Holiday Bakeathon 2014

Our very first holiday baking day! Sarah compiled all the recipes. She chose a bunch of vegan treats so that Caroline could share some with her family. We additionally had one more recipe on the list, Eggnog Florentines, but decided against making it because we ran out of time and it looked like a relatively complicated recipe compared to the other cookies we were attempting. We gravely underestimated the amount of time we'd need to spend making everything, especially baking the cookies and frosting them -- two large batches of cutout cookies is quite a lot of work for three people with only one oven!

Sarah and Caroline frantically finished the raspberry truffles and frosting all the cookies the next morning so Sarah could bring the treats to her late-morning tae kwon do class. It was a fun learning experience.

RECIPES

• Spicy Gingerbread Cookies (Smitten Kitchen) -- this recipe was really, really delicious, especially paired with cream cheese frosting. Sarah's family loves to make Santa face cookies out of this and she showed us how to make them. They are the most delightful thing.
• Lofthouse Style Soft Sugar Cookies (Two Peas and Their Pod) -- these turned out as advertised, fluffy and soft textured like the brand they imitate. I personally think they were a little too delicate to hold up to transportation. But I am not a huge fan of Lofthouse sugar cookies anyway. They are too sweet and something about the texture feels like I'm going to inhale the entire bite and suffocate and they always fall apart on me when I bite into them. This recipe is great if that's what you're going for, but it is not something I enjoy.
• Cream Cheese Frosting -- we used this for both the gingerbread and sugar cookies.
• Mexican Hot Chocolate Snickerdoodles (Isa Chandra, from her book Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar) -- A vegan treat. I'm not the biggest fan of chili pepper in my chocolate and I found the end product somewhat bitter so I thought these were just OK, but Caroline seemed to like them a lot.
• Gingerbread Biscotti (Smitten Kitchen) -- I was afraid I'd get tired of gingerbread after making so many cutout cookies, but I ended up really enjoying these and would make them again.
• Decadent Hot Chocolate Mix (Smitten Kitchen) -- quite easy to make if you have a food processor, and absolutely delicious. We made 4 times the recipe and split it 3 ways, and each generously filled a pint canning jar.
• Homemade Marshmallows (Alton Brown) -- for putting in the hot chocolate! We piped the mixture into long, winding ribbons onto so many cookie sheets and then tried to cut them with a pizza cutter until we discovered scissors works way better. Definitely use powdered sugar instead of mixing in cornstarch because the cornstarch makes it taste bitter (it also doesn't taste good in the hot chocolate) and the powdered sugar is not incredibly sweet anyway.
• Chocolate Raspberry Truffles (from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking, p.172) -- I made the raspberry ganache part but Sarah and Caroline finished making them the next day. These ended up a little too soft so they were hard to shape and looked messy, but they tasted good. I think this could be because they may have dispensed with the tempered chocolate coating on the outside.
• Dark Chocolate Coconut Truffles (Melanie Stephens, via Feed Your Awesome Machine) -- made with coconut milk instead of dairy cream so they are vegan friendly. They worked beautifully.
• Dark Chocolate Cherry-Walnut Bark (Grace Parisi via Food and Wine) -- no complaints here, this was really tasty. We made it vegan with dairy-free chocolate.
• Peppermint Bark (Allrecipes) -- my sister-in-law makes this so I was excited to try it. The only issue was that the peppermint candy crumbles had a hard time adhering to the surface of the chocolate.
• Popcorn Brittle (Mark Scarbrough via Cooking Light)-- a very old fashioned feeling recipe, but it holds up great. It has a really lovely salty-sweet taste and the molasses gives it an interesting type of sweetness. The popcorn makes for a light, easy-to-bite texture too, unlike most candy brittle.

Mardi Gras King Cake

Because I got the baby in the cake last year, I was in charge of supplying the king cake for Mardi Gras this year at work. I felt like trying to make one rather than drive across town to get one from the bakery, which I thought was nothing special. Normally the king cake stays around all day at my work, but people that normally wouldn't eat king cake tried some because it was homemade, so this one got completely eaten within a couple of hours. They especially loved the rich flavor of the bread, and that it wasn't overly sugary like the ones we got from bakeries.

I made this twice, once as a trial run because my attempts at yeast bread have been hit or miss in the past, and once for the real thing.

• I cut the recipe in half so it would only make one bread/cake (works great if you don't need to feed an army).
• I used a bread machine for most of the initial work, and did the shaping and final rise as normal.
• Since it's cold in the winter where I live and room temperature is not enough to raise the bread, I preheated the oven to its lowest temperature, then turned it off, placed a mug of boiling water on the edge of the cookie sheet the bread dough was on, and let the bread rise inside the warm oven. It worked great!
• I brushed egg wash on top (just beat an egg with a tiny bit of milk or water) before baking to give it a nice golden color.
• I went easy on the icing and did not double the filling as other reviewers of the recipe suggested.
• I did put a plastic baby figurine in it -- I slit the bottom of the cake and pushed it in after the cake was baked and cooled but before decorating so as not to smudge the decoration.
• I colored my own sugar purple for the cake. The color was soft when I first made it but got more intense after I sprinkled it on the icing.

Verdict: This recipe was a great success, and I would even consider making it when it's not Mardi Gras because it's that tasty.

RECIPE: Mardi Gras King Cake

Vanilla Caramels

I have made these several times for fall/winter holidays (mainly in the first half of the 2010s; these photos are from 2011) and liked them a lot. I'm posting the recipe here in case I ever want to make them again. I want to make pecan turtles at some point and I think this would be a good component.

Notes:

• I usually pour mine into an 8x8 inch square pan. It makes around 120-140 pieces. 

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RECIPE:

Vanilla Caramels
from Giverslog

1 cup unsalted butter
1 cup (11.5 oz) light corn syrup
14 oz (1 can) sweetened condensed milk
2 1/4 cups (14.5 oz) brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla
Chopped nuts for mixing in or topping (optional; if using I recommend toasting them first for extra flavor) 

Before beginning, test your candy thermometer for accuracy. Clip the candy thermometer onto a pan full of cold water and bring it to a boil, ensuring the thermometer is not touching the bottom of the pan. Boiling water should read 212°F. Once the water is boiling, make note of any difference in your reading, and adjust your reading accordingly when you make the candy. For example, if thermometer reads 210° in boiling water instead of 212°, then remove the caramel from the heat at 242°F instead of 244°F.

Line your pan with parchment paper, even up the sides. Chop any nuts or other mix-ins/toppings and set aside. Cut butter into smaller, even sized cubes for even melting, then place in a saucepan and melt it over low heat. Carefully add the sugar by pouring it into the center of the pan. If any sugar crystals stick to the side of the pan, push them down with a damp pastry brush so they do not crystallize the entire batch. Stir slowly until the sugar is well combined with the melted butter. Add corn syrup and sweetened condensed milk (or cream) and mix in thoroughly. Cook on medium for 1 minute, stirring the whole time, then increase heat to medium-high and keep stirring until the mixture is boiling. Once boiling, attach the candy thermometer to the side of the pan, ensuring it does not rest against the bottom of the pan. By the time the caramel mixture is boiling, if you have been stirring enough, the butter should be fully blended into the caramel mixture and not separated.

Reduce the heat to medium, adjusting gradually so that you keep a moderate, steady boil. Stir frequently and consistently so as not to let it separate. The temperature of the mixture will not rise at a steady rate, so watch the thermometer closely, especially as it nears the target temperature (it tends to accelerate the hotter it gets). If you are even slightly unsure about the accuracy of your thermometer, periodically test the mixture by dropping a small amount of it into cold water to see how it behaves. When the thermometer reaches 244° (low end of firm ball stage), remove caramel from heat. Stir in vanilla carefully but quickly (it will sizzle and boil when you pour it in) as well as any nuts or other mix-ins, then pour the caramel into the prepared pan, taking care not to burn yourself.

Allow to cool for several hours and use a knife, kitchen shears, or pizza cutter to cut into small bite-size pieces. Wrap each in wax paper.