June 12th, 2009
If you’re up on all your doughnut news, you would know that the first Friday in June is always National Doughnut Day. So In order to celebrate, Mr. Project and I left the house last friday night in search for a doughnut shop.
Now finding doughnut shops in San Francisco is not a difficult thing to do. I’ve never seen so many doughnut shops – there seems to be one on every block around these parts. But we wanted to find a “designer” doughnut shop. So we headed out to Dynamo Donut. If you clicked on that link, you’ll notice two things, 1. They are located in the GHETTO. Seriously. I think we took our lives into our hands for this doughnut run at 9 pm. And 2. that there is no “hours of operation” on the website. So silly me, I assumed they were open till all hours of the night (like most doughnut shops here). However, they were not open late, in fact they close around 6pm, 6PM! Thats insane in the doughnut world! So we risked our lives for nothing!
So not as to be defeated, we searched for doughnuts on our snazzy iphones. We came across an “Eagle Donut” with a 5 star rating that was on Mission St. So once again assuming that all doughnut shops are open late, we decided to check it out. After finding a parking spot a few blocks away, we made the trek uphill to Eagle Donut, which we then found out was also closed! Such devastating news on this National Doughnut Day. So sad. So by this time it was close to 11, and we really didn’t care about doughnuts any more. So we decided to call it a night.
Fast Forward to Tuesday of this week (June 9th) I was thinking about our tragic celebration of National Doughnut Day and said to Mr. Project, “Why didn’t we MAKE doughnuts on national doughnut day??” To which he said, “why don’t you make doughnuts tonight?” Which I thought was a brilliant idea. So while I was cooking dinner, I threw these ingredients into my breadmaker:
* 1 1/4 cups milk
* 1 beaten egg
* 1/4 cup shortening
* 1/4 cup sugar
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 3 1/2 cups white flour
* 1 1/2 teaspoons dry yeast
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February 11th, 2009
Today I got a bread maker! That definitely calls for a blog post. I wasn’t really in the market for a bread maker. I did make rolls the other day and was thinking how nice it would be to make all my own bread, but since my mother always made her bread the hard way, I didn’t really think about the possibility of getting a bread maker to do the task for me.
However, all this changed while I was wasting time on the Two Peas in a Bucket message boards. A fellow pea mentioned that she was looking for a bread maker and was hoping for some recommendations and general advice. Well this got my wheels turning and I thought, gee it would be nice to have a bread maker, but they are so expensive, maybe one day. And then as more people posted to the thread, many ladies were telling the original poster to get hers second hand either from goodwill or craigslist. Of course since I had my very own internet handy, I went right over to craigslist to check things out. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I promptly found a beautiful stainless steel Cuisinart bread machine for sale!
It was listed as only used twice, purchased for $130 and sellnig for $50. Not too shabby, I offered $40, cause well it is craigslist and you’re supposed to haggle a bit. The guy still had it and was home all day. So Mr. Project took care of the whole thing, correspondance, atm, money/product exchange at one shady apartment building in downtown San Francisco. The whole deal. A few hours later, I was a proud owner of a bread maker! Happy Valentine’s day to me.
Of course I had to make bread immediately, so after a quick run to the grocery store to pick up a few key ingredients. I decided to start with classic cinnamon-raisin swirl bread. Yum-o!
The whole process was very quick – which I do believe is the point. I cleared off some counter space, grabbed the recipe and all the ingredients. The cinnamon swirl take a bit more effort since it has “Mix-Ins.” The first step on the recipe was to mix sugar, cinnamon, and a whole lot of raisins in a small bowl.
Once that was mixed, I put it aside and got down to business! Putting the remainder of the ingredients, very carefully in order and according to directions, into the bread maker’s bread pan. This was a basic white bread recipe, all the expected ingredients, sugar, salt, egg, butter, bread flour, yeast.
Then I just let it do its thing. Since it was my first time with a bread maker, I watched for quite awhile and even gave it a name. Henceforth the Bread maker shall be referred to as “Gina the Bread Machine-a”. Or just Gina for short. Once Gina was finished kneeding the bread, an alarm went off and it was time to add the raisin mixture. I pulled out the smoooooth dough and plopped it on my cleaned and floured counter and then rolled it out. After rolling it out, I spread the rasen mixture on like so:
Next, I rolled it up, yes this is just like cinnamon rolls, super easy.
Finally, I pinched all the edges – top and sides – and placed it ever-so-gently back in the bread maker for rising and baking.
I realize now that I probably should have put the bread in upside down — making the completely smooth underbelly face up instead of the pinched top, but It still looked yummy! After replacing the bread pan, I pressed start again (it had been paused). and then just sat back and let Gina do all the work. About 2.5 hours, I had this beautiful loaf of yummy, warm, and practically perfect raisin bread to show for!
YUM! it was seriously so good and a great late night snack for this super late night blogger. The moral of the story: craigslist is awesome.
I have a batch of ingredients in the bread maker which has a timer on (so cool) to have a loaf of honey whole wheat bread all kneaded and baked by the time I wake up tomorrow. Yeah, I’m living the dream. Now I really have to find my running shoes.
January 31st, 2009
There is this great little grocery store just a few blocks from my apartment. Everytime I go there, I look at their amazing bakery and see these fabulous jam-filled heart cookies. But of course I never buy them, and if I did, they would probably be like 3 dollars a piece. So I decided in honor of valentines day, I would make some myself! They were so easy, and exceptionally good! You should definitely try them.
I just moved and have barely any kitchen stuff, so baking presents quite the challenge. For these cookies you will need:
1. A Rolling Pin
2. 2 nesting heart-shapped cookie cutters (I found mine for $1 a piece)
3. Sugar cookie dough recipe + ingredients – or pre-made sugar cookie dough (I totally cheated!).
3b. Extra flour & powdered sugar
4. Red jam
5. Cookie Sheet
First step is to make the dough – or pretend you made the dough. When I use pre-made dough, I always add just a little bit of flour so it doesn’t stick to everything.
Next you’ll need to roll it out. I recommend 3/16″ (just a little less than a quarter of an inch) because you’ll be putting together two cookies in the end, so it gets a bit bulky. This also depends on how much your dough rises.
Once you’ve rolled out your dough, go ahead and use the cookie cutters to cut the big hearts in the dough. At this point you’ll want to cut little hearts in HALF of the big hearts.
I just made a few cookies because I didn’t want to eat a dozen or so. If you are going to make a lot of these, I would recommend making your own dough, that pre-made stuff is expensive. But if you really need to save time, it only took me about 20 min from start to finish to make these awesome cookies.
Next you’ll want to bake the cookies. Just follow the instructions on your recipe. The hardest part of this whole thing was transferring the dough to the baking sheet without ruining the shape. Here are the cookies after they were baked. I also baked the little inner hearts, but had to do it on a second sheet.
I let the cookies cool for about a minute on the pan, then they are easy to move to a paper towel or cooling rack. The assembly of the final cookies is pretty easy. I had the cut-out hearts on one side and dusted them with powdered sugar. Then the whole hearts I covered with a thin layer of jam – a bit thicker towards the center.
The final assembly consisted of placing the dusted hearts on the jammed hearts. Viola! Beautiful jam filled heart cookies! These were so so yummy, I’m going to make a big batch for Mr. Project to take to work on valentine’s day!
If you are wanting to make the dough from scratch, I found this super easy recipe online:
Raspberry Sandwich Heart Cookies
Happy Valentine Baking!
