Cherry-Lemon Candy Canes, Oatmeal Raisins, & Gingerbread Disks

This weekend I started baking Christmas cookies.  I was lazier than intended (I haven’t had a lot of time to just be mellow with the family lately), and took an unplanned family shopping trip to the mall.  But even with that, and the trip to see the Lights Before Christmas, and a couple dozen Christmas cards, I still managed to make three batches of cookies happen.  Recipes and comments after the jump, but here’s the executive summary.

1. Classic Oatmeal Raisin Cookies: definitely delicious; would have preferred slightly chewier
2. Gingerbread Disks: flavor is good, but they were decidedly crunchy.  they work well when dipped in coffee or milk
3. Cherry-Lemon Candy Canes: very delicious and great texture

1. Classic Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

This is essentially the recipe on the Quaker oatmeal canisters, with Gabriel-friendly substitutions.

Ingredients

• 2/3 C coconut oil
• 1/3 C soy-free Earth Balance
• 1 C brown sugar
• 1/2 C white sugar
• 2/3 C applesauce
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 C pastry flour
• 1/2 C bread flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3 cups oats
• 1 cup raisins (okay, I always use extra raisins, more like 1 1/2 C… who doesn’t like extra raisins?)

Process

Preheat oven to 350ºF.

Cream together coconut oil, Earth Balance and sugars.  Beat in applesauce and vanilla.  Add flours, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt, and mix well.  Add oats and raisins and stir it all together … gently but throroughly: cookies need love like everything does.

I like to put parchment paper down on my cookie sheets, even when they don’t need to be greased… simplifies cleanup greatly.  With or without parchment paper, drop full tablespoons of dough onto cookie sheets (they will expand).

Bake 10-12 minutes.  Cool for 90 seconds on cookie sheet before transferring to cooling rack.

Comments

These little guys are yummy.  When Gabriel saw they were ready, he asked, “Can I have two?”  I gave him his two, and before he even finished the first, he changed it to “Can I have twelve?”  The only problem is that I wish they were chewier.  Because I’m experimenting, I checked them compulsively while they were nearing being done, and they went from not looking done at all to definitely being done.  I wish they were chewier (although 5-8 seconds in the microwave fixes that).  Perhaps a solution would be to lower the oven temperature a bit; that certainly worked for the adapted white bread.

2. Gingerbread Disks

Ingredients

Process

Cream together Earth Balance and sugars.  Beat in egg substitute, molasses, and apple cider vinegar.  Add all the dry ingredients (except the extra supply of sugar) incrementally and stir until thoroughly mixed into a dark, slightly sticky dough.

Cover with plastic and chill two hours or overnight.  (If you chill overnight, you’ll have to let the dough sit out for a bit the next day or it will be unworkably cold.)

Preheat oven to 375.  Prepare cookie sheets with cooking spray or parchment paper.  Roll the dough into small (2/3 inch or so) balls, roll in white sugar, and flatten.

Bake 7-8 minutes.  Yields 4 dozen.

Comments

Turned out a little dark, both in the sense of heavy gingerbread flavor (which I actually like but that’s subjective) and in the sense of not chewy enough.  I think this would have been a good situation for using applesauce as an egg substitute to increase the moisture.  I tried to roll this out and break out the cookie cutters, but it wasn’t rolling-pin-friendly.  But even as they are, they make lovely things to dunk in coffee or milk (or milk substitute).

 3. Cherry-Lemon Candy Canes

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup coconut oil
• 1/2 cup soy-free Earth Balance
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar
• egg substitute (I used 1 Tbsp flax, beaten with 3 Tbsp hot water until gelatinous, but you could use Ener-G if you have it, or 1 large egg if you have no reason to avoid them)
• 2 1/2 cups pastry flour (but see note)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 Tbsp lemon extract
• 1/2 Tbsp cherry extract
• red food coloring

Process

Cream together sugars, coconut oil, and Earth Balance.  Beat in egg substitute.  Stir in the salt and flour until the dough is thoroughly blended.

Divide the dough in half and place in two medium bowls.  Add lemon extract to one half, add food coloring and cherry extract to the other.  Mix thoroughly.  Cover with plastic and chill two hours or overnight.  (If you chill overnight, you’ll have to let the dough sit out for a bit the next day or it will be unworkably cold.)

Preheat oven to 375.  Prepare cookie sheets with cooking spray or parchment paper.  Roll the dough into little snakes; you have some flexibility with thickness and length, but if you make them too skinny it’s hard to keep them even.  Anywhere from 2-4 inches is a good length.  Place a white snake snugly against a red snake, twist them together gently, and bend the end into the candy cane shape.  It’s best to make one whole candy cane at a time before starting the next; if you roll out, say, all the white snakes first, then the first snakes you make will be too dried out by the time you want to use them.

Bake 7-9 minutes.  Yield depends on snake size, of course; I got twenty-seven largeish cookies.

Comments

Fantastical.  They don’t look as pretty as they have in the past, when I’ve used eggs, but they sure were delicious.  In this case it could probably have been remedied by substituting bread flour for some (a cup?) of the pastry flour (but you’re probably using all-purpose flour anyway, so that more than handles that), or by having more experience than I currently have with very soft dough.  In any case, strongly recommend this recipe to anyone looking for something new to try.  The blend of fruit flavors is comforting and somewhat unexpected, and really gives the kitchen a nice fragrance.

Definitely Not Done.

This evening I should bake bread, so probably no cookies. But I want to take another shot at gingerbread cookies (next time, a recipe more suitable for rolling and cutting, so we can have ninjabread men), and sugar cookies are a must (we have leftover Halloween-theme sprinkles, so I’m thinking Nightmare Before Christmas cookies).  More from me soon.

About a week and a half into this adventure, I can say that it’s turning out stranger than I expected.  The other day my wife was sitting on the couch asking me what I knew about “cheese rage”, supposedly a phenomenon where withdrawal from cheese and dairy manifests itself in your mood, and suspecting that she might be experiencing it.  I don’t know about cheese rage, but I know that it can’t be easy for Gabriel to adjust to all the foods he’s suddenly had to leave behind.  And it’s hard to know whether he understands what’s going on.  His preschool teacher says that he’s been getting angry at the lunches I send with him lately, because they don’t have the foods he’s used to.  A few days back he found (I don’t even know where) a stray pouch of Annie’s cheddar bunnies, which he barely liked before, and he clearly thought he had found the best thing in the world.  Poor guy.

But we’re here to talk about baking. After the jump, you’ll find a very successful white bread recipe and a mostly successful toaster pastry recipe.

Bread, takes one and two.

Last time I made a version of Brother Fitzgerald’s Basic White Bread, and was waiting for it to cool enough to try.  It turned out to be better than I expected for a first attempt.  The texture was among the best I’ve gotten, but the crust ended up a little harder than I’d have liked.  Last night it was time to bake up some more bread, so I made some modifications to the recipe.  The results were delicious.  The texture is just about perfect now, and the crust wasn’t too hard.  We ate more than half the first loaf just with this morning’s breakfast, and I’ve since found that it is great for sandwiches also.  Gabriel’s jelly toast consumption seems to have gone up, and for the first time my daughter actually eats bread that I baked (in fact she didn’t believe me when I told her it was my work).  I see this one becoming a staple recipe for our family.  Here’s the recipe, with a couple changes since last time.

White Bread for Gabriel

• 9 tsp active dry yeast
• 2 1/2 cups warm rice milk (I used vanilla rice milk because that’s what I had, and it worked out great)
• 2 Tbsp salt
• 4 Tbsp sugar
• 4 1/2 cups bread flour
• 3 – 3 1/2 cups pastry flour
• 2 Tbsp coconut oil

Warm the milk (not boiling, but noticeably above room temperature; last time it was lukewarm, warmer is better).  Dissolve the yeast in 3/4 cups of milk and let stand for 10 minutes.  Add half the flour and all the other dry ingredients, the coconut oil and the rest of the warm milk, and start to mix (I use a stand mixer).  Add the rest of the flour in increments of 1/2 cup.  I let the dough spend a total of about 13 minutes on a the stand mixer.

Let the dough rise in a covered, greased bowl for 45 minutes.  Punch down and knead by hand for a minute or two.  Let the dough rise in a covered, greased bowl for 45 minutes.  Punch down and knead by hand for a minute or two, then divide the dough into two equal pieces and form the pieces into loaves.  Put each loaf into its own greased bread pan (I spray olive oil for this), and let it rise for 45 minutes on top of the oven while it is preheating to 410º.  Bake for 40 minutes.  Do not overbake.

Remove promptly from pans and cool on racks.

You really should let it cool before slicing, but I can never resist more than a few minutes.

I’m fully satisfied with this as a white bread, so the next phase of my bread journey will be elsewhere.  Perhaps something in the Italian herb direction.

Toaster Pastries … Tempting!

For these, I used this recipe from Smitten Kitchen, which I had previously made exactly as written (before the allergy situation arose).

Changes / Remarks:

• I used a combination of pastry flour and bread flour in a ratio of about 3:1
• vanilla Rice Dream instead of milk
• 1/4 C applesauce instead of the egg
• coconut oil instead of butter
• the filling was based on blueberry jam
• instead of an egg wash, I used rice milk mixed with corn statch as a “vanilla wash”.  This was a good decision.

These were just plain delicious.  The vanilla of the rice milk worked extremely well as a flavor complement to the blueberry filling, and the rice milk wash brought it out.  Gabriel did eat some of these, though admittedly I ate most of them.  Definitely going to make this again.  And again and again.  I want to try various other fruit fillings (cherry will probably be next) and also cinnamon-brown sugar.  And by popular demand from my wife, I need to start icing them.

Next time I’m going to use banana-flax-and-water as an egg substitute instead of applesauce, and also a little more bread flour and a little less pastry flour.  Not because the finished product wasn’t right with the recipe given — it was — but it was very hard to handle when preparing the pastries.  It was too soft to be able to use the fold-over pastry gadget that I have.

Dire Cinnamon Rolls … questionable

Now, my son is a cinnamon roll monster, ever since my parents made some on Thanksgiving morning.  The week after, he pulled me out of bed at about two in the morning, shouting “Cimmon rolls!  Cimmon rolls, Daddy!”  My wife found this recipe, and it seemed like just what the baker ordered, especially because the recipe claims to freeze well.  And that chest freezer in my garage is just begging to be filled with a dozen rolls of cinnamon roll dough.

I made the recipe almost exactly as described on the website, with the following comments/clarifications.

• I doubled the recipe.  I baked one batch and froze the other one (rolled up in a log and wrapped in foil) for later.
• I used coconut oil for the dough, but Earth Balance soy-free for the filling.
• I skipped the margarine altogether for the icing.
• I didn’t use maple syrup in the icing, but I did add maple extract.  1/2 tsp, perhaps?

The problem here was that the dough just didn’t rise properly, even though I waited almost twice as long as the recipe suggested.  Not clear why that would be, especially since the yeast mixture seemed to be frothing enthusiastically at the start.  The end results looked pretty weird, and nothing like the picture with the recipe.  Not at all light or fluffy, just mostly-unrisen rolls of dough.  The filling was terrific though, and the Earth Balance gave it a pleasant nuttiness.  Icing was on the verge of overpowering, but lots of people like their cinnamon rolls that way.  The dough tasted right, but the texture and look were very wrong.

I’ll be thawing out the freezer dough in a couple days, maybe we’ll be luckier next time.  I’ll be trying alternative recipes all this week, because I really want to have cinnamon rolls for Christmas.

Bring on the cookies!

This weekend is blocked out for baking mass quantities of cookies.  I’m starting with oatmeal raisin, and we’ll see where it goes from there.  Report on that soon.

Aside: Wow… I know I’ve gone since Tau Day (late June) without posting, but you know it’s been too long when you barely recognize the interface.  It’s going to take some getting used to…

I am the baker of my household.  My wife is the cook (with exemptions for breakfast, which is my domain, and one special recipe which comes from the Lebanese part of my heritage).  I cooked when I lived alone, of course, but without enthusiasm.  Baking, I love.

Between teaching, research, and family life, I don’t have much time to pursue my own interests, baking included.  But we are now entering the one time of year when I make time for baking, when I consider my privilege to push aside other commitments and timesinks in favor of baking almost absolute: the Christmas season.  It just wouldn’t be Christmas without baked goods filling the kitchen and surrounding area with the smell of the holidays.  If I’ve learned anything, it’s that Christmas spirit comes in through the nose.  There are pies to make, and cookies and cookies and breads and cookies and cookies and cakes and cookies and cookies.  I did say bread.  I make almost all the bread we eat around here.

Bottom line: I bake a lot, and I consider it an essential Christmas ritual to escalate baking to ridiculous levels in the immediate future.

Cut to Friday, when we learned that our son Gabriel (almost three years old, though that hardly seems possible) is allergic to egg whites, peanuts, milk, soy, walnuts, dogs, and shrimp.  (Yes, seven distinct things; this explains why it was to hard to nail down the one thing that was causing his chronic allergic reactions….)  Peanuts wasn’t a surprised, and we’ve been avoiding them for quite a while now (sunflower butter is quite nice).  But egg whites, milk, and soy?!?  In case you’ve never read ingredients lists, that’s not much different from outright being allergic to food.   (Dairy subsitutes, and egg substitutes, are almost invariably soy-based.)

So my wife has spend the weekend culling from our pantry and fridge all the newly excluded foods, and finding as many new, acceptable foods as possible (no small task, especially in small town Michigan).  Me, I’m thinking “but, cookies… how will I make cookies?”

And so begins my adventure into highly-constrained baking.

Before I get to cookies, though, today we ran out of bread.  Today I made my first attempt to bake kid-friendly, wife-friendly, dairy-free, egg-free, soy-free bread.  The recipe I used is an adaptation of Brother Fitzgerald’s Basic White Bread from The Secrets of Jesuit Breadmaking, an outstanding book by Rick Curry, which should be in every breadlover’s collection.  I had to make some substitutions, though.  What follows is my amended list of ingredients.

• 9 tsp active dry yeast
• 2 1/2 cups warm rice milk
• 2 Tbsp salt
• 3 Tbsp sugar
• ~4 cups of bread flour
• ~3 cups of pastry flour
• 2 Tbsp Olivio coconut-based spread

I dissolved the yeast in 1 cup of the milk (the recipe called for just 1/2 cup at this step, but I couldn’t get all the yeast to dissolve at that quantity) and let it set for a little while.  Then half the flour, the rest of the dry, the frothing yeast monster, and the the rest of the milk go into my stand mixer bowl.  I mixed it for a total of about 12 minutes, adding the rest of the flour gradually.  (Without a stand mixer, I’d have to do a bunch of kneading at this point.)

I let it double, punched it down and kneaded a minute or two, let it double, punched it down and kneaded a minute or two, let it double, punched it down, put it into bread pans and let it double.  I have a warming oven, and I let it spend the latter two rises hanging out in there.

The recipe calls for an optional egg wash (apparently that’s how Brother Fitzgerald does it), which of course I had to skip.  I misted the loaf lightly with olive oil, which has worked for me in the past with other recipes.  Then into the 425° oven to bake for 40 minutes.

It’s baking as I type this, so it’s too soon to report on how well it goes over.  Fingers crossed.

My wife’s cousin Mouse sent me this banana bread recipe, which seems like a winner, so at least I can make one baked goods treat.  Time to go exploring for more.

The next thing I attempt (assuming that this bread is not deemed so disastrously inedible that I have to make up another bread recipe, pronto) will be toaster pastries.  Y’know, Pop-Tarts.  One of my son’s favorite foods.  Before we knew about the allergies, I made this recipe, which was fine (I thought they were tasty, anyway) but a lot of work.  Actually forming the individual rectangles and positioning the filling took entirely too long.  I bought a foldover press thing from Bed Bath and Beyond that should be a big time saver.  Again, we’ll see.

(Edit: I mistyped one of the givens when I first posted this.  This is corrected now.  The 1 in row six was incorrectly given as a dot.  My apologies for any frustration this may have caused anyone.)

taudoku 1 (fixed)

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Today on Not About Apples, why mathematicians prefer radians to degrees, and what that has to do with Tau Day.  Also, I use the word “myriograde”.

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I say “the Lego magic” and not “the Star Wars magic”, because I really am playing it chiefly because it’s a Lego game.  I know that there are people, hordes of them, who might pick it up because of their love for Star Wars.  But not me.  I’m a nerd for many things but not for Star Wars.  I bear Star Wars cultists no ill will, and indeed I have a little envy.  I wish I loved those movies the way they do.  And I like the original trilogy just fine.  But I don’t love it.  And I never will.

Because the first Star Wars movie I say was Phantom Menace.  Enough said, I guess.

I never watched the originals as a child, even when my friends were talking about them.  I didn’t watch a lot of movies.  They were on my to-watch list, but it never happened.  When I heard about the prequel trilogy, I was excited.  I planned to watch the six movies in story order.  Episodes I through III as they came out, and then the next day an original trilogy marathon.  That’s not how it worked out, though.  After the first movie I was sufficiently disappointed and nonplussed that I rented the originals all in one go, wanting to see what it was that had made so many people so excited to see .. that.  But by then it was too late for me.  It’s true what they say about first impressions.

Last weekend, the Not My Job segment on “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” was quite apropos: Simon Pegg, actor and author of Nerd Do Well.  (You can read or listen here.)  Peter Sagal and Simon Pegg spend a good bit of the conversation nerding out about the original Star Wars Trilogy (stirring in me, as always, a quiet jealousy for the love some people have for those movies), and the conversation takes an angrier turn when they come to discuss the prequel trilogy.

This reminded me of one of my all-time favorite pieces from This American Life: John Hodgman’s “Jar Jar Head”.  It’s Act 3 of this episode.  If you don’t know this about me already, I’m an unapologetic Hodgmaniac.  I read and reread Areas of My Expertise and More Information than You Require, I watch and rewatch his You’re Welcome clips on The Daily Show (too hard to pick a favorite clip, but my favorite line is surely “No, if anything, it’s not.” from this one; surely one of the all-time great throwaway lines).  But this is different.  This is John Hodgman before his persona was established, before he was playing the character John Hodgman.  The emotion is real, the poignancy and vulnerability are not feigned.  That’s right, it’s vintage John Hodgman.  Please, take 10 minutes and listen.