Bread Ape

  I am sure that you have heard the old saying “Some people make bread. And some people bake apes.” I think that I might fall into the later category.  I also may have made that saying up.  No one bakes apes.

My friend Tanya gave me a bread starter. It is kind of like a tamagotchi. Occasionally I need to feed it and take it out for a walk and sometimes even make bread out of it.  This is my first attempt at turning a tamagotchi into bread. 

I am pretty sure I made an ape. I don’t think that bread is supposed to look like this. A yeasty, warm bread ape. I am currently letting it cool, before I chop its face open.  

I don’t know if this counts a bread win, but I tried. That counts for something, right?

Ice Cream Failure

 

This is a little bit of a convoluted story about ice cream and failure.

This story starts with my mother in law giving me a recipe. She had acquired this recipe from a friend and is raved as a no fail bread recipe with only two ingredients. I thought it would be a great recipe to try and a wonderful excuse to buy a half gallon of ice cream. My thought process would be that I would make the ice cream bread and tell my dad about the wonderful uses for ice cream other than just eating it.  That was my plan.  Eat ice cream, try a new recipe for bread and pick on my father and report back to my mother in law on my success.

I really want to say that I executed the plan flawlessly. If I bragged on this as a success and smirked over my kitchen prowess, then know that I was utterly lying. I totally bombed on this.  I think  the fault lie with the ice cream. I thought it would sounded wonderful to have chocolate peanut butter bread. That it would be great to make into French Toast.  There is one thing that I failed to consider with Chocolate Peanut Butter Ripple, is that there is literally ribbons of peanut butter in the ice cream.  Cold peanut butter is stubborn. It does not like to mix and will not unclench its might grip in even melted ice cream.  Trying to get the chilled peanut butter to relax and mix with flour is a  nightmare that I would not wish on my worse enemy.  Once I had everything incorporated I popped it in the oven in a loaf like shape.

In all honesty it looked like I giant brown turd.  It did not look appealing and sadly it did not change into any sort of shape while it baked. It wen tin the oven looking like a turd, and it came out of the oven looking like turd. This was not the easy kitchen victory that I had anticipated. It was the anthesis of that.  My husband, the supportive champ that he is, shave me is best Paul Hollywood impression and let me know it was under proved. 

I had thoughts that perhaps I could salvage this experiment and then write I heart warming tale about over coming adversity and try to tie it into a moral or child hood lesson I learned from my father.

My glorious idea to salvage it, was to first slice it up, so it no longer looked like a turd. The second part was to bake/toast it to be like a biscotti and maybe put a little bit of fudge icing on it. Everything is better with fudge icing on it. Except it isn’t. It still tasted like stale ice cream, except now it was dry and the fudge icing made it really obvious that the bread was lackluster.  It was not what I was trying to accomplish and was a rather embarrassing kitchen failure. 

Sometimes things just suck. There is no way to make it not suck. Sometimes you just have to accept that and keep moving. On the bright side, I had still had ice cream. 

Experimenting on Old People

You are not to experiment on old people.

Say it again.

You are not to experiment on old people.

Say it one more time so it sticks.

You are not to experiment on old people.

Berating myself about using my grandparents for taste testers is not really going well.  It lacks sincerity. It isn’t like they left clutching their stomachs in agony.  That in itself makes it a successful brunch, right?

Truth be told I learned the art of experimentation on guests from my grandmother.  She would often have several experimental dishes when she would host holiday dinners. (And most of us have survived.)

After I lured them into the house with the help of the charming Dib cat, the real fun began. The food experiment this time was something that my grandmother loves and that would be baked oatmeal.  A traditional baked oatmeal typically tastes like an oatmeal cookie and you pour milk over it while it is warm.  The one I tried is from Five Hearte Home and is called Banana Nut Baked Oatmeal. 

Oh, my goody goody gumdrops is it good.  It tastes like a cross between an oatmeal cookie and banana bread.  The maple syrup in it and more to go one it adds the perfect amount of sweetness to balance the density that the oatmeal brings.    The best part is that it was easy to make and doesn’t need to bake for an eternity.  If you are looking for something different that is relatively healthy, I would certainly check it out. 

No grandparents were harmed in the making of the baked oatmeal. So far all participants have survived. Further testing will be conducted. 

Iggins Understands

I told myself I was going to write a blog post before bed, but it isn’t working. I have a couple of half baked ideas and I am exhausted. Here is a picture of my cat in lieu of a meaningful witty post.

Iggins completely understands and is okay with me using his picture. In fact my lovely fur friend has agreed that I should give him canned cat food, instead of trying to force down some half baked ideas.

I think I can agree to this and now we both win. 

Blueberry Buckle

Why is it called a "Buckle"?  That is the question my husband had for me when tasting the latest Pinterest experiment. It has been a long tradition for me that when I work a Saturday, I bring breakfast in and I let one of my coworkers pick what they want for breakfast.  I think that if given the choice most people would rather not work on a Saturday.  Having something good to eat makes the pain of having to work on a Saturday a little more bearable.

Some Saturdays I make quiche, burritos and sometimes even snowman pancakes.  This latest Saturday that I worked, one of my coworkers requested blueberry muffins.  I will admit that I hate my muffin tin.  The way that I want things to turn out and the way that they do turn out are often times on opposite ends of the spectrum.  However, it was the mighty Pinterest to the rescue. Blueberry Buckle from Just A Pinch Recipes is just like a blueberry muffin, with out the muffin liner. The body is nice and moist and there is a crumble top that I could happily pick at.

Not all of my Pinterest experiments are excellent. (Yes, I am talking about you American Goulash, no hard feelings.) I was exceedingly pleased that this one turned out well and can double as a coffee cake in a pinch.  The only hiccup in the entire process was not knowing what size pan to use.  I used a 9 x 5 pan and ended up with the buckle in the over about ten minutes longer than the suggested cook time, because it  did not pass the tooth pick test.  There is also the possibility that my oven is old and temperatures may vary.  In the end it didn't really matter that much, because the finished products was delicious. It made my morning cup of tea a delight and provided smiles and satisfied stomachs to my coworkers.  The only thing left is to try and find out why it is called a buckle and not a belt.

Getting Off My Butt To Make Cornbread

There is one problem with self challenges.  It may not be a problem for other people, but it is for me, and that problem is that my mind will obsess about it.  It is like a hamster wheel that just keeps spinning for no other reason than just to spin.  I realized over the weekend that it had been a month and a half since I had truly tried a recipe from my Cook Book Challenge.  I disgust myself at times.  The recipes in the books won't cook themselves.  Then to top it off I gained two more cookbooks during Christmas. My mother had a good laugh as I opened up a cookbook on homemade candy bars and another book on canning.  I would groan and call uncle on this whole challenge, but I am at the half way point and there is plenty of time to catch up. 

In the name of catching up, and because I am compelled by good manners to offer to bring something to a get together, and also because I do truly like to putz around the kitchen, I offered to bring something to the annual girlfriend gift exchange.  This is where a good majority of my girl friends get together and exchange presents and catch up with each other after a nice long holiday. Eat, Drink some more and be merry are all part of the experience. 

Too Lazy to Flip this Picture

Lizzy hosted it this year, and a hearty winter soup was part of the menu.  I don't know about most people, but I do love a chunk of bread to go with soup, so I volunteered to bring bread for the meal. In my head, I was going to do this fancy braided bread that looked really awesome and probably was going to take half a day to accomplish. That was the original plan, then I realized that I had to work over the weekend, and complicated braided bread was not something I was going to have time for. 

In fact, I was seriously debating on a quick run to the grocer to pick up french bread or table bread, but the monologue in my brain would not shut up. In fact the monologue got quite vicious, stating that if I had time to play games on my phone, then I had time to bake bread. 

Flipping through the book, The Art of Bread by Cooking Club of America I settled upon Classic Corn Bread.  Corn Bread goes with almost everything, and the recipe looked almost like every other recipe that I have seen of corn bread.  With a lot of mental berating and very little skill, I toss a corn bread batter in the oven and flounced off to run a brush through my hair and find a shirt that didn't have flour on it, so that I would be ready to go when the corn bread was ready. 

The gift exchange was fun, and thankfully the corn bread was a success. It didn't do all the horrible things that I thought it would in my mind, which mostly consisted of it not solidifying in the center or being dry.  It was also successful in the fact that it got the internal monologue to shut up for once, and compelled me to start looking at some of the cookbooks I still have on the list. Yay for small victories.