Post-wedding nesting

Posted on August 16, 2011 by rycrafty

There’s something about suddenly having cupboards that look like this:

Matching!!

Full of all the stuff we registered for, and received thanks to our awesome family and friends, that made me want to attack the rest of the kitchen. Mainly our pantry drawer and our spices.

See, we keep some of our spices in these magnet containers that I made. Supplies: Lee Valley watchmakers’ tins and rare earth magents, Ikea magnet board, glue, spice & herb labels from Safeway. But some spices live in here:

In the middle shelf of our pantry drawer. These spices are still in the bottles from Safeway. Some of them are spices that react badly to light – I don’t keep paprika in the glass-topped tins any more because it fades both flavour- and colour-wise so fast. Some I just haven’t decanted yet. Some are too big for the tins, like cinnamon sticks and whole nutmeg. To add to that, more spices also live here:

In those black baskets hanging off the lower shelf of our pantry cupboard. Those are the spices that come in bags and generally get decanted into the tins. The tins won’t take a whole bag of most things, so the extras get clipped shut and stuffed in a ziplock.

So if that kitchen tour hasn’t lost you, our herbs and spices are stored in 3 different places! It was time to do something about that, and the mish-mash of stuff in our pantry drawer.

I save all my canning jars, pasta sauce jars, curry sauce jars, anything glass jar, because they might be useful one day. Today they were finally useful. I got out all my jars, and all the 2-part canning lids I’ve saved. Now when you’re actually canning things you don’t want to use the little disc part of the lid more than once, but for sealing stuff like sugar or walnuts they’re just fine. I sorted through the jars and recycled all those that wouldn’t take a standard canning lid. Then I took all the lightly-used lids I had and gave them a quick sand:

Then out came the chalkboard paint. We have a can of the liquid stuff, because the one time I bought a spray can it wouldn’t spray. I gave each lid a good coating of chalkboard and let it dry for a couple days. Then I started the fun part: decanting!

I also sorted through the spices, and put more onto the magnet board as well as my spare tins so if I buy something new, it’s easy to put it up.

After a few days the chalkboard lids were ready to write on, and all of a sudden my pantry drawer looks like this:

I didn’t decant some things, like the yeast and baking powder – they’re fine by me in their little jars. The sugar I kept in the two big canisters because a 1 cup measure fits into those.

This project not only tidied up the pantry, it made the storage room look better because I used up the last of the 1L canning jars that were hanging out in a box in there, plus the pile of small jam-sized jars and lids that had taken over the top shelf of the pantry cupboard. Not to mention recycling all the jars that didn’t take the right size lids!

I was using regular chalk (you can see the box beside the Panko and Triscuits) but I might try to find a liquid chalk pen, because my writing looks like a 5-year old’s with the regular stuff.

Has your wedding inspired any nesting?

CSA Tales August 10th

Posted on August 10, 2011 by rycrafty

Last week, I got going on the veggies as soon as I picked them up. For dinner that night (and the next night), I had beet greens and pasta:

I steamed the beet greens in a covered frying pan with a little bit of white wine, then mixed the wilted greens into hot whole-wheat pasta. A little bit of basil, some Parmesan (shaved with our potato peeler!) and that was dinner. For dessert after, I made Zucchini Muffins with Nutella Swirl.

My wee zucchini made exactly one cup of grated zucchini. I subbed out the butter for one individual applesauce + 2tbsp of oil.

I didn’t have Nutella, so I added some cocoa powder to some organic almond/hazelnut butter I had in the cupboard, as well as a little bit of agave syrup to sweeten it a bit. It made a tasty mix, but even after microwaving, it wasn’t as ‘swirlable’ as Nutella is, so my muffins were more ‘Zucchini Muffins with Nutella-esque blob’.

Now, why did I make the first zuke of the season into muffins, and not something fresh and yummy? Well, I don’t really like them. Zucchinis, that is, I love muffins. Growing up, we lived in a rural area and my parents grew a lot of our own food. This was awesome, only zukes are one of those crops that never. stop. producing.

And, when you’re just a little bit bigger than the average zuke, and the garden produces so many of them for so long, you get a little tired of them.

On the weekend, I made up a batch of dough from Artisan Bread in 5 minutes a day, and decided to make the spinach calzones from this recipe. To get the 350g of greens, I used up all the spinach and the rest of the beet greens.

They’re pretty enormous, half of one made a very nice dinner. I froze two, to add to our ‘emergency dinner’ stash. We usually have a 2-serving storebought frozen lasagne in the freezer for when you just don’t want to think about dinner. This winter I want to have that fallback, but have it be stuff we’ve made and frozen, not Safeway.

The tomatoes I ate as a side dish, just cut in half and sprinkled with some balsamic vinegar. Sidenote: in Portland, we went to this A-mazing olive oil/balsamic vinegar store but didn’t buy anything. Really regretting that now, it would have been worth the vingar-soaked clothes risk. Guess we’ll just have to go back to Portland some time! The main dish I had that night was this creamed avocado pasta dish, using CSA cilantro.

And then Wednesday came again, and I picked up these veggies even though I still have so. much. lettuce.

Lots of lettuces, beet greens, some little onions and onion tops, a cabbage (the giant thing on the right that looks like it wants to eat my kitchen!), PEAS, more herbs including what I think is some fresh dill.

Is there anything else to do with lettuce apart from salad?

Here’s a link to all my 2011 CSA posts!

CSA Tales – July 27th & August 3

Posted on August 4, 2011 by rycrafty

I’m a bit behind with the veggie logs, thanks to our mini-honeymoon in Portland. More about that later, for now, veggies!

The CSA delivery from July 20th turned into radish stir-fry, and a lot of salads, none of which had their portraits taken.

Here are all the veggies I picked up on July 27th:

More of what I’d received before, but also including something I’d never heard of before called ‘lamb’s quarters’. They just look like little leaves, nothing crazy. Sadly, not many of these veggies got used, because I picked them up at 5pm on Wednesday, and left for Portland at 11am on Thursday. I did turn the Swiss chard into these yummy cakes for Wednesday dinner though:

They were very tasty, although I think smaller-cut almonds would make them look more appetizing. I just have the chunky ones at home though! The sauce used up all the basil and spinach in the deliver (and the spinach from the week before, if I’m truthful). I got the recipe for both from Marcus Samulesson’s blog. I gave the lettuces to the friend who drove me to the airport, and hoped the radishes would last the 6 days until we got home. That…. did not happen. Although it did remind me that on my first pick-up day, I think the farmer said that if you keep your radishes in a tub of water in the fridge, they’ll last.

The day after we got back, August 3rd, I picked up this haul:

For the record, that Romaine in the middle is HUGE-NORMOUS. Bigger than my head. There is also spinach, a lettuce called buttercrunch, 3 small radishes, a wee zucchini, tomatoes (!), beet greens, and a baggie of herbs.

I’m excited to actually have time to make stuff out of these veggies. And it’s the universe telling me I should eat more salad, but… how much salad can one person really eat? The Mr is away, so it is just me and these veggies right now.

Here’s a link to all my 2011 CSA posts!

CSA Tales – July 20

Posted on July 26, 2011 by rycrafty

I spent part of the week and the weekend in Banff, so I didn’t get to post this on the day I picked our veggies up.

Here is what I did with last week’s (July 13th’s) veggies:

I picked the Swiss chard (I think that’s what it was… lettuce with red veins?) out of the mixed greens bag, and made this Swiss chard & goat cheese soup from Dianasaur Dishes. Goat cheese is one of my favourite cheeses! Plus, it doesn’t give me bellyaches (not that the bellyaches stop me from eating cow’s milk cheese…). This recipe also meant that I got to use the immersion blender we got for our wedding for the first time! Buzzzz!

The next night, I made the asaparagus, lemon, and mint risotto from Cook Sister, minus the asparagus. Instead of the asparagus, I did the radishes as these sauteed radishes with mint from Food 52. The risotto used up all the stock that didn’t get used in the soup! I actually didn’t have to buy any ingredients for these recipes, it was all stuff I had in the fridge. Granted, I had bought the stock on the way home from work the night before so I could make soup, but still, not bad!

What mint I didn’t use in that dinner, I dipped in chocolate. The original thin mints!

Twilight chocolate bar? Yeah, I’m a little ashamed I bought it. The one below is regular, non-vampire-related milk chocolate.

The rest of the mixed greens and the little head of lettuce got used in various salads throughout the week.

If I had more radishes (I used them all in the risotto) I would have used this recipe for cinnamon sugar radish chips.

And, here are this week’s veggies!

Radishes, lettuces, spinach, Swiss chard, mint, basil

CSA Tales – July 13th

Posted on July 15, 2011 by rycrafty

I joined a CSA for the summer! CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and you basically buy a share in a local farm which means you get a share of what they produce. I’ve wanted to do this for a couple years, but I never remember until the summer, after they’ve all started delivering already. This year, with our seemingly unending winter, the crops are later than normal, so I managed to join one! I bought a half share with Sundance Fields, and got my first delivery on Wednesday.

I’m planning on taking a picture of each delivery when it arrives, and recording what I make with the things included. The next week, when the new delivery arrives, I’ll post of a photo of it, and a list of what I made with last week’s veggies. I’m excited to be a part of this because it will really get me out of my ‘go to Safeway, buy the same things over and over’ rut.

Here is the first delivery (small, because the winter has delayed everything):

Clockwise, from bottom left: green onions, baggie of mixed salad greens, radishes, small lettuce, mint, and two very sad looking pieces of rhubarb. If they’re still getting rhubarb, that’s a sign of how late everything is here. My mum on the coast had rhubarb as big as my arm in early May!

Come back in a week, and see what I did with it all!

*Note: the title ‘CSA Tales’ popped into my head first thing, and only later did I remember a cartoon I saw once called Veggie Tales. I in no way endorse Veggie Tales!

My one experience with it: I was about 16 and on a long bus trip with a bunch of other kids from my school, and the teacher on the bus with us was one of the less exciting teachers. We were watching a movie on the bus’ TV, and either he deemed it inappropriate, or we got too rowdy, or something happened to make him stop the movie and put on one he brought. It was VT, an Easter episode, and I don’t remember details any more, but I remember my friend Jen and I just not being able to believe we were watching talking veggies preaching at us. It was so absurd to us (Jen is very anti-religion, and I just don’t bother with it) that we had giggle fits the whole way home. When I tried to describe it to my (also not religious) parents it was one of those situations where I couldn’t get 3 words out without breaking down laughing again: “And and and then the tomato says ahahahahahahha he’s reeeeeal shiny ahahaha in like, this Mexican accent hahahahooohooohoo”. I think my parents might have seriously wondered if I had been doing anything illegal on the bus. They teased me about talking tomatoes for years afterwards.

Pie is irrational

Posted on July 6, 2011 by rycrafty

Lots of people (including my own mother) thought I was insane for wanting to make all the pies for our wedding. I am so glad I stuck to my guns, because hive? The pie tasted awesome. People kept coming up to me and saying it was delicious (although, I suppose, who would tell the bride on her wedding day that she made sub-par pie? Hmmm…) and wedding pie was such a great idea. I have to admit that it was nice to receive all those compliments, and it felt like a little bit of vindication after all the doubters. I thought it was delicious, and I even managed to have two slices!

(this is the first guest photo of the pie table to surface!)

This is the part where I give you the recipes I used!

I used the Fool-proof Pie Dough recipe from Cooks Illustrated, via Smitten Kitchen, but I didn’t make it exactly the same way. Here’s my version of the recipe, but I’d suggest testing it as-written the first time though. Remember that the adjustments are what work for me, in a very dry climate at 3438 feet above sea level. (Altitude absolutely affects your baking!) I also used my food processor, as I am a lazy bones.

Foolproof Pie Dough
Cooks Illustrated, November 2007

Makes enough for one 9-inch double-crust pie

2 1/2 cups (12 1/2 ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon table salt
2 tablespoons sugar
1 1/4 cup cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch slices (the original recipe has you use a mix of butter and shortening – I just like butter better)
1/4 cup cold vodka
1/3 cup cold water (the original recipe had 1/4 cup cold water)

1. Process the flour, salt, and sugar in food processor until combined. Add butter and process until homogeneous dough just starts to collect in uneven clumps, about 15 seconds (dough will resemble cottage cheese curds and there should be no uncoated flour). Scrape bowl with rubber spatula and redistribute dough evenly around processor blade.

2. Pour water into food processor, then once the food processor is running, pour the vodka in a thin stream through the feeder spout. Stop processor and scrape down the sides as needed. Pastry is ready the moment it all clumps into one big ball and threatens to pop the lid off (although that last bit might just be because the latch on my processor is broken!) Divide dough into two even balls and flatten each into a disk. Wrap each in plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 45 minutes or up to 2 days.

Fillings

Below are the sources for all the pie fillings I made. I doubled most, as I was making two pies of each flavour, but found both the apple and the apple-blackberry much too generous. I used 7 – 8 apples per double batch of filling. I was generally aiming for 4-5 cups of filling per pie, because I didn’t want pies with enormous domes. Giant pies like that also tend to bubble and spill more in the baking. I also took care that each recipe included some tapioca or cornstarch, so the pies would be non-drippy.

The cherry pie filling I made up with a vague recipe from my mum. I bought four of these jars of sour cherries:

Drained three of them and put the cherries in a big saucepan, and poured the whole other jar (syrup and all) over them. I mixed in some cornstarch (about 3 tablespoons) and some sugar until it tasted like I wanted it to (about 1/2 to 3/4 of a cup, I think) and let it bubble and get a bit thick. Remember that things will also always be thicker when they’re cool too.

For the chocolate tarts, mum came over to my house on Thursday and baked the crusts, then did the filling on Friday while we were waiting for fruit pies to bake. It’s a simple but delicious recipe.

Cooking pies from frozen:

We did 6 pies at a time in Cinnamon Buns’ mum’s convection oven, so we only got two tries to perfect this art. I don’t recommend using both oven racks unless you have a convection oven though – the baking will be too uneven. Even with the convection oven we switched the pies around from top to bottom halfway through. We started out cooking them at 350 and that took a long time, and we ended up turning the oven up to 400 near the end. The tops were brown by the halfway point, but the filling was still room temperature. What we did the second time was start the pies at 400, with the tops loosely covered in tinfoil, then when we switched them around (top rack pies to the bottom, bottom rack pies to the top) we took off the foil and turned the oven down a bit, back to 350.

We weren’t serving these hot (obviously, as we baked them on Friday, and served them on Saturday) but we still wanted the fillings to get bubbly hot, so the cornstarch and tapioca could do their jobs. The test pie I did a week or two before the wedding got cooked at 350 for an hour, and while the pastry was done, and it wasn’t cold per se, the tapioca was still visible as little white dots everywhere. If it is hard to see, stick a metal knife into the pie through one of the slits in the top, and hold it there for 10-15 seconds. Then take it out and touch it to see if it is hot. If it hurts, your filling is hot. You can also just wait until you see filling bubbling through the slits too.

Bridal injuries:

Beware when moving pies from one rack to the other! As we were fitting 3 pies on to each rack, some pies had to be pushed to the back of the bottom rack, and I (inevitably) touched my wrist to the top rack accidentally. After that mum took over the job of transferring pies, and also pointed out that I could have pulled out the bottom rack, placed the pies, then pushed it back in. Oops. Luckily it wasn’t a bad burn, or very large, and I wore a bracelet on that wrist which helped camouflage it on the wedding day.

What’s your wedding dessert? What’s your favourite flavour of pie?

Pie is a constant

Posted on July 4, 2011 by rycrafty

Interested in the logistics of making your own pie for your wedding? I’m going to try to articulate everything we discovered about the logistics of it in this post, and share the recipes in the next one.

Preparation:

The best way (in my opinion) to do pies for your own wedding is to make (but not bake) them ahead of time, and then spend a few hours the day before shoveling pies in and out of the oven. This means that you have to be able to store whatever number of frozen pies (we did 12), which leads me to:
Think about your freezer space! We briefly considered buying a small chest freezer, but don’t actually have anywhere to put one. We ended up making a couple trips to Cinnamon Buns’ mum’s house to fill up the freezer in her garage with our pies.
Think about your oven space! I thought we could get 3 in our oven on the top rack, in a little triangle. Turns out, only 2 fit, and I didn’t want to layer due to uneven baking.
Do you know anyone with a large or efficient oven? Cinnamon Buns’ mum has a convection oven, which meant that we could layer the pies because the heating is more even. That meant we could cook 6 pies in her oven at one time, so we borrowed her oven on the Friday morning before the wedding.
Now that you know how many you can bake at once, how long will it take? Baking a full pie from frozen takes about an hour and a half. How many loads of pies do you need to do?
Stock up on butter. And sugar. And flour.
Ditto on tinfoil pie plates. I thought they’d be more practical for freezing/heating, I didn’t want to be scared that glass would crack. Plus, we did 12! That’s a lot of pie plates to have leftover.
If you’ve made this decision far enough ahead of time, buy fruit in season and freeze it! Then you’re not trying to buy blueberries in May – that’s just unnatural. (In this part of the world at least.)

The Making:

I love a production line, so I would make batch of pastry after pastry after pastry. My food processor could only hold enough flour/butter for one 9″ pie at a time, so I would just do 4 or 5 batches in a row. I didn’t bother cleaning out the food processor between batches like that, because I was just going to dump more butter and flour into it in a minute. Just a quick scrape with a spatula to get the last few bits of pastry out was enough.
You need to let pastry rest in the fridge, but if it rests too long it’ll be too hard to roll when you take it out, then you have to wait for it to warm up a bit. I found an hour to an hour and a half in the fridge was just the right amount.
Think about guests in pretty outfits, and you in a white dress. You don’t want extra-juicy pie, so I made sure all the filling recipes I used included tapioca or cornstarch. I like juicy pies at home, but I didn’t want drippy fillings at the weddding.
If you don’t have a standby pastry recipe already, try a single batch of the recipe you’re planning first. Then you can adjust ingredients or choose a whole new recipe as needed.
Think about how you’re decorating your crusts. If you have many flavours, you might want to have different crusts to tell them apart.

I know for a fact that these ones are blueberry pies, the first picture in the post is a Saskatoonberry/serviceberry pie, and the one with the tiled hearts is apple.

The Storing/Transporting:

Fruit pies don’t need to be refrigerated overnight. Custard pies on the other hand, do. If you’re concerned about fridge space, go with fruit pies!
To transport them, we used a shallow cardboard box for each pie, and then put those boxes in big rubbermaid containers. Don’t close the boxes until the pies are completely cool! Otherwise they’ll steam themselves inside the box and get all soggy.
My original plan was to set everything, including the pies, on the pie table the night before, and cover the pies with tinfoil tents or tea towels to keep flies off. It was my very smart mother who pointed out that old buildings tend to have little mice-y tenants that like tasty food left out on tables. Hm… I’d forgotten about unwanted pets. So, we left them in their boxes.

The first 6 pies (strawberry-rhubarb, blueberry, sour cherry) and 2 chocolate tarts almost ready to go!

The Display:

We spent 12 months stocking up on cake/pie plates, and ended up with more than we needed, but better more than too few!
To get the pies where I wanted, once all the cake plates were set up in a pleasing display on Friday, I put a sealed pie in a box on each stand, and left instructions for our day-of-coordinator to take the pies out of the boxes before guests came in.
Make signs for each flavour of pie. I woke up at 4am on my wedding day with the thought of ‘I never made flavour signs!!’. Then I decided there was nothing I could do about it, and went back to sleep. I had been thinking of making a little tent card for each pie, but once Cinnamon Buns and I had cut the wedding pie, the caterers ended up cutting and plating a whole bunch of pieces of pie so people could just walk up and grab a plate. Had I known that was going to happen (and had I actually remembered to make signs) I probably would have just done a list of what flavours there were in an 8×10 frame or something. It didn’t work out too badly, because once the pies were all cut like that, you could see what was in them.

The Amounts:

I made 12 fruit pies, 2 each of 6 flavours. My mum made 2 chocolate tarts, so we had a total of 14 pies. Our math ran like this:

60 guests + 5 people working = 65 people. Many flavours means people will try multiple pies, so let’s average 2 slices per person. 65 people X 2 pieces each = 130 slices, which is probably a generous estimate.

If each fruit pie is sliced into 8 slices, that’s 96 slices. The chocolate tarts could be sliced into 12 slices each, that’s 24 which = 120 slices of various pies.

Here’s the answer to the question that everyone is asking: how much was left over?

Sunday, when we went back to clean up, there were 5 boxes left with pie in them. Two boxes had whole, untouched pies (a Saskatoonberry, and a blackberry-apple) and the other three boxes had slices of various flavours in them, which probably comprised 2.5 total pies. We took them back to our house, and at our Sunday British-relatives’ dinner, the three boxes of slices were polished off. The whole blackberry-apple we took into work on Monday as a thank you for a very touching card they sent. That means that the two of us just have to polish off the Saskatoonberry pie, and the wedding pie is done with! I think the amounts were just right. Also remember, if you’re using this as a planning guide for your wedding, that we had a ‘heavy appetizer’ or ‘tapas-style’ dinner, rather than a full plated meal.

Does this post make making pie for your wedding seem feasible? I hope so, because I had fun doing it, and wouldn’t change a thing! (Apart from maybe actually getting these done a month before, instead of a week or two).

Desserts! Onna Stick!

Posted on April 2, 2011 by rycrafty

Any other Pratchett/CMOT Dibbler fans out there? Anyway….

I have an addiction. Its name is Martha Stewart Weddings. I have most of what I need for the wedding, but I can’t stop buying MSW – I guess I think I’ll miss something if I don’t read every issue? Really, they’re all the same ads for dresses and Sandals resorts, but there are still some real gems in there too! (Full disclosure: Mum got me a subscription to the regular Martha Stewart mag for Christmas, it it is the gift that keeps on giving. Love. It.) The most recent issue had these babies:

Lemon-Meringue Cookie Kebabs, photo from MSW.

I am now obsessed with these essence-of-pie-onna-stick pops. You see, the marshmallow is lemon-flavoured, then you’ve got the meringue, and the shortbread cookie represents the crust… LEMON MERINGUE PIE ONNA STICK. Does it get any better?

I keep thinking that it would be nice to have some snacks and a little refreshing beverage available pre-ceremony, for those who get there early. I’m picturing pretty drink dispensers filled with lemonade and water (PS: where does one buy those?), and now I’m drawing in a few little tasties on sticks! We’ll have a full pie buffet for actual dessert later in the evening, so we couldn’t use them there, but what if people are feeling a little munch-y pre-ceremony? It’s only polite to provide, after all.

After obsessing about the LMCKs for a day or two, I realised that we could have a few different desserts on sticks for snacking on:

Photo from Sugar Pie Bakery

The popular pie-onna-stick (incidentally, this bakery is the brainchild of a friend of a friend of mine, so I’d be supporting good people by buying).

And that dessert-world darling, the macaron. Onna stick.

(photo from Trissalicious)

I recently found a macaron bakery here in Calgary, she has a booth at a new farmer’s market (the same place you can buy the pie-onna-stick!). She doesn’t sell macarons on sticks, but I’m sure she could be persuaded. I have made macarons myself, but I wouldn’t want to put that sort of stress on myself before the wedding, considering how much wedding pie I’ll be baking that week.

I can see such a pretty display of all these in my head, and everything arranged on top of vintage furniture painted in bright colours, maybe the paint is a little worn, making it that much more rustic-chic…. But it probably won’t happen. Especially the macarons won’t happen because they are made with almond flour. We gave ourselves a strict “no nuts” rule for the wedding, to avoid killing important people like the best man and the groom’s mum.

I’m still toying with the idea of the lemon meringue pops, because I’ve seen meringue kisses for sale at Safeway (usually in tubs of white/yellow/pink, but I could deal with that), the cookies would be easy, and I have made marshmallows before. They’re not that hard (if you have a working candy thermometer…). Or maybe I should just find another excuse to make them, like a birthday party or something? Something non-wedding related might be better for my sanity, but now that I’ve had this vision of cute desserts on sticks at the wedding, it is hard to get rid of it.

Will people even want snackies before an evening wedding, when they’re going to have a dinner’s worth of appies anyway? Or am I turning into a hobbit-like creature, wanting to feed everyone dinner and second dinner?

Glitter Ball Cookies

Posted on December 25, 2010 by rycrafty

Happy Christmas, if that’s your bag, baby!

As I can’t send all my blog readers actual cookies for the holidays, I thought I’d do the best a blogger can do: post about cookies!

And tell you guys how I made this Martha recipe work for me. I won’t reprint the recipe here, but here’s a link to it on Martha’s website. Go over there, look at those cookies! They have this awesome disco ball-look from all the sanding sugar. I knew I wanted to make them the moment I saw them in the magazine, so I decided to bring some in to work on the day before vacation.

I mixed up the dough as directed. Martha says that if the dough is too sticky to work with, chill it for a bit. Mine wasn’t sticky enough to work with! It was crumbly and dry. I did a quick test in a measuring cup by adding water to a little bit of the dough. That really helped, it was much easier to roll into balls then. So I added just a tiny bit of water to the mix (note that I did a double batch, that is why the mixer is so full!).

Then it was time for rolling in the sugar. I bought mine at Winners – it’s a great place for those random, non-perishable food items. Check regularly, and build up your arsenal of sprinkles! (It is also my secret source for cheap artisan vanilla!)

I put my sugar into two shallow bowls, as directed (I used our pasta bowls). Then a got a ball of dough and rolled it in the sugar. Not very much stuck. I tried again. Still not much more sticking. Definitely no disco ball effect. I made about 12 this very frustrating way, pressing bits of sugar into the dough bit by bit, when I decided I’d had enough. I filled a little bowl with water, and I moved my green sprinkles into a smaller, deeper bowl.

I dunked a doughball in the water, then rolled it around in the green sprinkles. Bingo, instant green disco ball! It was the water that made the difference, but I also found it easier to work with the deeper bowl than the shallow one.

I found the easiest thing was to use my left hand to dunk the ball and drop it in the sprinkles, then my right hand to roll it around. That meant that only one hand got coated in sugar, and most of the colouring in the sugar stayed out of the water (I took the picture of my water bowl above before I figured this trick out!). By the end, the colour had bled from the sanding sugar, because of the moisture, but it didn’t matter too much. The sanding sugar I had was a mix of coloured and plain sugar, so the bleeding just meant that the plain sugar turned red (or green), which wasn’t a problem. I also worked with one colour at a time, and rinsed my hands between colours.

I didn’t bother sticking two together with ginger icing, like Martha says either. They’re perfectly nice to eat just as they are!

Recipes October 31 – November 6

Posted on November 7, 2010 by rycrafty

I have quite the cookbook collection, but I still find most of the recipes I use online. I thought I’d start collecting all the ones I use in a week together in one post, just for fun.

ReBar Rice Pudding from the ReBar cookbook: I make this at least once a month, so I’ll just put it in here. Rebar is a vegetarian restaurant in my hometown, and I have a copy of their fabulous book. This rice pudding is everything you’ve ever wanted from rice pudding: lots of nice spice, not to sweet but just sweet enough, creamy from coconut and dairy-free! I also have an almost endless supply of brown basmati rice because I bought a 20kg bag from the local organic store on sale. Last year. Still eating it.

Wholewheat Apple Muffins from Smitten Kitchen: Very tasty, nice and moist! I used brown sugar in the muffins, and really chunky sugar for on top. Yum.

Butternut Squash Thyme Crumble from White on Rice Couple: I’ve only ever cooked a butternut squash once before, and that was in the slow cooker, although I buy butternut squash ravioli fairly often. This was absolutely delicious – crumble is one of my favourite desserts and I’d never thought about making it savoury. I used wholewheat flour for the topping, and added some bacon for crunch. The taste combination of everything really reminded me of one of my favourite holiday foods: stuffing. I think it’d go great as a side dish at Christmas or Thanksgiving. I served it with baked chicken breasts.

Stuffed Shells from the November issue of Martha Stewart Living: I love that this recipe makes 2 dishes – one to cook and one to freeze! Or you could freeze both. I think this might have been the first time I’ve ever bought and chopped cabbage – I found this tutorial helpful. Cabbage never really features in our diet for some reason. I used bacon in this instead of prosciutto, as I had bacon leftover from the Butternut Crumble the day before.

Stuffed Shells, before baking

Cookie Letters

Posted on October 1, 2010 by rycrafty

I bought these cookie cutters from Williams Sonoma when Cinnamum came out on her ‘omg you’re ENGAGED’ trip to visit. We both agreed they were wonderful, and I’ve been wondering if I could work them into the wedding somehow.

Picture from Williams Sonoma

You get those 3 shapes, and a big bag of tiny plastic letters to slide into them, making them say whatever you want. I’ve been dying to use them, and opening night of my current show gave me the perfect excuse to test them out! I used my favourite sugar cookie recipe (from the book Cookie Craft. Talk about inspiring cookies!). All the following pictures were taken by me!

I made a double batch of their basic recipe. Once everything was mixed, I took half the dough out of the mixer, then added blue food colouring to the stuff left in the mixer. It didn’t blend completely smooth – I guess I wasn’t patient enough? I was also using the liquid stuff, not the gel, which could have made a difference. I rolled everything out, then put the sheets of dough into the fridge, like they tell you.

When it came to cutting the cookies, you definitely want to give the dough time to warm up. The cutter part will cut through the dough, but the letters won’t stamp until the dough is a little softer. Sliding the letters in to the slots was pretty easy. The hardest part was sorting through the pile of letters! Remember to write your words backwards, so they stamp forwards.

I baked the cookies that day, then put them in a tin once they’d cooled. The next day, I made royal icing from the same book. I used their piping/outlining icing recipe, because I knew I just wanted to do dots. I think I could have stood to beat the icing a little longer, it did splodge out a bit, so the look wasn’t as delicate as I was going for. I used squeezy icing bottles, which makes piping very easy. Cinnamon Buns helped me ice them, which was a lot of fun.

Things to think about:

Coloured cookies, when they brown, will change colour. These blue ones started going green around the edges. Blue + brown = green, I suppose.
Beat the icing really, really hard, if you’re going for the very delicate look featured on the box/website.
Find the teeniest icing tip you can. I used a #4.
I think the lemon zest in the cookies took up the food colouring in a different way than the dough – it made little darker flecks in the blue. You can’t see it in the white ones.
If you give a boy a squeezy bottle of icing, and also point out the reject cookies that will not be given away to people, expect this: (stop reading if you’re easily offended, or at work!)

Continue reading →

Birthday Cake 2010

Posted on April 17, 2010 by rycrafty

This year, I had a task: to make a birthday cake for myself and my friend K, as our birthdays are 4 days apart. The deal was that she’d make dinner, and I’d make the cake.

My birthday was Good Friday this year, and cake day actually ended up being Easter Monday, so I decided against anything with chocolate in – we’d all be chocolated-out. I looked through my favourite cake book, Sky High, and picked out a couple choices. After consulting with K, we decided on the Marbled Lemon-Blueberry cake.

The first step of the recipe is to make jam for the filling. I love that ‘make jam’ was the first step, it made my day. And then I made jam! It was also a good thing I had to blender-ize the blueberries, there’s been a rash of food tampering at supermarkets around here, pins and tacks and the like. People are scary. I made the jam on the Saturday, when cake day was Monday.

I find it is so helpful to divide up recipes like this into multiple days. Sunday was cake-baking day:

You use some of the jam to make some batter purple, and swirl that in to the cake pans.

Monday was the part I’m always least confident in: icing the cake. This recipe had you make a buttercream icing, which I’ve never done before, and I’m not exactly sure what sort of texture buttercream should even be. When time eventually came to eat the cake, I scraped all my icing off, because it just tasted (and felt) like eating butter. Everyone else seemed to like it though, and I generally scrape the icing off store bought cakes too.

As you can see, I had a bit of a structural integrity problem here. You’re suppose to trim off any domed bits from your cakes, so you have perfectly flat surfaces. If I’d done that, all the marbling would have been cut off! So, I decided to glue it together with jam and icing, which mostly worked. I found the icing ended up looking pretty sweaty in the end, even after being in the fridge. I feel like the lemon juice didn’t like mixing with the butter.

I’m not sure how the cake in the book has swirls so dark, and icing so white. My swirls were much paler, and I followed the instructions for how much jam to add to the batter. I also don’t know how you get white icing out of yellow butter, and eggs with yellow yolks.

Some cell phone photos of the cake at the party, after slicing off everyone’s pieces. Yes, I made a cake that is labeled ‘serves 16-20′ for a party of 8. It was delicious!

Gingerbread Beer Cake with Instant Fudge Frosting

Posted on February 16, 2010 by rycrafty

Monday, I set out to make a 3-layer cake. I love the cake book Sky High, and jump at any chance to make a fancy cake.

I started with the Gingerbread Beer cake – I found a fancy ‘porter’ beer, because that’s what the recipe recommended. I got out my 3 8″ cake pans (well, 2 8″ cake pans, and 1 8″ springform), and my beloved new KitchenAid mixer and went at it.

I realised that I had no parchment paper or even waxed paper in the house, so I just sprayed extra grease into the pans. Here are my 3 layers after getting them out of the pans:

On the first two I managed to scrape the stuck bits out of the pan and put them back on the cakes (with varying levels of success). The third one was so stuck I just ate those bits with a fork, and left the cake with a hole in it.

Because my friend is lactose-intolerant, I couldn’t do the tasty bittersweet chocolate & cream icing called for in the recipe. I looked through the book and found the ‘instant fudge frosting’ from a vanilla cake, and decided to use that. That frosting called for 6 tablespoons of half and half – I bought soy coffee creamer to use for that. I figured that 6 tablespoons was easier to substitute than the 1.5 cups called for in the other recipe!

That frosting, by the way? One of the easiest things ever. You just dump all the ingredients in to your food processor and process until smooth. That’s it.

My cake looks different, probably because I’m not a professional, but I like to think it is because I had a smaller tip than called for on my icing bag.

I thought myself very clever for covering a cutting board in tinfoil to put the cake on – I even remembered the paper strips around the edges so the board would stay clean. Then, I went to put the cake in the cake carrier:

Oops. Now what? The cake carrier is definitely the easiest way to transport cakes and cupcakes, plus I felt that I get to use it rarely enough that I damn well wanted to use it today.

In an amazing feat (undocumented because my hands were busy) I cut a 9″x9″ square from a cardboard box, unrolled the tinfoild from the edges of the cutting board, and slipped the cardboard under the cake, from under the foil. I got about halfway when I just started pushing the whole cake off the cutting board. At that point though, I could pull on the tinfoil to move the cake onto my nicely-size piece of cardboard. Wrapped the edges of the foil around that, and voila! No catastrophe!

Along with the pinwheel, this cake also has dino sprinkles. For the same friend’s birthday last year, I promised to make cake with dinosaur sprinkles. I thought it was a joke, but I actually found some at the grocery store, so I bought them. I wasn’t really thinking about how many dino sprinkles were in that container – every cake I make from now until eternity will have dino sprinkles.

Heart Cookies

Posted on February 13, 2010 by rycrafty

Last year for Christmas (and I mean Christmas 2008 here) I used a Chapters gift certificate to buy myself the book Cookie Craft. I’ve been wanting to make fabulously decorated sugar cookies ever since. This year, as I have three opening nights in a row leading up to Valentine’s Day, I decided to make use of the set of heart cookie cutters my mum sent me last year, and make some cookies.

I’d also been putting this project off because I wasn’t sure how reliable my old mixer was, and how/if I’d have to change any directions. New mixer put paid to all these fears!

I went with two colours of royal icing, although you can see I didn’t do a very good job of matching the pink piping and flood colours. Then came the fun of packaging!

I used that little box pattern I love so much, and paper from the 10 / $1 bin. I chose two papers so the lids would be different, and I mixed up which was the box and which was the lid a bit too.

Then I found a mostly-coordinating colour of vintage seam binding from my stash to tie little bows to close the boxes and attach the tags. For the tags, I just cut 12 rectangles, then used an edge punch on the bottom of each. I just punched a hole through one side of the box for convenience, and because I didn’t have a lot of the same colour ribbon!

The plastic container in the back has the extras – I only made boxes for stage management and actors, the plastic container went in to the green room for crew and designer types. Anyone who was around, really.

I had a lot of fun making both cookies and boxes, but I have to say that I wouldn’t have managed it if I hadn’t had two days off from work.

Podcast-Inspired Gifts

Posted on December 23, 2009 by rycrafty

Last night I had to clean up my craft desk (and my ‘unofficial storage space’, the futon beside my desk) because my parents are coming for Christmas. I thought I’d stick a podcast on in the background to keep me amused while sorting everything out. I noticed that I had a new episode of Scraptime in iTunes so I turned that on. And then I got out the papers and made more mess!

The episode I watched was #446 – Holiday Packaging.

I had just decided earlier in the day to give a couple of my co-workers some homemade jam for Christmas. I was just going to bring in the jars, but when I saw this project, I knew it would fit my 125mL jam jars!

I used up some Christmas paper, which is good – it’s just going to hang around until next year if I don’t!

I modified the boxes a little, not by size, although I thought about it. When putting the top piece on, I used Scor-Tape to adhere the back side of that piece to the back of the box. Then I punched holes in the front flap, then the front of the box, using the first set of holes as a guide (PS: I really want a Crop-a-dile. I got to use one at my last cardmaking class, and I love it!)

I made that modification because the jam jars are just a little too big for the box, so they made the sides bow out, and I felt this way would put less pressure on the box. The picture above shows how I threaded the ribbon through the holes. I also made that top piece a little bigger than recommended. I think the red/green box was 3″ wide, and the swirly one was 4″. I like the 4″ width best.

I pulled the two Kitchen Tildas out of my bowl of stamped, coloured, and cut out Magnolia stamps. They don’t particularly match, but they don’t clash like crazy either, I think. Especially since I used blue ribbon on the box with the blue Tilda.

I think I am going to use this box pattern A LOT. I can’t wait to try re-sizing it too!

If Knitting Be the Food of Life

Posted on September 4, 2009 by rycrafty

I had some very tasty meals at the Sock Summit. This was my favourite:

I highly recommend that anyone going to Portland stop by The Waffle Window. It’s in a very nice little area near two offshoots of Powell’s (one of them being only home & garden and CRAFT books). This was the ‘Purl Two’ waffle, a special for Sock Summit.

On the first day, I explored the food carts at 11th and Alder at lunch with a few other knitters.

Very tasty, very huge burritos to be found here.

I didn’t eat at Voo Doo doughnuts (too full of curry) but I did wander over there with some people.

That’s their revolving display case, and below is a close up a bacon doughnut. Yes, bacon.

I haven’t been knitting much lately – too busy making jams and jellies. While at the Farmer’s Market, I thought the 20lb box of peaches for $28 was a great deal (true) so I bought it. Maybe not the best idea when there’s only 2 people at home, but they’re tasty, tasty peaches.

I’ve also been making stitch markers, some of which follow the food theme:

Carrots!

And, just in time for Halloween:

A New Obsession

Posted on May 14, 2009 by rycrafty

I’m one of those people who is always starting new craft projects. I have supplies for all sorts of crafts in our storage room. I’ve found a new love, but don’t worry, it won’t stop me knitting. My new ‘thing’? Canning.

I bought this book: The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving: Over 300 Recipes to Use Year-Round and I absolutely love it. Mum made all our jams & marmalades when I was growing up. We had a lot of fruit on our property, way more than 3 people could eat in one summer. It is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I moved out, but I didn’t want to end up with 10 jars of jam. Buying that much fruit would be expensive, and we don’t eat that much jam. Small-batch preserving is just right! You get a couple jars of jam, which is just right.

Soon after I bought the book, but before I’d thought seriously about what to make, I went grocery shopping and found a flat of 12 mangoes for $6. So I bought mangoes.

I cut up mangoes.

And I made just about every mango recipe in the book. The thing with small-batch is that while you don’t end up with a lot of product (good) it doesn’t use a lot of fruit (sometimes good). Most recipes call for 2 mangoes. I still have 6 left sitting in the box.

From left to right we have: Mango Chutney, Strawberry-Rhubarb Jam (no mangoes, but I couldn’t help myself), Mango-Lemon Marmalade, Light Mango Spread (I had more than 1 jar of this, but they’ve already gone to new homes!).

P’s stepdad is a recently-diagnosed diabetic, so the light mango stuff was for him. No added sugar, just Splenda, and a special no-sugar pectin.

It gets the plastic lid, because you need to keep it in the fridge or freezer. No sitting on the shelf for 3 months for this one, eat it fast!

I’ve been looking at canning books for ages, trying to find one that meshed with what I knew about canning. Mum never used pectin in anything, saying that it just diluted the fruit. Look at a pectin recipe vs. a no-pectin one and even if you start with the same amount of fruit, you get much more product from the pectin-using one. Thus, diluted fruit flavour. This book doesn’t use it too much, which is nice.

Mum also never boiled the jars once the jam was in. Just put boiling hot jam into hot jars. She boiled the flat part of the lids, to soften the seal, but that was it. Once the lids were on, I’d hang around the kitchen counting the ‘ping!’ noises the lids made as they snapped down to seal. And, no one has ever died or even gotten sick from eating mum’s jam. Some canning books went so overboard on the warnings it just seemed like fear-mongering to me. Small-Batch has you boil the full jars, and I did for these, but I still don’t think it really necessary.

Most of these have been done for about a week, and the only thing I’ve tasted (apart from licking the spoon) is the Mango Chutney. I sometimes will finish knitting a sweater or socks or something, and immediately put it away nice and neat where it belongs. I won’t try it on for a while. After I’ve spent so much time on something, I want to enjoy it being completed without realising that it’s too big/forgot a button/too small/etc. I think I’m doing the same thing with this jam. What if it is too runny? Tastes bad? To stiff? I’m just enjoying the pretty jars right now, and telling myself I haven’t had any yet because you need muffins or scones to truly enjoy jam, and I haven’t made any yet.

I think I’m going to go make some cornmeal muffins now, and while those are in the oven, I may even sew buttons on the finished $1.50 cardi that’s been folded on the shelf for 2 months now.

Sweet and Salty

Posted on December 8, 2008 by rycrafty

A few weeks ago, we had a potluck at work. There was a sign-up sheet with various spaces to put down your name, with only two dessert spots. I immediately claimed one by putting ‘chocolate something’ on the list. Someone had already taken the first dessert spot with ‘carrot cake’, so I thought there should be some contrast.

As for what ‘chocolate something’ entailed, I wasn’t certain until I remembered a cake I’ve seen making the rounds. Baked bakery’s Sweet and Salty Chocolate Cake. The cookbook is on my Christmas list, but this recipe is on Martha Stewart’s website.

I wanted a challenge, and boy was this a challenge! A fun one though. I’d been wanting to make a layer cake for a while. I want to be the cake-baker among my friends, the one people come to for a cake. I figured to become that person, I better start baking cakes. So I went out and bought some cake pans. I had one 8″ pan, but this is a 3-layer cake after all!

I won’t repeat the recipe here, but I will tell you what I found out.

That recipe makes a lot of icing. They said the caramel would do a couple cakes, and the ganache recipe would do one. This is NOT true. I actually made two of these cakes; one was a test that I took to our D&D night a couple days before the potluck. It was a completely different set of people, so no one got bored by cake. One recipe of ganache completely iced both cakes. Granted, I don’t actually like icing on cakes, so I probably spread it thinner than the bakery does, but it would’ve been pretty overwhelming to have it all on one cake.

I needed two goes at the caramel, but that is more because my candy thermometer is a piece of junk. This I should know already, from my first adventure in cooking with Lester, on the fateful day we tried to make marshmallows. I have a feeling the caramel was supposed to be caramel-coloured rather than white, but I didn’t want to risk burning it again.

I also ended up buying a Cupcake Courier (seen in the background of the top photo). If I do want to be cake lady, I need some snazzy transport. I’m also very excited by all the cupcake blogs out there, and want to try some of those for treats to bring in to work.

The cakes were well received at both events, and provided great snacks at work for the next few days. You only need tiny, sliver-like slices of this cake, even with my stingy icing job. The salted caramel is great, it cuts the sickly-sweetness of all the chocolate in the ganache (an entire POUND!). I used a hodge-podge of baking chocolate squares, which I think worked out to 6oz dark, 8oz unsweetened, and 2oz bittersweet.

Definitely put it in the fridge before transporting. The first cake needed to go in the car as soon as I finished icing, and I actually ended up using skewers to pin the layers together so it wouldn’t slip apart. The second one had some time in the fridge (top photo) so it was good and sturdy. The Cupcake Courier worked well on my 15 minute walk to work. And I only got a few weird looks!

I’ve been busy

Posted on October 15, 2008 by rycrafty

And it is only going to get busier!

After being so productive knitting-wise in September, October has so far been a bit of a lapse. I, of course, do have my reasons.

Reason #1:

I’ve been cooking. A lot. In the past few days I’ve made two pumpkin cheesecakes (one vegan, one not), 4 loaves of bread, one vat of moose chili, and another vat of bison stew is currently in the slow cooker. Oh, and about 24 muffins. The reason for all this? Well, the cheesecakes were for Thanksgiving, and the rest is because my job is going to get very busy very soon, and I want to have a freezer full of things I can grab and go. I’ll be starting tech week for my current show, which is the busiest time you get. That’s when we move to the stage and start adding lights and sound and all sorts of cues and most days are 12 hours. Also, as soon as this show opens, I’m starting rehearsals for another one, so I’ll be rehearsing all day and as soon as I’m done, have to run across the street to the other theatre to run that show in the evenings. If you want to hear more about my cooking and baking, I’m part of a food blog called Theatre Cooks. Although currently, I’m the only one who has posted anything there.

Reason #2:

My boyfriend bought me Mario Kart for the Wii. I’ve never been a video game person but I. Love. This. Game.

Reason #3:

I’ve been starting to list stuff on Etsy again!

Clicking those pictures will take you to my Flickr page, but if you want to see my Etsy store, I am at rycrafty.etsy.com. I’ll be trying to put at least one new thing up a day for the next little while. In keeping with the food stocked in the freezer, I have all the descriptions stocked up on my computer, so I just need to copy and paste to make the listing.

I did manage to knit 4 rows on my Druid Mittens the other night (while waiting for bread to bake), so I’m hoping to do the same again tonight. I want to make seitan, and that takes a whole 90 minutes in the oven.

Rycrafty

I knit, I stamp, I colour, I craft. I bake. I make.

Category Archives: Baking & Other Food