Millionaire's Shortbread pg 124

I've seen this recipe floating around the internet for some time now and people seem to love it so I thought that it would be a good choice. I think I tried to make it before with dismal results but it may have been the same concept but a different recipe.

The Verdict: It takes time and patience but with some tweaking, it could be amazing. Someone compared it to a twix which blew my mind because I didn't make the connection myself. Shortbread, caramel, chocolate .. twix. The dark chocolate ganache was a nice choice, not too sweet but a good balance for the bar. I did think that the bar was missing a salty element though. Maybe some salt would be a nice addition to the shortbread.

Tips for Next Time: The shortbread was fine on it's own, a little thick but a good solid surface for the tastiness piled on top. The caramel was HORRIBLE to make. The recipe suggests two methods, 12 minutes in the microwave or 1 1/2 hours on the stove top. Obvious decision, I went for the microwave. It says to whisk every 2 minutes but between minute 8-10 when I walked away, it erupted and I was left with a molten sugar mess in my microwave. I transferred what I had left into a pot and tried to finish it on the stovetop but not even 2 minutes into it I was whisking and with each movement I was dragging burnt bits through the caramel. Thinking quick on my feet I grabbed a strainer and quickly strained out as much as the brunt crap as I could (hence the dark specs). Was anyone the wiser? No, but making that fetching caramel was stressful! Next time I'm finding my own caramel recipe.

chocolate chip cookies and peanut butter cookies pg 139-140

I had flagged the cookies as my next recipes to try and made sure that I had all the ingredients but I made the fatal error of not reading through the instructions first. Turns out that the chocolate chip cookies needed to rest for 6 hours and the peanut butter for 3. I like to bake because the reward is also instantaneous. It takes me 2o minutes to mix something up, I get it in the oven and then I get a tasty treat when it's done baking. Ta da! I don't want to wait 6 hours for cookies! But alas, I'm following the instructions exactly as written so I mixed up all the dough on Saturday night and baked them all on Sunday. Let me just tell you that there is nothing worse than scooping cold cookie dough except for scooping cold cookie dough with giant chunks of cold chocolate. I decided that I hated these cookies before I even had the chance to taste one.

The Verdict: With the waiting period and the cold dough scooping - I really really wanted to hate these cookies but they cannot be denied. They are tasty. Super tasty even. Even though I want to bake the recipes exactly as written, I couldn't help myself and in the chocolate chip cookies I added 2 cups of semi sweet and 3/4 cup of milk chocolate, I just love the mixture of two chocolates in one bite. The chocolate chip aren't the prettiest and there are 2 sticks of butter in each recipe but dammit, I loved these cookies.

Tips for Next Time: They're pretty solid cookies as-is. Aside from my mixing of 2 kinds of chocolate chips, I wouldn't change a thing. I had enough foresight to add some milk chocolate to half the peanut butter cookies so my husband couldn't eat the entire batch, he was annoyed but his coworkers seemed to enjoy the little addition.

whiteout cake pg 55

My husband doesn't eat chocolate and while we were hanging around on Christmas break I wanted to make something that he could enjoy too so for my very first Baked recipe, I picked the Whiteout Cake. I didn't realize how much batter it makes so I ended up with a 4", 6" and 10" cake. When my husband saw them on top of the oven cooling he asked if I was making a wedding cake. Note to self; it's totally ok to scale down.

Verdict: Not my favorite. I made it exactly to recipe for some friends we were having over for boardgames and our friends loved it but I thought that it was waaaay too sweet. I'm over critical but I while the cake was light and airy, it was also dry. And the white chocolate frosting was like whipped pastry cream, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The frosting is made with flour and boy could I tell in the final product. Plus, you cook the flour, sugar, cream and milk before adding all the butter and whatnot and even with constant stirring, I ended up with bits of cooked flour, very unsightly. Also, the next day the leftover frosting I had in the fridge had separated which I was able to remedy but it was annoying nonetheless.

Tips for next time: Pass it up all together. There are better options out there.

this little project of mine

I'm feeling slightly guilty because the husband is in the basement doing a horribly dirty task that I can't help on so I figured that my time would be best spent on a task that I haven't been terribly excited about either - updating! It's not that I don't enjoy you, dear blog, it just seems to take so much time to write posts and upload photos when I could be.. you know..napping. But! I have an exciting new project.

Since I'm not baking professionally anymore, I had this crazy idea that in order to keep my skills up to par that it could be fun to bake an entire cookbook, front to back. Fun! I shared this idea with my family for a possible christmas gift idea and ..well.. I got 3 cookbooks. I received both Baked books and Flour. As I carefully looked through each recipe I was more inspired and excited about Flour but it is a lot more technical and requires some hard to find ingredients so I decided that for my first cover to cover experience to go the simpler route, Baked. To you know, get my feet wet and to get an idea of what I've committed myself to.

I've also committed to being better about taking decent photos since I've gotten lazy lately with only taking phone photos. And so, this tiny blog of mine will be chronicling my crazy adventure through Baked. I'm already apologizing to my coworkers for ruining their New Years resolutions so quickly.