Yesterday I was back in my garden for the first time in about three weeks. The second set of radishes are almost ready and the few stragglers from the first bunch were overgrown and flowering. I transplanted the tomatoes just before I left and they were tall, but gaingly. Now they’re thick, healthy and some are flowering. The cucumbers I planted from seed have a couple of leaves and hopefully they’ll do better than the poor plants I grew from seed. Those wilted away a day after I transplanted them outside. Sad. In a last minute fit of zucchini desire, I bought a set of 6 plants from a local nursery. They’re all doing really well and I found some little squash at the end of a couple of blossoms. Sadly, they’re yellow squash, not green zucchini as advertised. Fail.

It’s been a busy month since May 19. We took a delicious trip to Maine over Memorial weekend (details to come), there was a Relay for Life comedy show, another bake sale for Relay at work, and then Relay itself! It’s hard to believe it was two weeks ago. It was a really amazing experience and I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.

That’s me and Kate working hard with our team’s fundraiser, the bead-o-meter. You buy a piece of colorful lanyard and then for every lap you walk, you pick up a bead. I walked 16 miles and I have 64 shiny beads on my string. If you’d like to see more pictures, they’re up on flickr.

I’ve spent the past two weeks in Michigan with my parents and I’ll be here a little while longer. I’ll try to use some of this time to catch up here!

I did a lot of baking last week. It had been several weeks since I’d done any substantial baking because of a) Passover and b) oh, I went to Paris for a week with my Mom. Il a été une semaine merveilleuse. (I apologize if that’s incorrect, my French is, shall we say, pas bon.) Last Thursday we had a bake sale at work to raise money for Relay for Life and I’m not one to miss out on a good bake sale.

I decided to make some old favorites, cream cheese brownies and lemon bars, as well as try a couple of new recipes: Sour Cream Coffeecake and a second adaptation, Lemon Mini Bundt Cakes.

Lemon Mini Bundt cakes
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 cups King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup sour cream
1 1/2 teaspoons lemon extract
dash of vanilla extract

Cream together the butter, sugar, and eggs. Mix together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture alternately with the sour cream, stirring after each addition. Add in the lemon extract and vanilla, stir for 15 seconds more.

Preheat the oven to 350.

My mini bundt pan makes 12 mini bundts. This recipe will make 24 mini bundts. If you have 2 mini bundt pans you can do this in one shot, else, you’ll have to wash the pan in the middle like I did.
Grease and flour (I like to use flour baking spray) a mini bundt pan. Fill the bundts halfway. You should use half the batter for one pan. Bake at 350 for 15-20 minutes, the cakes should be springy when done. Cool for 5 minutes in the pan and then turn out onto a cooling rack.

Lemon Glaze
1/4 C powdered sugar
1Tbsp milk (any kind will do)
1/2 tsp lemon extract

Whisk ingredients together until there are no lumps. Drizzle over cooled cakes and let the glaze set for at least 5 minutes before moving.

This is what happens when you buy powdered sugar at Costco.

I have a lot of cooking ahead of me as I don’t have any food made yet. In the past this would have stressed me out but not this year. I’m looking forward to making passover popovers, spinach vegetable kugel, matzo meal pancakes, matzo brei and maybe a few of new things. I love passover. I need to go buy a couple of chickens. And a tube pan. It is very handy having Good Friday off from work. Lots to do tomorrow!

Way back in high school I got a hand-crank pasta roller and cutter set. I enjoyed making fresh pasta, but it was always kind of a pain dealing with the long sheets of dough in one hand and trying to crank the pasta roller with the other hand. I probably made fresh pasta 5 or 10 times, until one day in college I got the bright idea to use my pasta roller on some fimo clay and that was the end of that. It’s nearly impossible to get fimo clay out of a pasta roller.
I’d had my eye on the pasta roller attachment for the Kitchen Aid mixer for a long time. After I got married and had a couple of Macy’s gift cards burning a hole in my pocket, I bought the set. And then it sat on my shelf for 6 months. Or maybe longer. Ok, longer. You got me. In my head it seemed like fresh pasta was going to be this huge messy project, a once-in-a-blue-moon kind of thing. Well let me tell you, it was easy and not at all messy. Here’s the dough recipe:

Pepper Pasta
2 eggs
2 1/4 C King Arthur Unbleached AP flour
2 Tbsp water
1/4 tsp salt
lots of fresh ground pepper (I didn’t measure it)

Combine all ingredients in the workbowl of your mixer and mix together using the paddle blade. Once a dough forms, switch to the dough hook and knead for a couple of minutes. Form the dough in to a ball. You may want to knead by hand for an additional minute or two. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and let rest for 30 minutes.
Bring a large pot of water to a boil and salt the water once it’s boiling. Don’t salt the water before it boils or you’ll pit your pots. Seriously.

Set up the roller attachment on your KA mixer. Divide the dough in half. Roll one ball through on the largest setting, folding the dough and re-rolling 6 or 7 times. Once you have a smooth sheet, move the setting 1 notch smaller. Only roll the sheet through once per notch. Keep rolling on smaller settings until you have the thickness you desire. (I like it thin, 5 or 6). Let the sheet rest and roll out the other sheet.

Once both sheets were done, I used the fettuccine cutter to cut the pasta. I recently read a recipe that recommended letting the sheets rest for 15 minutes between rolling and cutting. I’ll have to give that a try next time. Once the pasta is cut, boil it off. It only takes 4 minutes or so to cook, so if you’re planning on having any sauce with your pasta, have it ready before you put the pasta in the water.

Just so you don’t get any funny ideas, I don’t get any sort of promotional consideration from King Arthur Flour (though I wish I did… Hey – KA .. need me to test anything? I’d be delighted to…)
I order flour and other things from King Arthur Flour fairly regularly. A couple of orders ago, I got a free Cream Tea Scone Mix for ordering more than $50 or $60 worth of stuff. The mix sat on my shelf for awhile, as I’m not a big mix person or a big scone person. Finally, I made them at xmas time when Jodie and Ian came to visit. They were nothing short of fantastic. Delicious, moist, light-textured. No trace of the sawdust doorstops so many scones are. I’d been dreaming of ways to replicate them, since a $7 mix can’t be a staple in my house.

I found a recipe for Cream Scones with Currants in Baking Illustrated Here’s the recipe with my modifications.

Cream Scones (no currants)
2 cups unbleached AP flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
3 Tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
5 Tbsp cold butter, cut in to cubes
1 C heavy cream

Preheat your oven to 425F and set your rack in the middle of the oven.
Put flour, baking powder, sugar and salt in the workbowl of your food processor. Process with several 1-second pulses.
Remove the cover and distribute the butter evenly over the flour. Cover and process with 12 1-second pulses. Add in the heavy cream and do several short pulses until the dough begins to form.
Transfer the dough to a countertop and knead the dough by hand until it comes together into a rough, slightly sticky ball, 5 to 10 seconds.

The original recipe says to cut the scones into 8 wedges. I wanted small, round scones so I used a biscuit cutter to cut them out. This was not a great plan. I should have added in some more flour when I was kneading or something, because they were a big sticky mess to cut out into rounds. Big sticky mess.

Place the scones on an ungreased baking sheet . If you have some pearl sugar, it makes a nice decoration on top. Bake until scone tops are light brown, 12-15 minutes. Cool on a wire rack for at least 15 minutes.

They tasted great, were nice and light, but the dough wasn’t as easy to deal with as the Cream Tea Scone Mix dough. If I want scones that are easy to cut out, I’ll have to keep playing around a bit. I think I’ll give this recipe another try but I’ll go with the more standard triangle shape.

Rollerderby was awesome! I wish I was a good enough skater to be able to play. I’m not really looking for another hobby right now, so the improving-skating-to-be-able-to-play part will have to wait. The next match is April 11. Check out www.ctrollerderby.com for more details.

I didn’t make a pie. Instead I made another couple of batches of whole wheat bread, cream cheese brownies, and scones. More to come on that later, cause there’s some good stories and good lessons to be had. For now, I’m off to watch some CT RollerGirls roller derby!

As I’ve mentioned before, I hate wasting food. I had a substantial amount of chocolate buttercream frosting left over, even though I think I halved the recipe. I’ll have to look at it again to be sure. Not wanting to just eat a big bowl of frosting, I thought I’d try to make some chocolate cookies. Since I didn’t know exactly how much frosting I’d used and how much I had left, this was a total improvisation.

Frosting was: butter, “homemade powdered sugar” (see PSA from previous post), cocoa powder, and a touch of heavy cream.
I added a tablespoon of baking powder, a tablespoon of baking soda, about a half tablespoon of kosher salt, and King Arthur AP flour until it “looked right”. Not terribly scientific, but I’d estimate about 2 cups. I baked the cookies at 350 for 12 minutes and they turned out, well, pretty darn perfect. They didn’t spread and they puffed up nicely. Since our house is a little long on baked goods right now, almost all of the cookies went in to the freezer. Once we’ve eaten through them, I’ll try to make them again and put together an actual recipe.

Three cheers for not wasting butter!