So, as is evident from the last post on this blog…. I failed at the baking challenge….. That isn’t to say I stopped baking though! My Instagram is proof of that and so are all the happy students at my new job that get to enjoy all my food adventures, lol.
I decided to give the 52 week baking challenge another go in 2020, mostly because I am in a much more stable place in my life ( don’t worry, I still suffer from all my near constant inconveniences lol) and because I have a whole bunch of people around who can AND DO eat everything I bake. The less you waste, the more you can bake, haha~
Anyways, this week as is tradition of week 1 was the redo week, where bakers around the Reddit sub-forums remake something that bested them the year before (or make something new if they’re new to the challenge). I initially wanted to conquer the dessert that destroyed my desire to continue the challenge, those stupid mini bundt cakes with a white chocolate ganache from mini treats week, but alas I guess I threw out my mini bundt pan when I moved across the county. Que sera sera.
But seriously, fuck that sticky nasty bundt pan.
Instead I stuck the the theme of tiny treats but attempted something that has given me tons of issues in the past: pie dough.
Pie doughs don’t normally like me.
But I really managed to make a great dough! And filling!
Ya’ll, these mini hand pies were so good! My coworkers (2 cause Winter Break is still a thing) really liked them and in particular the crust!
I used this recipe from King Arthur Flour. I think the secret to my success was the sour cream in the crust. Not very traditional I guess, but hey it made one hell of a buttery flaky crust.
I’d say a solid 9/10, I wasn’t too happy with the coloring on the crust but I couldn’t find a pastry brush for the egg wash
And yes, the pics aren’t the best quality. New kitchen, still bad lighting lol. My food always tastes good but looks like a hot mess. Very metaphoric of my life really.
Anyways, we’ll see how long I can last with this year’s challenge. Probably not long. Being an adult is hard.
This week was muffins and scones, and the original plan was two kinds of scones; a cheddar scallion one and a sweet one, TBD.
However, I got absolutely destroyed by the creeping crud that’s been going around my office. That ended up with me having sinus headaches and borderline laryngitis all week.
Needless to say this post is a quick one, I didn’t even try to get good pictures of my results. Still trying to get back my old energy levels.
I decided on making muffins, as they are quick and relatively easy. I used the ever-faithful Sally’s Baking Addiction blog for a recipe. Specifically the 1 muffin batter for infinite muffins recipe.
Let me just say, this recipe uses sour cream and the muffins come out so silky smooth, its almost like a cupcake but with that nice muffin top! I made the Raspberry White Chocolate variant, because I have a lot of white chocolate in my fridge and the raspberries at my grocery store looked amazing! and they were~
So, could I bake this and redeem myself from the caramel debacle?
Muffing tops!!!
Yes, yes I could! Even though I still have trouble breathing!
This recipe by Sally just makes such a smooth and rich muffin, I was seriously tempted to eat the batter its that good. Seriously, if you need a reliable muffin recipe its this one.
Even my coworkers braved my congested presence to eat these. They LOVED them and devoured them in like, an hour.
So good~~~~
Next week is mini treats! Tiny and cute is the game, and I’m thinking cake pops. Cause I’ve never made them and why the heck not? Or maybe mini tarts? or hand pies? Whatever.
Today me will live in the moment, unless its unpleasant in which case me will eat a cookie
Cookie Monster
So I play Dungeons and Dragons. Ok, I really play a lot of different kinds of Tabletop Role-Playing games (TRPGs). I even wrote (one of) my Master’s Thesis on these kinds of games. I love these games and they are a huge part of my life. I met one of my oldest and dearest friends because of these games and have successfully roped in a lot of my friends into playing them, or met friends through them.
Why? They let you be creative and live out your craziest dreams. Wanna try and seduce a dragon? Go for it. Wanna be a spy or a superhero? You can find a game for that. You work together with other people to make a story. Its a lot of fun. I recommend it, and Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is a good place to start, mainly because its the biggest one.
My main group of TRPG people actually just started picking up again after a few months off, so needless to say D&D is consuming my life again. Podcasts like Critical Role, fleshing out character backstory and how I want to play, lurking on the Reddit forums for inspiration, helping out the newbies in the group. Its all over my life right now, which is a nice change from the existential dread that has been looming over me the last year.
Now Jenni, you may be asking, I thought this was a blog about a baking challenge? Where are the pics of your nearly destroyed kitchen? We’re waiting for the first epic failure of the challenge, hop to it!
So, the reason for the dip into D&D is that this weeks challenge idea is cookies and my current and currently most beloved character has a thing for apples. And pastels but that isn’t really relevant here. I decided that his family owns a cidery (or is it a winery, cause fruit?) and apple orchard, and my character likes to cook and always has apple products on him.
Yeah, this is the kind of stuff D&D has. Its not weird.
In his honor I decided to do an apple recipe, inspired by my character! Plus, I needed a recipe a bit more laid-back after the Medovik Honey cake earlier this week. What I decided on was a caramel apple drop cookie inspired by House of Yumm. I did change it up a bit by using only cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger, cause I just didn’t want to buy anymore spices. And I used butterscotch because the store didn’t have those caramel baking bits.
So, could I, in fact, bake these cookies? Were they good?
I can bake these! Actually, I sort of expected these to not turn out, mainly because I’ve baked more drop cookies than I can count so it would make sense that they burned or I mixed up the salt and sugar or something.
In the end, though, they came out golden brown and chewy. Just what you want from a cookie with brown sugar in the mix!
Not to worry, though, I did manage to drop a tray of these cookies tripping over my cat.
I think I’m getting better at this food photography thing…
Poor things.
They weren’t very difficult to throw together, so I also made some Oatmeal lace cookies.
Crispy Crunchy!
I was going to drizzle chocolate on them or fill them with Nutella and make sandwiche cookies but, eh, I got tired of making cookies.
Whelp, that’s it for week 4. Next week the challenge is piping, so I sense I cake coming on! Fancy, decorated cake. What could co horribly wrong? Eventually I’ll also get around to catching-up on week 1’s “re-do” challenge. I’m thinking something Pate Choux….cause that pastry hates me.
The great thing about cake is it doesn’t feel like work. You forget about work. Kids, adults, they all get the same look in their eye when they’re decorating cakes… That’s the magic right there.
Duff Goldman
Oh Duff Goldman. If only you could have seen me trying to make this cake. This nightmare of a cake-baking experience. This is the story of my Week 2 catch-up challenge. My Medovik cake. That bitch.
First off, Natasha of Natasha’s Kitchen is a goddess. Her directions and videos are so clear and simple to follow. Heck, she’s where I got the recipe for my Genoise sponge I tried a few weeks ago. So this is all on me.
Everyone has those moments when a recipe just, decides to personally victimize them. To scar them. To break their blender. The Russian Medovik (honey cake) is that for me right now.
The Medovik cake is a layered cake, kind of like amille-feuille but with no custard or pastry cream, not exactly puff pastry, and honey in the dough. Ok, so maybe it isn’t like a mille-feuille…
Its really, really similar to a Russian Napoleon cake, but again, honey in the dough, and the layers are more like a cookie than a straight-up flaky pastry. However, some recipes seem to use puff pastry like the mille-feuille, but from my experience a lot of dessert recipes vary a lot from family tradition to family tradition. As far as my general internet research showed they’re more or less in the same family of cakes though.
A traditional Mille-Feuille, courtesy of Wikipedia
If you want to give this cake a try after reading about my horror story, check out the expert recipe from Natacha’s Kitchen here.
So….How’d I do? Could I, in fact, bake that?
The first thing that really should’ve tipped me off that this would be a bad baking experience was burning my wrist while making the dough. I’m definitely gonna have a nice big blister in the next few days. But, you may be asking, how’d you burn yourself making cake dough?
Cause this dough is actually similar to a pate a choux dough; you gotta cook up stuff and then add flour. And then be miserable…..I have a…history with pate a choux…
Not scrambled, huzzah!!
So after melting the honey, butter, and sugar you gotta quickly whisk in the eggs in a thin constant stream. If you just dump them in the hot honey and sugar mix it will scramble the eggs. Don’t do that. Then, add enough flour so its not sticky…..mine never got completely not-sticky, and I almost added in 4 cups of flour, whereas the recipe said about 3.
The real fun part was rolling out the dough. You divide the dough into 8 equal little balls, then roll out super thin. Then you cut out a 9-inch circle and bake. I, thinking that I bake quite a bit and am going to be prepared, cut out a circle in parchment paper… too bad the dough turned out to be a nightmare to work with. IT JUST KEPT STICKING, no matter how much flour I used… Lucky for y’all my hands were covered in dough so there are no disastrous torn up dough pictures.
Ok, so far so good
Burnt myself on the pot but all divided up..
Oh god they finally rolled out
Such a mess, I need a drink..
Layers complete…ugh..
Even then, my layers weren’t perfect circles. I just got to a point that the dough was getting suuuuper thin, like almost too thin…so I just had to accept the weird shapes.
The dough bakes for 4-5 minutes, until golden brown and I guess slightly puffy, it reminded me a lot of pita bread coming out of the oven. Now I want hummus. Dang it.
The fun part of any cake is making the icing, and the Medovik cake has an extraordinarily yummy sour cream whipped cream icing. Its very yum.
Yum!
Whipped cream is never a bad thing
Mix together a ton of sour cream with powdered sugar, whip the heavy whipping cream, then fold both together. Finally, trip on a pile of that flour you used to roll out the cake dough and fling your blender into a wall… Then, put the baked up extra dough bits into the blender and blend, having a cloud of blended cake/cookie fly into your face from the cracked blender you didn’t notice until now. So much for grinding up the cake crumbs…
And then experience the final trauma of icing a cake with uneven layers and an icing that really isn’t thick enough to fill in the gaps. Its no buttercream or cream cheese icing.
Also, remind me to get a cake stand for decorating purposes.
So far so good…
Oh no…
Everything is everywhere
Using my background in Archaeology to dig out the cake
I give up, saran wrap this bitch…
And stick it in the fridge to come together
By the end of it I just started flinging icing back at it, haha. See? What other food blog shows you the nitty-gritty of the baking process? All the failure that goes into it?
I’m sure there’s like, a thousand blogs.
Finally, top with the crushed up cake bits and put the cake in the fridge to set overnight and sadly eat the remainder of the icing in defeat…
~24 hours later~
The moment of truth…. did it turn out ok? Was the dough under-cooked? Did it cut cleanly? Did my friend who came over for D&D enjoy eating it?
Pay no attention to the hole in the side of the cake…
Ok, so I have no idea how I managed to make what I think was a perfect-adjacent Medovik cake. But I really think I did? Some of the layers did just of get smushed, but I think I did that as I angrily smothered on the frosting.
The layers, man, the layers~
Look, I attempted photography
My friend and I devoured this cake. Like, I’ve made a lot of cakes in my day and this is definitely in the top 10 of best cakes I’ve ever made. Not that you fine folks reading this blog are familiar with my past baking exploits, so…just trust me on this. The cake layers were so soft and delicate. The sour cream icing is tangy and slightly sweet, and got a very nice creamy texture after sitting in the fridge overnight.
Just. Yum. Much yum.
I actually think…I might make this again. For a special occasion of course.
So, in the end, I’d have to say, yeah, I can bake that! Painfully and messily, but I can!
Later in the week I’ll be posting about Week 4’s topic, drop cookies. Stay tuned for potentially burnt cookies!
As I stood with my face and body pressed up against the wall of the bus I was riding on, I thought of two things: One, “if the guy that was doing said pushing didn’t stop talking on his phone and move over a little I may get unpleasant.” Two, “oh dang this week’s challenge is sweet dough. I should get on that.”
So as I said in the first post, I’m a bit behind. I will catch on with week 1 and week 2 as soon as I can. I really wanna try baking something Russian! Maybe some cookies or a cake….
This week, though, was sweet dough, which is a yeasty dough which is, well, sweet. It can be a brioche, sticky buns, some kind of sweet braid or a funky yeasty coffee cake, the sky’s the limit, my dudes~ Now, the point of this blog isn’t to provide step by step instructions or recipes, so if you want a recipe get to Googling! Mainly cause I’m doing a baking challenge, partially because I have the photographic capabilities of a rock.
But what kind of sweet dough did I want to make? Well, my parents met because of cinnamon rolls, cinnamon rolls are a sweet dough pastry. So yeah, ok. Let’s go with that. That sounds like a long, food-blog worthy story that I can shove before a recipe and make people scroll for 84 years to get to….I’m not bitter…you know its true.
I decided on a variant of a cinnamon roll, though, and used the base recipe for the dough found on Genius Kitchen here. I did decide on doing something a bit different, so instead of a regular ole’cinnamon roll I decided on strawberries & cream sweet rolls, because fruit is good for you and its almost strawberry season, inspired by Cookies&Cups.
So, if you want to make these bad boys, combine the dough recipe from Genius Kitchen with the filling of Cookies&Cups. Piece of cake!
So….How’d I do? Could I, in fact, bake that?
Proofing the yeast
Forgot I was proofing the yeast
Kneading the dough
A pretty, round boy with good gluten!
Nice~ Back to proofing
Very sexy~
Oh, so first off I loved the smell of yeasty goodness wafting through my apartment. So good. So, so good. Second, I also loved the smell of the baking rolls. Thirdly, if you’ve never made a homemade bread, please try it. Its fun and so satisfactorily rewarding. Kneading and punching bread dough has been known for generations as a great stress reliever. Cause of the punches. Gotta have my punches.
Finally….I forgot the cornstarch in the filling…. and fresh strawberries lose a lot of liquid when you cook them…Cataclysmic ‘oops’ incoming?
Eh, a bit. But I don’t think it matters cause OMG SO YUMMY!
Look at how gooey and luscious that is~
These came out AMAZING! And I’m not just saying that because I was really hungry at this point. The dough was light and springy and slightly sweet. I really nailed the proofing and getting all that good, good gluten going. And I did cut down on the sugar in the filling, so between that and the tiniest amount of glaze ever (always check if you have powdered sugar, dang-it) it wasn’t too cloyingly sweet. The only bad part was that the bad fluorescent lighting of my tiny kitchen couldn’t do them justice on camera.
So, in the end, I’d have to say, yeah, I can bake that!
Next week is drop cookies. I have no idea what to make, so leave a suggestion if you want?
