Phew, my energy level right now is as flat as a puddle of butter in a microwave.
Seriously, this week has been one for the baking books. On Thursday alone I baked fifteen dozen cookies in two hours, and that was after making all the pastries for the theme park for the day.
But you know what, I love it!
This whole last week was a bake-fest. I made cookies, brownies, breads, cinnamon rolls, pastries, and even a couple cherry galettes using pie filling that I had made and frozen a couple months ago.
And I thought it would be pretty cool to share some of the created caloric cornucopia with ya'll.
It also wouldn't be a Kat post without some form of added practical value, so I'll include a couple of baking tips just because I adore you all.
To start this tour, let's examine the following cookies:
@jacobtothe for Zuccini-fest game night. He ate a lot of it so I think it might have been acceptable.They also happen to be the stars of my blog post cover image. They are zucchini, raisin, oat, pecan in composition, and I can tell you that they got rave reviews from all those who ingested them.
The secret ingredient, (well not so secret now) in these cookies, along with the ones I am going to show you after this series of sentences, is a cup of crispy rice cereal. Crispy rice cereal does something magical to an oatmeal cookie. In most oatmeal cookie recipes you add three cups of oats. Well, in the above cookie and the one below, I added two cups of oats and one cup of crispy rice and the resulting cookie is DIVINE!!
The above little beauties are crispy rice, oatmeal, and milk chocolate chip. There were no leftovers, these cookies just disappeared like our hot summer weather...
The other new to me thing that I baked this week was a couple cherry galettes. A galette is a rustic french pastry that can be filled with savory or sweet filling. It's basically a free-form, rustic pie. I've made lots of pies, pasties, hand pies, empanadas, etc, but until this week I don't think I had officially crafted a galette. Of course a lot of my baked goods are always a little bit on the free-form and rustic side, so maybe I have, heh.
Anyway, the first order of business in galette composition-land was to make some pie crust. Which takes me about as long as singing Take On Me by A-Ha. I then divided my dough in half, chilled it for a bit, and then rolled out a thirteen inch circle of pie crust.
After dolloping some of my thawed homemade cherry pie filling onto the crust, reserving a three inch ring all the way around, I folded the pie crust inward all haphazardly.
I like such things.
Then I got to do a little art.
And herein lies baking tip number two. Anyone who makes pastry a lot knows about washing the pastry. Egg washes give shine and and milk washes give depth of color. I like to use the best of both worlds and beat an egg with a tsp of half and half for my pastry crust washes.
Then I get shine and color!
I also sprinkled a nice dusting of sugar over my pastry after I brushed on the egg/cream wash and voila! Tastiness ahoy!!
And there you have it, a nice little pictorial tour of just a smidgen of what I have been up to in the kitchen this past week. I'm pretty sure that I am permanently going to smell of cinnamon rolls and croissant dough, but you know what? There could be worse things😁
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's full of an obscene amount of baked good photos iPhone.