TWD - Gingerbread Baby Cakes

Holy black pepper! These cakes are like crack! Have you ever had crack? Well I haven't, but I understand it's really addicting, so I believe these cakes should be called crack cakes. That is how good they are.

I love crack...cakes!

Crack cakes have a cute little wrapper.

I've seen too many recipes, had too many desserts that fall short of the punch. When you say you are a lemon tart, please, please taste like lemon and have a little kick. If you are going to claim to have some ginger in you, then I better feel like I'm on Gilligan's Island!

These little lovelies, they do the trick. There's powdered ginger, fresh ginger and (wait for it) black pepper!

I am going to be putting black pepper in a few more sweet dishes from now on.

You all would be proud of me too, I only changed up the recipe a smidge and that was on the recommendation of the many other TWD'ers. There was much chatter about the molasses being overwhelming and this recipe called for 2 cups. That is a lot. So I subbed half the molasses with corn syrup and I believe that was the right call, it allowed the other flavors to come through nicely.

Oh and the texture of these genius bombs are somewhat like a brownie...isn't that crazy?

A ginger brownie.

It's a little christmas miracle.

Crack cakes also come in snowflake shapes.

Karen's Kichen Stories is this week's host. She has some nice pictures. Staging and all, I have my cooling rack that appears in 99.9% of my pictures. It's a nice rack though.

TWD - Best Ever Brownies

That's the actual title of the brownies. Now, I haven't eaten one yet, so I reserve judgement until the end of this post when I've finally consumed one. But what I can tell you right now is that these are the most hippest brownies, ever.

How are they so hip you ask? Well just check these babies out! They are chevron patterned and anyone in the hippest squares know that chevron is every where (you really notice this if you have to visit a Target and that means it must be hip.)

Too hip

Now how did I make this hippness? I took a tour around my pantry and found a few items that screamed "put me in your brownies now!" Said items were coconut cream and Speculoos. Double take, what's Speculoos? Trader Joe's, my friend, introduced me to this peanut butter looking stuff that is made out of ground cookies. It's crazy! And crazy good. Instead of peanut butter, it's cookie butter. I love butter.

I subbed out 1/4 of the butter in the recipe for coconut cream and then mixed 4ish tablespoons of the Speculoos in with about 4 tablespoons of some more coconut cream, melted it, spooned it on top and then swizzled with a knife. Tada, chevron!

It really smells good. Really, super, really.

Here's the recipe in all it's original best-everness hosted by A Beautiful Mess.

Just had a piece, I think I need to test the rest of the pan before I can make my judgement. I don't take these things lightly (neither does my scale).

TWD - Buttermilk Crumb Muffins

Radio silence. I know, that's what I've been broadcasting these last few weeks. I just didn't have anything to say. Without a TWD to write about, I just couldn't write.

A friend of mine yesterday told me that men's minds are like waffles and women's are like spaghetti. (I think it's a book.) Now, I don't usually prescribe to these types of metaphors, but spaghetti did seem to fit. I think it's something about how everything I think or feel gets involved in everything I do. So I've been kind of empty thus I had nothing to write about.

It is was it is.

Ok, no more.

So I have to say these muffins give me hope. I plan on them being my supper followed by a chaser of tomato juice. I need to have a balanced meal, right?

Muffins for dinner, emptiness, this is sounding a little Lifetime. Ah geez and I did watch a sappy movie with Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant on Lifetime yesterday. This really isn't good.

Well I just pulled them out of the oven, hope gone. They have little sink holes in them. Is that another metaphor?

Maybe those holes are supposed to be filled with cream cheese?

Now I can't see the sink holes.

I think I'll order some delivery instead, how about spaghetti?



Easier Than Pie used the exact same pan as I did and no sink holes. Geez, it is a metaphor. Well the recipe is listed on their site, maybe make the muffins yourself and see what it says about your life.

TWD - Bagels

Have you ever done distracted baking? Not the baking that you do to distract you from your woes, but baked or cooked while distracted because you had to. Maybe it was because you couldn't or shouldn't go out to eat again and should use that box of spinach that you picked up at the large wholesale bonanza store. Or baked because you have been neglecting your promise to the TWD group and you can't ask your sister to bake again because that would be wrong and you should save those favors for important things like kidneys or get out of jail cards.

Well I have been baking distracted. My poor, poor bagels. I barely read the recipe, couldn't have the patience to let them rise and my punches were weak.

These bagels didn't get the love that they should've and to top it all I also tweaked the recipe. So not much brain power went into my tweaking either. I switched out the sugar for malt and honey and added pumpkin spice instead of the black pepper. It sounds good, but I didn't really pay attention if those changes would suffice.

They didn't.

I know, just follow the recipe and you wouldn't have to worry about sad bagels.

sad, sad bagel

There's this song called "Sad Robot". This might describe my bagels. Sad, sad bagels.


But on an unrelated note, I am now the proud owner of green jeans. And not just green, but skinny, green jeans. Look out world, here comes Misses Green Jeans and her bagel top!

Where's the holes?

I'm sorry bagels, you got more love at Heather's Bytes I think.


So why am I distracted, it's a little thing called life. Sometimes it's just distracting for no good reason.

TWD - Cranberry Pumpkin Walnut Loaf

How do you bake bread in a hotel room with only a microwave and mini fridge? I can poach salmon in my coffee maker. Or make a nice grilled cheese with my iron. And it seems if I had thought to bring my rice cooker I could have made some outstanding meals!

I did try, I purchased a toaster/convection oven thinking that I could do a lot of things with it and I could have if I hadn't chickened out and thought that I would get in trouble with the hotel. And I think I would have. It's not safe to bake in your hotel room, do you hear me, not safe at all even if it's for the goodness of the blog. So next best thing...call my sister and ask if she would bake it for me and send me pictures and tell me her thoughts.

"Sister would you please take many hours out of your already busy life and make some bread for me so I can tell the world about it? Please, I know you will love the recipe! And you are a master bread maker and please?"

Thanks sister :)

Well her verdict, the recipe took two days! And it didn't taste that good! And she didn't mind because she's a good sister.

Thanks sister :)

Yes, it was a long recipe and with all the great sounding ingredients, it just wasn't a home run for her or her husband. She couldn't taste the pumpkin, only the cranberries and raisins. She said it smelled great while baking, but just didn't cut the mustard even when it was generously slathered with butter. (Don't know why she used mustard in the recipe.)

Well shucks. My sister is a master break maker so I know it wasn't her. I was sure this recipe would be a winner, now I feel sorta bad for asking her to work on it. Well only sorta, she is my big sister and I'm sure there is something that she did to me when I was young that this is pay back for ;)

Thanks sister :)

It's cute though.

Now you readers scamper on over to This Bountiful Backyard and Heather's Bytes to find out the true meaning of Christmas - wait I mean the recipe to this bread.

Magic and microwave brittle

Well I have something very awesome to share...I have a theme song! A song that was made for little ol' me. How, you ask? Well, I made him brittle and he made me a song. (That sounds romantic, but it wasn't. My husband has made a song for me though, that I won't share because it's mine and mine alone.)

So this theme song is pretty cool. He read my blog and ate my brittle and put it all into a little instrumental.

Hit it Paul!

Nice, huh? I thought so. Thanks Paul, you are too cool.


Now on to fancy pants stew. I don't really have a recipe for that. It's more of a story about my mom. My mom makes brittle for every Christmas and she makes it in the microwave. I know some of you have heard of this and I'll share a recipe below. But the really cool thing is my mom made this when microwaves weren't in every home and if they were you mostly just reheated your coffee or something. Another cool thing about my mom is she's Vietnamese (my dad's Kansas) and she still made brittle even though she didn't have that growing up. She learned how to make it because, I suspect, one day at work someone was talking about making some candy in the microwave and she remembered it, then she came home and did it. And it was amazing, it was the best tasting brittle I'd ever had. She didn't use thermometers, she didn't know anything about hard crack stage or microwave wattages...she had heard someone describe the process and she maybe had a piece. An that was it. This is her magic.

Another example of her magic is when we'd go into a restaurant and we'd all have a nice meal. Someone would comment about the stew and how good it was and the next day my mom would whip out this bowl and it would be the same stew. She'd had figured out what was exactly in that stew just from a few tastes. Even when the name gave no indication what was in it, it could have been called fancy pants stew or something. But somehow she knew. That is magic.

I don't have that kind of magic. But I do have her and she showed me how to make brittle. That's pretty good.


Microwave Peanut Brittle
Adapted from my mom

• 1 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup light corn syrup
• 1 ½ cups raw Spanish peanuts with skins
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt

Directions

1. Spray a metal cookie sheet with non-stick spray. Combine sugar, corn syrup and peanuts in a 2 quart glass bowl and microwave on high for 2 minutes. Stir and continue microwaving on high 3 minutes more, then stir in butter and vanilla and microwave for 2 more minutes.
2. Finally stir in baking soda and salt until just mixed. Pour onto cookie sheet and spread thin with a large spatula or metal spoon (sprayed with non-stick spray). Cool completely then break into pieces and serve.

Be very careful, melted sugar is hotter than the surface of the sun. It will burn. This I know.

So microwaves vary and you might need to adjust times to better fit your microwave. You are trying to reach hard crack stage. Here's a nice site describing how to test for that.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/candy/sugar-stages.html

TWD - Whole Wheat Loaves

Turns out I'm kind of lazy and that I get overwhelmed easily. Luckily I've made this bread before so my laziness and being easily overwhelmed doesn't really affect this week's post. Oh ya, I have memory problems too. I think it was one of the first recipes I made out of the book sometime last year, but I only think that because when I went to take a gander at the recipe, someone (probably me) had wrote "good" next to the title.

So now I'm going to go look for some pictures and try to see if I have any other thoughts or memories that pop up so I can say something else about this loaf of bread.

Found one!

Boy they do look good!

According to the date on the picture, I made these bad boys on January 8, 2012. That's clearly not last year but I do still think they where some of the first recipes I had made. In the same picture folder are some brioche loaves. I do remember those because they were a pain in the ass to make! Later the brioche became bread pudding and that was some dang good bread pudding.

Those are some fancy, granny rolls.

So going on the "good" statement I'm going to recommend you try these out. I don't write "good" on just anything (I don't think anyway, hard to tell since I really can't remember). The recipe calls for malt extract and I'm pretty sure I used a one-to-one exchange of molasses instead, because until yesterday I've never owned malt. And once again, "good" means the molasses must have worked out.

Veggie num num and The Family That Bakes Together can provide a much better synopsis of this bread. I think aroma was mentioned and some other niceties that probably make this recipe actually sound more appealing than just "good".

See? Good.