overly decorated or fragile that will look like mush by the time it arrives to it’s recipient.

3.) Must taste as good on day two as day one. I tend to like strong flavors like mint and ginger but they can contaminate other cookies when grouped together on a plate. Two years ago, I put all varieties in individual snack size bags so the flavors remain distinct. I don’t exactly know how to get around it. I may have to continue this practice.

So the challenge is…. give me some recipes! If I make the cookies from your recipe, I’ll send you a dozen of another variety I make. Sound tasty? Leave a link or recipe in the comments and I’ll pick at least one by December 15. You’ll have your cookies by Christmas. Yum! Anyone in?