Day Twenty: Petits Fours Dummys

I went to a baby shower Sunday, and while they served an impressive three-tier cake with a cartoon caricature of the mother-to-be on the side, there were no petits fours.  There must be petits fours at a shower.  It's a rule....that someone said...some time ago.

For the uninitiated, petits fours (pronounced "petty-fours" if you speak American) are little, bite-sized cakes.  Petit four is French for "little bites of sugary-heaven".* The best are so light, they melt in your mouth...not unlike cotton candy.  :swoon:   You can see why they are quite a treat.

       *Petit Four is actually French for "little oven", but my version is closer to the truth.

Since there were no petits fours at the shower, I decided to make some as a reward to myself for sitting through two hours of watching a pregnant lady open baby gifts.  All that oooh-ing and aaaah-ing at crocheted baby shoes is hard work.   I chose Martha's recipe for Spring Shower Almond Petits Fours. (Note the name.  Martha, too, knows about the rule).  Martha has numerous petits fours recipes, but I chose this one because several people commented that the recipe was "way too sweet".  The misguided folks who wrote those reviews probably also use the phrases "too rich", "too thin", and "too good-looking".  I don't know these people, but they've lost all credibility with that crazy talk.

I learned a few things today:

Lesson #1:   Almond Paste is like cocaine:  It's sold by the gram. Or quite close to it.  I went to a specialty bake shop because I wasn't sure whether or not I would be able to find almond paste at my local grocery.  I walked out of there with a can of almond paste the size of baby food jar,  and my wallet thirteen dollars lighter.  I felt like I had just left one of those "smoke shops" and had bought something illicit.

This is what almond paste looks like laying over a bed of sugar, which happens to be the first ingredients to petits fours:

Looks appetizing, right?  :gags:


Lesson #2:  Electric Mixers will send all male members of your household scampering to you.  It's the modern version of a dinner bell.  My son became intensely interested in what I was baking as soon as I took it out.

This is what the almond paste and sugar looks like after it's been mixed with loads of butter.  Those are egg whites on top about to be gently folded into the mix.

The petits fours uncooked in their pan:

Petits Fours completed.  Sort of looks like creme brulee, n'est pas?

As if the petits fours weren't delicious enough, you put cherry preserves in the middle and on top.

Lesson #3:  Cherry preserves processed in a food processor looks a lot like the stuff that passes for blood in the movies:

Again, looks appetizing, right?

Lesson #4:  Nothing, absolutely nothing, makes your kitchen dirtier than powdered sugar.  I am still finding sticky spots where I spilled the stuff.  This is probably because the glaze for these petits fours takes TWELVE CUPS of powdered sugar.

Sweet Betty Crocker that's a lot of powdered sugar.

I had to take a photo of it.

 ...And you mix the sugar with milk.  Throw in a video game and you've slipped into some kid's fantasy...

Side note: that's me, mixing the glaze with the wisk my husband Santa bought me for Christmas.  What a treat that was...There is nothing like waking up on Christmas morning and finding... a wisk in your stocking!  Yay!

Completed, cherry-preserve-topped petits fours, before the sugar frosting glaze is applied:

They don't look too bad, right?

It is at this point that the whole endeavor goes horribly wrong. 

Lesson #5:  If you don't mix in enough milk to your glaze, your petits fours will end up looking like a bad-horror-movie victim, oozing blood and covered in slime:

This is the most appetizing photo I could take:

In the future I think I will leave the petits fours to the professional bakers.  Besides, it's really not a good idea that I start making these at home.  I might as well just tie the sticks of butter directly to my thighs.  It would be more expedient.  Plus, they look so terrible I'm not sure I could get anyone else to eat them...

But Holy Martha Stewart are they good.

Day Eighty Six: Sugar Tax

I have a five-year old son.  He is a very active boy.  I often joke that he has two speeds:  run and sleep.  There is no middle-ground.  If I could find the source of his energy, I could solve the country's dependence on foreign fuels.  We could just put him on a large hamster wheel and let him go.  Despite being the sweetest boy ever, he gets a lot of attention from his teachers because he is so active.  "Attention" as in:  "Please sit down", "Please stand in line", "Please go back to your seat", "Please stay in your seat", etc... He doesn't exactly get into trouble, but I know it must get annoying to his teachers.

And that is why I pay The Tax:  The Boy Tax.

The Girl Tax is paid in shoes, dresses and weddings. The Boy Tax is paid in emergency room visits, bulk purchases of stain remover, and gifts of thanks and apology.  Gift of Thanks and Apology as in "thanks for putting up with my son, I'm sorry he: broke that window/ kidnapped your cat/ let the class frog loose at assembly."

As a thank-you for his teachers' patience and love, this year's payment is in sugar.  As in sugar cookies.

As you might remember, I'm not so adept at icing sugar cookies.  That attempt was traumatic enough that I'm not ready to try icing cookies again.  I'm mentally scarred.  But I will try making sugar cookies again...this time with sprinkles.

I used Martha's Heart Sugar Cookie Recipe.  The recipe tastes great, but I obviously have some sort of mental defect when it comes to rolling dough.  I simply cannot make the dough uniformly flat. It's always too thick in the middle and too thin on the ends.  It only took me about five eleven tries to create a sugar cookie that didn't fall apart.

After about an hour worth of rolling, cutting, cursing, and re-rolling, I ended up with about a dozen decent-looking cookies:

 I layered the cookies and put each in a little bag with ribbon that reads:  Sweets to the Sweet.

Add a note thanking each teacher for all her hard work and there you go:  Boy Tax paid.

Until next year...

Day Three Hundred Twenty Three: Animal House Sugar Cookies

My three-year old daughter's class studied hibernation last week.  On Friday, they had a Hibernation Party and all the kids wore their pajamas and brought a stuffed animal to hibernate in a "Hibernation Station".  To add to the fun, I brought bear-shaped cookies for the kids.  I used Martha's Flower Sugar Cookies and Royal Icing recipes.  I needed 40 cookies for the party.  This recipe claims it makes 24 cookies.  (This is my nice way of questioning the counting abilities of the person who wrote this recipe.)  I only got about a 10 cookies out of this batch. Maybe it was because the bear-shaped cookie cutter was so large. :shrug:

 If you recall, sugar cookies are not my strong suit.  I am capable of rolling out the dough and cutting the cookies, but I have a major handicap when it comes to transferring said cookies intact onto a baking sheet.  They always end up slightly deformed. So needless to say, finishing ten cookies that still looked like bears took me quite some time.  That was a lot of work for only ten stupid cookies.

Undecorated cookie:

Confession: It is at this point that I went to my local supermarket and bought a box of sugar cookie mix.  I was being lazy, and was pressed for time.  It would be a cold day in hell before I would reproduce Martha's fabulous recipe three more times. I was ready to curse the day I bought that bear-shaped cookie cutter. After making about ten more cookies, I had to enlist my husband into buying more mix for these dang cookies.

It was this point that my husband's mother, the consummate baker, called our house.  And, of course, my husband tells her that we are making cookies from a box.  I was mortified.  Were she dead, I'm sure this sort of information would cause her to roll face down.  As it is, I could almost hear her mental scoff through the phone.

Box cookies, indeed.

I hope all of you, (and she) will forgive the transgression.  It is not one I hope to repeat.

At any rate, with the cookies finally (finally!) cooked, I was able to decorate them. Martha's icing recipe is fabulous.  It's runny enough that it smooths beautifully on a cookie.  (You have to use a thicker version for the outline.)  The meringue powder gives the icing a little sheen like you see on professionally-baked cookies.  These are my bears:

Bear Cookie outlined in black icing:

This one sort of looks like a horse:

An aardvark perhaps?  Not sure if aardvarks hibernate.

Completed cookies:

Those are little chocolate sprinkles on his bum.  (For a three-dimensional I'm-pretending-I-know-what-I'm-doing look.)

 The aardvark:

The cookies looked great and (since I'm the only one who tasted both) no one noticed that some of the cookies were from a box.  (Shhh.  It's our secret.)  Except for the mutant versions, I was excessively pleased with myself.

Maybe a little too pleased. :dancing around the living room:

Day Thirty Nine: Do-Over Sugar Cookies

After the disastrous birthday Puzzle Cookie yesterday, I woke up ready to tackle another, if much simpler, cookie gift. I was half expecting Oops, I did it again to become my theme song.  I had some of the sugar cookie dough left and a cute little box, so I thought I could make some little cookies to fit inside. *  I could make recruit my kids' help with the sprinkles, so it would be a success from one point:  it would give them something constructive to do inside on a rainy humid day. Mommy has her hair to think of.

Roll of sugar cookies with sprinkles

 Child labor: Sprinkling the cookies.

Cookies ready for the oven: 

Delicious cookies straight from the oven:

Cute little box:

Cookies in the box:

*In truth, it was blind luck that the cookies fit so perfectly into the box.  Had I tried to make them fit into this box, you would be reading an amusing account of how I broke all the cookies trying to fit them in. :Thank you, cookie fairy:

Now this is a gift I can be proud of:  a dozen little sugar cookies in a ridiculously cute box.  :pats self on back:  They look so good, I'm glad I have this proof that I made them.  No one will believe me.

Happy Birthday, little guy.

Day Three Hundred Fifty Two: Gettin' My Jam On (Everything)

As I mentioned when I made the Personalized Gift Tags, my birthday was Friday.  My husband planned a dinner with a few friends, and I wanted to make little boxes of late-night snacks for them to take home.  As part of the boxes, I thought to include a little something for breakfast the next morning.  I decided on Martha's Jam-Filled Coffee Cake Muffins because they look seriously decadent and I thought the crumbly, brown-sugar top would keep them moist until they were ready to eat.  (I don't know this to be the case, I was just guessing.)

Martha's recipe calls for the muffins to be made in 2 3/4-inch by 2-inch panettone papers, which are basically fancy, slightly sturdier, cupcake liners.  Despite heroic efforts, I was unable to find panettone papers that size.  I decided to try these adorable, slightly smaller paper muffin cups.  Since these cups are smaller than the suggested cups, I divided the batter between fifteen muffins cups instead of twelve.

Divided batter in ridiculously adorable muffin cups:

A teaspoon of strawberry jam on top:

Covered with a brown-sugar crumble:

I can smell success...or is that just the brown sugar?



About twenty minutes later I checked the oven to find this:

Hmmm.  Looks like I should have used a few more cups.  Nary a single muffin was presentable for my guests.  If you ignored the dripping dough on the outside, however, and actually ate one... They. Are. Delicious.  A herd of elephants or Justin Beiber fans could not keep me from trying this again.

Day Two Hundred Fifteen: Easiest-Cookies-In-The-World: Palmiers

I had some leftover puff pastry from Martha's Chicken Pot Pies the other day, so I decided to use it to make Martha's Palmiers.  I had never made Palmiers before, but they are basically just puff pastry, sprinkled with sugar, then rolled into a cute little shape. They have only two ingredients:  sugar and pastry.

It's true.  These are probably the easiest cookies in the world.

These are Martha's:

These are mine: 

I had to show you Martha's photo, because my photo was a little anti-climatic.  :sad:

These Palmiers were fun to make.  (It's also fun to say.  Use your best French accent:  Palmiers!)  My kids went a little crazy sprinkling the sugar over the pastry, and I had to intervene and roll the pasty into a neat roll.  They were good to eat....I wouldn't buy or make puff pastry expressly for this purpose, but how often can you use dinner leftovers to make cookies?  That makes it a winner in my book.

Day One Hundred Seventeen: Give Me Some Sugar, Cookie

I tried Sugar Cookies again today, by request.  My kids' request, that is.  I tried Martha's Old-Fashioned Sugar Cookies this time, and let my kids cut out the shapes.  Holy hollandaise sauce, were these cookies good.  I wish I could say the same for the shapes.  Despite refrigerating them before putting them in the oven, they ended up looking like melted butter.

This is a cookie I can be proud of:

:Commencing internal dancing:

Um, this is a duck...whose head has melted into it's back like some sort of deformed zombie-duck:

Clearly, a pteranodon, not a bat:

A burned (but non-burned) duck:

There were also a few burned hearts.  I'm sure there is a clever Valentine's Day card punchline here:

I made about two dozen cookies.  Taking into account the ten or so that I burned, plus the roughly half dozen whose shapes were completely unrecognizable, I ended up with about seven edible, pretty cookies.

I've done worse.

Day Fifty Seven: Cinqo de Mexican Wedding Cookies

Saturday is Cinqo de Mayo.  Tomorrow (Thursday) my son's class is celebrating this holiday with Mexican food at snack time.  I've volunteered to bring Mexican Wedding Cookies.  There is one teensy problem:  I've never before made Mexican Wedding Cookies.  I've never before eaten Mexican Wedding Cookies.  

I've never even been to a Mexican Wedding.   

I started before panic set in and chose Martha's recipe for Mexican Wedding Cookies listed on p. 96 of her Baking Handbook.  It's similar to this recipe, except that the recipe I used makes approximately five thousand cookies.  Actually it makes about six dozen cookies, which seems like five thousand when you have to roll those puppies.

You start with pecans:

Then you add flour, butter and sugar. When you are finished, you roll the dough into little balls and bake:

Then you roll those little balls in powdered sugar and you have a Mexican Wedding Cookie:

It's one thing to bake something.  It's quite another to bake something and not know what it's supposed to taste like.  These cookies look good.  They taste good.  But even in the highly unlikely event that these cookies are epic, I wouldn't know.  In the end, I'm just happy they are coated in powdered sugar.  This fact alone is like an insurance policy that guarantees kids will eat them.

Happy Cinqo de Mayo!

Day Two Hundred Ninety: Chocolate-Espresso Snowcaps

Christmas is my favorite time of the year.  I love all the decorations and goodwill;  but, most of all, I love the parties.  I love that everyone takes time to celebrate.  We attended several parties leading up to Christmas and I brought sweets to them all.  Friday I made Martha's Chocolate-Espresso Snowcaps.  These goodies are a chocolate cookie rolled into a ball and dropped in powdered sugar.  As the cookie bakes, the sugar-covered balls crack and show their chocolate interiors.   

These were delicious and made a gorgeous hostess gift.  In fact, they were so good they landed a Facebook mention from the hostess.

And if that's not a measure of cookie-goodness, then what is?

Day Two Hundred Forty-Four: Jelly Roll Up

My youngest daughter turned one-year old on Monday.  For her birthday I made Martha's Hazelnut-Raspberry Jelly Roll.  A jelly roll is basically a thin cake, topped with jelly and cream, and rolled into a tube.

Yes, rolled into a tube.  How do they do that?

Start by baking a very thin cake.  After it's cooked, but before it cools, roll the cake in a clean kitchen towel:

There's a cake in that towel. :promise:

After the cake cools, unroll, spread some jelly and cream, and roll it up (without the towel this time.) Sprinkle with powdered sugar.

This cake looks so fancy.  People think I worked so hard.  (Hah! Fooled those suckers!)  Best part: it was a good cake....although I think it would be hard to screw up a cake rolled in jelly, cream and powdered sugar. 

Day Two Hundred Thirty-Eight: Candy-Corn Cookies

Today is Halloween and my kids have a Carnival at school.  (They are always doing such fun stuff. When do they go to class?)  I signed up to make a treat for the kids, so yesterday I made Martha's Candy-Corn Sugar Cookies.  I'm not a big fan of candy corn, but the recipe is simple and the cookies look really colorful and cute.

The recipe is simple: take a basic sugar cookie.  Bake it.  Immediately upon taking it out of the oven, smack a candy corn right in the middle.  Let cool and serve to all your goblins and goblin-ettes.

I sent these to school in a little box, just big enough to fit into a backpack...and be hand-delivered by a three-year old.

Day Two Hundred Four: Sugar Pie Honey Buns

My mother-in-law makes the best cinnamon rolls in the world.  She does.  Trust me.  Forget those things you buy in the mall.  If an international award for cinnamon rolls existed, she would win it.  She has perfected her recipe over the course of many years, starting before she gave birth to my husband.  She probably practiced kneading dough as a toddler.

My husband and I have tried to make cinnamon rolls many times.  They usually turn out pretty good but hardly comparable to "The Cinnamon Rolls" as they are known in my house.  I've given up.  

Since I can't possibly compare with The Cinnamon Rolls, I decided to try Martha's Honey Buns.  They look sort of like cinnamon rolls, but with honey.  And, since I've nothing to compare them with, I'm thinking I'll be pretty satisfied with the results. (Low expectations are important here.)

First you make the dough, which is key to a tasty bun.  This dough was kneaded mostly by my mixer's dough hook, which you can borrow if you want to go as Captain Hook for Halloween:

This is my dough fully kneaded, ready for rising:

I have to say I was pretty happy with this dough.  It looked fabulous.  It had great potential.  It was a thing of beauty.  

Give the dough an hour to rise and it should double in size.  Mine performed beautifully.  I was so proud of my dough I almost took a photo and sent it to Martha herself.

Martha calls for the dough to be divided into three balls.  Seriously, my dough is so awesome.  I'm pretty confident even my Mother-in-law would agree.  Look at that:

This is probably the first time I've ever made dough that part of it didn't stick to the counter.  I did a little dance around my kitchen when I was able to roll it out with ease:

 Brush with honey and top with filling, then roll it up:

Pour the honey mixture into the pan, then put the sliced rolls, face down into the pan.  My slices look like I cut them with a butter knife, but hey: 

But after the dough rose again, they looked better:

And then it happened:  the school called.  My youngest daughter wasn't feeling well and I had to take her to the doctor.  Also, it was nearly time to pick up my two oldest children from school.  My plan was this:  throw the honey buns in the oven, pick up sick kid, run to pick up the older kids from school, and then run home to take the buns out of the oven before heading to the doctor with all three. 

It was a solid plan.

After picking up all three kids, I ran home.  (No traffic!  No train!  Hurrah!!)  When I opened the back door, however, smoke poured out of the house. The honey topping had bubbled over and had smoked up the whole house.  My buns and glorious dough:

This is a really sad photo with the topping having frozen mid-drip:

The good thing is that the honey buns were still edible.  The bad thing is that they were terrible.  

Now:  I really like sweets.  There are few things that I have ever found too sweet for my tastes.  That being admitted, these honey buns are too sweet.  Once they cooled, the caramel/honey topping hardens into a taffy-like consistency that your dentist will have a hard time removing.  It was sort of like chewing on sticky honeycomb, which later hardens into rubber cement.

It was all very sad. But at least my daughter is feeling better.  

I still have two rolls of (beautiful!) dough that I will use for something else. Maybe I'll throw down some cinnamon and sugar and give my mother-in-law a run for her money.  In fact, I'm going to call her and throw down the cinnamon-roll gauntlet....after about fifty or sixty years of practice.  

I may have a very good chance of winning by then, given that she'd be about one hundred and twenty years old.