Baking Mixes

In my efforts to make more of our food from scratch, but still with an element of convenience, the other day I mixed up a few different baking mixes.
It's mostly just a matter of measuring and mixing the dry ingredients together, which is quite a bit of the effort in baking things like cornbread, cake, etc. By mixing up several batches at the same time, you can get all the ingredients out once and dirty up bowls, measuring cups and spoons once for several times of baking.

One of the recipes I mixed up here is a cookie recipe that calls for the sugar to be creamed first with oil. Since the sugar isn't mixed in with the flour at the same time, I just whisked the flour and other dry ingredients together and put them in the bottom of the jar. Then I measured out the sugar, set a storage bag in the top of the jar, and poured the sugar into it, keeping the sugar separate from the other dry ingredients.

I wrote instructions as to how to mix up and bake each one on a card and also labeled each jar with the kind of mix it was.
Here's a honey-wheat muffin mix, pie crust mix, the cookie mix behind it, and two corn bread mixes.The smaller jars are pint jars, and the larger ones are quarts. The cookie recipe just barely fit into a quart jar. I saw some half-gallon jars at the hardware store a few days ago in the canning aisle. Those would probably work better for larger mixes. Canning jars are nice because a lot of the lids are interchangeable, and you can even get plastic screw-on lids if you don't like using the flats and bands.

We've eaten up the cookie mix already, and I'm kind of getting a hankering for some corn bread again. My mouth is watering already!

A Few Flakes and a Little Baking

Remember the sourdough starter from awhile back? I've been using it fairly often. I'm not feeding it every few days like one of the recipes called for, but am adding more flour, water, and sugar after each use like another recipe said. It makes really yummy pizza crust, and today I just did a regular loaf of sourdough bread. This was taken after rubbing the top with butter (actually "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" stick). The texture turned out pretty nice, but a little chewy. That may just be the nature of sourdough, though.

And on another subject... here are some pretty snowflakes for your viewing pleasure:
They didn't really stick, but were pretty coming down. :)

Homemade Pop Tarts

Still on my make-it-from-scratch kick, yesterday I decided I would try Suzanne's Homemade Pop Tarts. Here they are in the early stages:Next, they're on the cookie sheet, ready to bake. The recipe called for a greased baking sheet, but I like using parchment paper when I can, so that's what I did. It's really great to keep things from sticking and makes for easy clean-up. (This will be important later in the story.)
I got them all ready and placed them in the oven. The recipe says to bake them for about 8 minutes on the top rack and then transfer them to the bottom rack. When the timer went off, I grabbed my oven mitt and pot holders so I could move the cookie sheet (it's a really big one) to the other rack. I pulled it out...lowered the cookie sheet...and the parchment paper filled with beautiful homemade pop tarts SLID OFF THE COOKIE SHEET!!! Pop tarts, beautiful homemade pop tarts, went down onto the door, down into the crack between the oven and the door, down into the drawer beneath the oven, and onto the floor. The parchment paper came in contact with the heating element and began scorching and nearly smoking. I managed to salvage two pop tarts that stayed on the paper, but the rest went into the scrap pan. What was it I was saying about parchment paper making for easy clean-up?
I had to wait for the oven to cool to clean up. I decided I would NOT be defeated by a piece of parchment paper. There was a little dough left, so I rolled it out some more and had enough for four more smaller pop tarts. I was afraid the crust might be tough after so much handling of the dough, but it wasn't.

And now...the finished product.
Mmmmmmm. Delicious. See where I, ahem, someone broke off a piece and sampled one? :)

Made from Scratch

For some reason, I was recently seized by this urge to start making more things from scratch. This includes bread (well, sort of scratch, because I'm employing the help of my bread machine), soap, and hand lotion. Yes. Hand lotion. But we'll save that for another post.

Part of the reason for some of these projects was inspiration from a blog/website I recently discovered...Chickens in the Road. There are lots of recipes and how-to's, and all kinds of neat stuff.

This morning I mixed up some starter for sourdough bread.It seems to be doing what it's supposed to so far. See it bubbling up?

And then later, I tried a "Chickens in the Road" recipe for Apple-Streudel Ladder Loaf. Here it is after baking. I didn't get a picture before. I was too sticky. And buttery.

Please ignore the un-Martha-Stewart-like tearing of the parchment paper.

The dough recipe I used was the one in my bread machine book, but otherwise I followed the recipe for the most part. I did drizzle on a little powdered sugar glaze after it cooled.
So far I've resisted the temptation to try it...trying to wait until after supper. I'll let you know how it comes out!

After-supper update: The verdict? Yummy!! I think it would also be good to use more apple filling, spread it out on the dough rectangle, roll up jelly-roll style, and slice and bake as for cinnamon rolls. Mmmmm...maybe next time! :)

French Bread

Remember my post about The Machine? I've been using it right and left, and still haven't been buying much store-bought bread. I decided to try something different today...French bread. The machine has a dough-only setting, where it mixes the dough, and after rising, you take it out, shape it by hand, and bake it in the oven. Here's what it looks like:

It smells yummy, hoping it tastes yummy, too.

Woman vs. Machine

Ever since we got married a little over 22 years ago, I've been working on learning to bake homemade bread. You know, a really tall, finely textured loaf. My first loaves were about two or three inches tall and pretty coarse. I found out that I was probably getting the water too hot, so after leaving the candy thermometer in the drawer and testing the liquid's temperature with my finger, the height improved, though it still wasn't like that of some of the homemade loaves I'd seen. The taste was all right, the height and texture were what needed improvement. A couple of months ago I thought maybe I should try a bread machine...maybe that would help. But I'm one of those people who think that anything made from scratch is probably better than store bought. (Except for cake mix. I can probably get a better cake from a mix than most I would make from scratch.) Anyway, I considered buying a bread maker. The pictures of the machine-made loaves looked really nice. After all these years of working on it, though, I kind of hated to be defeated by a machine. But then I realized that if the bread maker would make a really nice loaf of bread, it was only my stubbornness that was keeping our family from enjoying fresh homemade bread. So I researched different kinds, decided on one, and ordered it. Soon, it came. I took it out of the box. There it was. The Machine. Could it really make better bread than I could by hand?? I had to find out. I eyed it suspiciously and read through the instruction manual. I used the recipe for a simple white bread first. The loaf came out tasty, but not perfect. I wasn't sure whether to say "Ha! You couldn't do it either!" or be disappointed that it didn't make the loaf I was looking for. Some of the first few loaves fell a little on top, which after reading in the manual and on some cooking websites, was probably due to not using enough flour (or adding too much water). It seems that the amount of flour needed changes along with the weather and humidity. But after several tries, the loaves started staying tall. Really tall. And most with a very nice texture. I've hardly bought any bread since, even for sandwiches. It also has a dough cycle for mixing hot rolls and cinnamon rolls and such.

So, even though The Machine needs a little help from me in making sure the dough is the right consistency, I guess I'll have to send up the white flag in surrender. Could someone pass the butter, please?